The Language of Persuasion

What's the best way to get laid?

Advertising is a force that makes it possible to sell more merchandise due to its persuasive nature. As a tool of marketing communication, advertising is the structured and composed, non-personal communication of information. It is usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature. The language of persuasion is employed for successful advertising campaign thereby, boosting patronage of idea, product or service.

Advertising has been vigorously attacked on the ground that it is unnecessary and wasteful and that through it, people are induced to buy worthless products. It is further argued by the objectors that much advertising is misleading and untruthful.

Those Memories of Disney World

Remember your childhood visit to Disney World?

Cinderella's castle glistening, the cartoon characters laughing, grouping for photos, the many rides with their height requirements, the smells of freshly cooked food, and Bugs Bunny shaking your hand?  As you bring that experience to mind, you may have the feeling you are reliving it, seeing your childhood pass through your mind's eye, much like reviewing a videotape.

But the way human memory works is very different from that of a video tape recorder—our memories are actually reconstructions of bits and pieces of information we have obtained over time.

Sometimes those reconstructions are very similar to what we experienced; other times we are "tricked" and remember things differently than how they actually happened.

In Fact, Most of what you recall didn't happen. 

Is Color that Important?

Perception of color stimuli is found to trigger corresponding emotional and behavioral responses within human beings including certain psychological, physical, biological and metabolic reactions (Hettiarachchi & De Silva, 2012). Based on some studies such as Kaya and Epps (2004), color can produce emotional arousing effect but the range of arousal varies depending on the emotional element that is being attached with specific type of color (cited in Mustafar & Dzulkifli, 2011).

There is now a Brazen Quality to the Lies

Americans were once notorious in their cynical views about politicians, and for good reasons. We complain that they all lie to us to get elected. Most politicians were too smart to tell outright lies. They may have exaggerated or distort the truth or used a quote out of context in order to mislead you without actually lying

Smart politicians made sure there was some small truth behind what they said so they couldn’t be nailed for lying to us. It use to be rare for a politician to tell an outright lie –  not so much any more.

Habits, those things you do anyway

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The Checklist of Character

What we got here is a infograph of suggested check points for your MC and the Protagonist. I read through these and thought on the surface they looked like a good idea. Most of them are. What I balk at myself is the full list - the shear volume of them.

I haven't used this checklist against any of my own novels -- I'm sure they all fall short at some point. However - it is a comprehensive list of points, which will improve the character area of a novel. I tend to write characters who are Not extraordinary in some way, as the first point suggests. the idea of 'regular people' being pitched against extraordinary events is more appealing and  normal people are all that normal.

Development Methodologies, Business and Production

Much like construction and manufacturing work-flows, waterfall methodology is a sequential design process. This means that as each of the eight stages (conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, implementation, and maintenance) are completed, the developers move on to the next step.

Agile came about as a “solution” to the disadvantages of the waterfall methodology. Instead of a sequential design process, the Agile methodology follows an incremental approach. Developers start off with a simplistic project design, and then begin to work on small modules. The work on these modules is done in weekly or monthly sprints, and at the end of each sprint, project priorities are evaluated and tests are run.

• Agile methodologies (e.g. Scrum, XP, Kanban, Crystal etc) are often more difficult to understand than linear, sequential ones – at least initially.
• In waterfall Solution designers often aren’t able to foresee problems that will arise out of the implementation of their designs.

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Brain Storm: Lightning Across The Teeth

 25 brainstorming techniques you can use to break out of the usual crap and get some life into the plot of your story.

Some Twitter Basics

Some Basics of the Book Process

Self publishing

Just off the top, Identifying the "Ideal" reader is NEVER a good idea before you finish your novel. In fact -- it is just about guaranteed that you won't ever finish your novel if you start in that manner.

Other Than being So basic as to be useless, this looks legit. huh?

Beta-Readers aren't listed in that graphic, and I highly recommend using at least three after your second edit.

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And Check out the new site for Noir Stories -- Noir Street -- Tales of Shadow and Lust

How Important is an Emotional Connection

Are you old enough to remember Baby Jessica? 

When you write without an emotional connection, it comes across like News.

Eighteen people died when a train collided with a stalled bus on the tracks just outside of Hong Kong this morning. The reported counts of  injured passengers continue to rise. Last report was over 100 and many of those are in critical condition with life threatening injuries. Volunteers are searching the wreckage. Officials working on the scene are handling this catastrophe with expertise, but have admitted they expect the death toll to rise….

I am emotionally affected when I read stories like this one, but not connected.  First of all, I don’t know any of the victims. That  sounds  cold, I agree, but we react stronger to events when we personally know people who are involved.^[i]I also don’t have any names, and that is another detail we react to. People we are personally concerned about, have names.^[ii]

False Brain Information and Your Diet Plan

A while back I wrote up a post about the Malable Variance of Time, where I showed how inaccurate our minds can be on a given topic which -- for the most part-- has been exactly the same from the day we were born. We have a ton of awareness experience with time, and it would seem on the surface that we should be pretty good at guessing how long we have been waiting for an event to occur. But we're not. We suck at recalling amounts of time something has been going ont, or how long we have been waiting on it to happen, or how long it has been since it happened last.

In this post we are going to look at how easy it is for our minds to tell us that what we are eating is just fine, and that simply putting a beer into a short round mug, instead of a tall thin mug wouldn't possibly be a factor in consuming nearly twice as much as we think we did. That would be silly. Right?  --- At least you can be of comfort in knowing that I'm just as suseptable to this as you are. Because Knowing about it won't stop it from happening to you.

