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.

Catch Glenn on Twitter Noir Writer

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]

Propaganda - Description and Feel

PROPAGANDA IS EFFECTIVE BECAUSE it works on an emotional level. Most of our decisions are based on a combination between the perceived results of previous experience, the emotions we experience regarding the current situation, and logical analysis of the problem. Inside that mess is also perceived estimations of our skills, probable success, and evaluation of the forces and elements against us, if any.

What motivates us is not logic however, but emotion.

The propagandist uses symbols, attitudes and morals that are embedded in the target audience to control and limit the emotional state of his target. This is desirable because the emotional response is deep, powerful, long-lasting -- and not controlled by rational awareness or evaluation of the situation. An intellectual, rational response is not desired and is not sought.

There is a novel, one of my favorites by Philip K. Dick, We Will Remember It for you Wholesale, which posed a question -- If you remember spending six weeks as a Billionaire touring Europe and socializing among the world trenders. If it is a pure memory, wired into your matrix, did it happen? Did it? -- if it did, if the vacation could be authored, crafted by experienced and expert travelers, and tailored to your preferences and desires, would not that experience (which you could acquire in only a few hours, rather than six weeks) be more appealing than real travel to foreign lands with its reality of bungles and lost luggage and missing reservations, menacing dark streets, and weird toilet paper in the bathroom?

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.