Post #124 May 28 2018

“Downloads and New Projects”

This post is dedicated to some updates on current downloads and a peek at upcoming projects.  Last week, I uploaded a new ebook to Smashwords (The Specter) and its doing pretty well.  The distributor is showing 57 downloads as of Monday, May 21, after being available for 3 days.   This book is a horror story first written in 1980-81, so it’s an older work.  I scanned it earlier this year, then re-wrote and cleaned up the files and uploaded last week.  I hope you’ll enjoy it.   It’s available at Smashwords and all other fine ebook retailers.

Current downloads look like the following (total = 14484):

 

Tales of the Quantum Corps = 5052 (+54 from last update on April 16)

The Farpool Stories = 1545 (+84)

Nanotroopers = 6591 (+ 118)

Other (includes The Specter) = 1296 (+ 92)

 

Of note: The fourth title in The Farpool Stories (The Farpool: Convergence) is done in first draft.  This should be available to readers on or before late June 2018.

The fifth (and final) title in The Farpool Stories (The Farpool: Union) hasn’t been started yet but should be available by late fall 2018.

Which leads me to my major project for 2019.   Early next year, I will be publishing on, a monthly basis, episodes of a new serialized story entitled Time Jumpers.  Here are some details:

1. Time Jumpers is a series of 15,000-20,000-word episodes detailing the adventures of Ultrarch-Major Monthan Dringoth and his experiences as a time jumper with the Time Guard.
2. Each episode will be about 40-60 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.
3. A new episode will be available and uploaded every 4 weeks.
4. There will be 12 episodes.  The story will be completely serialized in about 12 months.
5. Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc. 
6. The main plotline: Time Guard must defeat the enemy Coethi and stop their efforts to disrupt or eliminate Uman settlements in the Galactic Inner Spiral and Lower Halo sectors of Uman space.  
7. Uploads will be made to www.smashwords.com.  Proposed titles are shown below.
    
    
   Episode #        Title                                                    

1.             ‘Marooned in Voidtime’                                
2.             ‘Keaton’s World’
3.             ‘A Small Navigation Error’
4.             ‘Sturdivant Eleven’
5.             ‘The Time Guard’
6.             ‘First Light Corridor
7.             ‘Hapsh’m and the First Coethi Encounter’
8.             ‘Operation Galactic Hammer’
9.             ‘Byrd’s Draconis’
10.             ‘Jumpship Majoris’
11.             ‘Planck Time’
12.             ‘The Time Twister’
     
    Look for this series to begin sometime in the first two months of 2019.  And, as indicated, a new episode will appear once a month, once the series has started. 
     
    That’s it for this post.  The next post to The Word Shed will put us at June 4, 2018. 
     
    See you then.
     
    Phil B.

 

 

 

 

 

Post #123 May 21, 2018

“Storytelling as a Tradition”

Where did storytelling come from?  How did it start?  Why do we need…and love stories? 

I went to Wikipedia for some answers and found this:

It is likely that oral storytelling has been around as long as human language. Storytelling fulfills the need for human beings to cast their experiences in narrative form. Our ancestors probably gathered around the evening fires and expressed their fears, their beliefs and their heroism through oral narratives. This long tradition of storytelling is evident in ancient cultures such as the Australian Aborigines. Community storytelling offered the security of explanation; how life and its many forms began and why things happen, as well as entertainment and enchantment. Communities were strengthened and maintained through stories that connected the present, the past and the future.

Telling stories is a nurturing act for the listener, who is connected to the storyteller through the story, as well as for the storyteller who is connected to the listeners through the story.

Early storytelling probably originated in simple chants^[.  People sang chants as they worked at grinding corn or sharpening tools. Our early ancestors created myths to explain natural occurrences. They assigned superhuman qualities to ordinary people, thus originating the hero tale.

Early storytelling combined stories, poetry, music, and dance. Those who excelled at storytelling became entertainers, educators, cultural advisors, and historians for the community. Through storytellers, the history of a culture was handed down from generation to generation.

The importance of stories and storytellers throughout human history can be seen in the respect afforded to professional storytellers today.

 Stories help us to explain and understand the world around us.  They illuminate our experience and help us organize it. 

Today, we have so many ways to take in stories, individually and in groups, but in the beginning, stories were mostly experienced communally.  Not unlike today’s moviegoer, stories were a form of theater, whose effect was often entertaining but whose purpose was to find meaning in our daily experience.  Why did this person kill that person?  What happened when the tribe undertook the long journey across the mountains?  Why did the last hunt produce so little meat?

