This is going to be a blog about my experiences working as an Assistant Editor at Nature Protocols.

The content is going to be formatted in one of three ways:

• Commentary (like this post where I tell you stuff directly)

• Letters / Postcards home (addressed to ‘Mom’, where I tell you about how things are going and ask for advice)

• Confessions (where I tell you about my mistakes or situations where I am trying to work out why the universe seems to be conspiring against me)

So, ‘Are you my mother?’

The letters are obviously not going to be written to my-mother, but ‘Dear Mom’ sounds better than anything else that I mentally rehearsed on the train. In the place that I have created here, mother is more like the word mother in the sentence: ‘Shall I be mother?’. In other words, it can be anyone, male or female, older or younger (than me!). And if you nod wisely at your computer screen with a cup of tea in your hand, then so much the better!