The nuts and bolts of writing a Scene

Want to see a grown writer roll his eyes into the back of his head, stick his fingers into his ears and start chanting "na na na na na" like a four-year-old? Easy, just start talking about structure. Things like outlines and guidelines and scene structure and anything that smacks of planning and non-creative activity that will stifle the flow of electric wow-ness.

This paradigm of belief is based on the misconception and confusion regarding creativity vs creation. Creativity is a force, an energy, and a chaos, which if guided through  a filter of brainstorming often results in plots, ideas, characters and dramatic paradigms for a story. Creation, is the process of structure applied to the wild energies.

Favorite Wonder Woman Fight

What really throws Wonder Woman as a serious warrior, is that damn name. Who thought up that name anyway?  Believe it or not that was  psychologist and writer William Moulton Marston.

Her real name is  Princess Diana of Themyscira. When outside her homeland, she is sometimes known by the secret identity Diana Prince. She is gifted with a wide range of superhuman powers and superior combat and battle skills. She possesses an arsenal of weapons, including the Lasso of Truth, a pair of indestructible bracelets, a tiara which serves as a projectile, and, in some stories, an invisible airplane, Mental Radio, and Purple Ray that could heal otherwise lethal injuries. We don't see much with the Mental Radio and Purple Ray these days and I'm just fine with that.

The best fight scene ever was Diana deciding that she needed to slap Super Man around a bit.

Foreknowledge Trading on 9/11

I'm amazed at this myself.

At the time this came out I heard and dismissed it as conspiracy. I'm working on a new novel series right now and the research for it led me into this area -- which is great for fiction - as conspiracies always are. The more I read however, the more I don't like what I'm reading. So I thought I would post a bit of what I'm finding, and let it land on you at face value.

Denotative and Connotative and the difference between

Be aware of the difference between denotative words and connotative words. 

A  denotative  word  conveys  information:  "hat,"  "yellow, " "twenty-five, " "book," "cat," "big." Such words speak to the practicalist in us,  to the data bank and statistician. A connotative word, on the other hand, is calculated to arouse emotional  response,  to  give  a  fillip  to  imagination,  to project a mood in our hearts and/or on our senses. To denote a woman,  I can refer to her as  a "female," a "teacher,"  or  a  "customer."  I  can  also  speak  of her  as  a "bimbo," a "maiden," or a "luminous creature," all connotative.

The  distinction  between  denotative  and  connotative, then, is that connotative words express a writer's opinions and  personal  feelings  while  denotative  words  state  the facts.  As  a  careful  writer,  you  will  be  aware  of these subtle,  yet significant,  differences.

For example,  if you  refer  to a person as  being "tired" you  convey  a matter-of-fact,  denotative  message.  If you describe the person as being "weary," the image becomes more personalized, as it does with the terms "drained" or "burned-out."  These  words  are  all  synonyms,  perhaps. Yet each carries a different degree of emotional charge. Be aware of what these charges are and use them knowingly. The following verse provides an astutely whimsical example of just how much connotations count, in life as well as in literature:

Call a  woman a  kitten,  but never a  cat; 
You  can call her a  mouse,  cannot call her a  rat; 
Call a  woman a  chick,  but never a  hen; 
Or you surely will not be her caller again. 
You  can call her a  duck,  cannot call her a goose; 
You  can call her a  deer,  but never a  moose; 
You  can call her a lamb,  but never a sheep; 
Economic she likes,  but you can't call her cheap. 

If you can't find the precise word,  move on and come back to it later.

Most writers discover this trick on their own, especially if they write on deadlines.  Better just to put an  X  on  the problem word, keep writing, and come back later. You'll bring a fresh eye to the decision then, and probably a fine solution.

Which  brings  up  an  important  rule  of  thumb  for writing practice in general: When your writing is going well, don't let anything stop your flow.  Don't get hung up on the grammatical or factual details. Just leave them, get on  with  the  brainstorming,  finish  the  entire piece,  then return to fix  the fine points. 

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Writers on the Worst part about Writing

My personal is listening to non-writers tell me what I should never do.

Al Hunter Ashton	Being on your own. I’m a party animal.
Ali McNamara	Sitting still so much, definitely. I used to be a fitness instructor so I was very active all day. Writing involves too much sitting down at a desk – not good for the fitness levels or the figure!

No Words in English, but there should be

Some emotions and situations which English doesn't have a word for - but should

Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut

Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn't want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

In The Beginning Starting with a Start

Where to begin with your writing. Some suggest outlines, or mind maps or stream of consciousness, or carrying a note book around to jot down ideas for several weeks. 

The Bible begins at the logical place-—the beginning. The very first verse starts:

Genesis 1:1. In the beginning . . .

The phrase “In the beginning" is a translation of the Hebrew word bereshith. In the case of several of the books of the Bible, the first word is taken as the title of the whole (much as Papal bulls are named for the two Latin words with which they begin.) The Hebrew name of the first book is, there, Bereshith.

The first book was named “Genesis,” which means, literally, “coming into being.” It implies a concem with births and beginnings which is appropriate for a book that begins with the creation of heaven and earth

Now, let's not jump to the conclusion that I'm a good and kind Christian, but the Bible does offer some keen ideas about the creative aspect of us humans. So, let's start there -- In the Beginning...