Now we can enjoy and ponder stories through so many different kinds of media.  Printed books, pdf files, audiobooks, downloads on your laptop, phone or tablet.  Storytellers are the conscience of a people.  Storytellers remind their readers and listeners of what’s important, what should be paid attention to.  Storytellers take the raw material of life experience and heighten it for us, season it, compress and amplify it, so we get to experience faraway places and times and people and conflicts without actually having to be there.

Writer Leo Widrich tells us why stories are so important:

“For over 27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories has been one of our most fundamental communication methods. Recently a good friend of mine gave me an introduction to the power of storytelling, and I wanted to learn more.

“Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day:

“We all enjoy a good story, whether it's a novel, a movie, or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?

“It's in fact quite simple. If we listen to a PowerPoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca's area and Wernicke's area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that's it, nothing else happens.

“When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.

“If someone tells us about how delicious certain foods were, our sensory cortex lights up. If it's about motion, our motor cortex gets active:

"Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet voice" and "He had leathery hands" roused the sensory cortex. […] Then, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like "John grasped the object" and "Pablo kicked the ball." The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body's movements."

“A story can put your whole brain to work. And yet, it gets better:

“When we tell stories to others that have really helped us shape our thinking and way of life, we can have the same effect on them too. The brains of the person telling a story and listening to it can synchronize, says Uri Hasson from Princeton:

"When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners' brains."

“Anything you've experienced, you can get others to experience the same. Or at least, get their brain areas that you've activated that way, active too:

“Now all this is very interesting. We know that we can activate our brains better if we listen to stories. The still unanswered question is: Why is that? Why does the format of a story, where events unfold one after the other, have such a profound impact on our learning?

“The simple answer is this: We are wired that way. A story, if broken down into the simplest form, is a connection of cause and effect. And that is exactly how we think. We think in narratives all day long, no matter if it’s about buying groceries, whether we think about work or our spouse at home. We make up (short) stories in our heads for every action and conversation. In fact, personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations."

“Now, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our existing experiences. That's why metaphors work so well with us. While we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, or disgust.”

We love stories because we’re wired by Evolution to love stories. The next time you watch a TV show or a film, read a novel or tell your neighbor how what those wacko-head drivers out there did on your way to the store, you’re engaging in an ancient tradition that marks us humans as a quite distinct from our knuckle-walking forefathers.

We’re all storytellers.



The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 28, 2018.  See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

 

 

Post #122 May 14, 2018

“Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers”

You’ve all heard of the book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”  The title got me to thinking that there are also a number of good habits and practices that writers should follow to give themselves the best chance to be successful at their chosen craft.  With that in mind, here are my seven habits.

1. Read.  Read widely and read every day.  Writing as a career or even as a hobby requires what I call word sense.  This is the ability to choose the right word for the situation and manipulate words to mean what you want to mean and say what you want to say.  Yes, of course, you learned all this is grade school, along with other ‘useful’ things like diagramming sentences. But a lot of word sense comes from seeing how other writers do it and copying them.  I often run across turns of phrase in some story or article that somehow becomes embedded in my memory and often pop out just when I need them.  You can’t read too much. 
2. Write.  Every day.  Writing is like a muscle.  Use it or lose it.  You have to be in the mode of choosing words and putting them down to exercise that muscle.  It really doesn’t matter that much what you write: a diary, an article, a few pages of your novel, a recipe for a neighbor.  Just get into the habit of putting words down in some coherent order every day and keep doing it.  There’s a hoary old saying, for writers of fiction, that you have to write a million words to flush out all the crap from your writer’s brain and get down to the real you.  I think there’s lot of truth to that.
3. Be ruthless in editing.  I always think of editing as a lot like flossing your teeth.  Nobody likes it but you’d better do it and do it well and regularly if you want to avoid problems.  Being ruthless requires putting on a different face and learning how to back away from your precious words and scenes and characters and ask yourself: does this really work?  Does this move the story, illuminate character, provide setting or in some way advance the story?  If it doesn’t, delete it!  Learn to love your delete key. 
4. Make outlines.  I am a diligent outliner.  I make extensive outlines ahead of time for my story, with scene descriptions and transitions and details that I need to know where I’m going in the story, every day.  I do deviate from my outlines when it helps the story but I rarely deviate far and I always come back to my outline, to stay on track.  As a consequence of this, I can truly say I’ve never suffered a single day of writer’s block or had any real fear of the blank page.  With outlines, you always have a way forward.  And you can always change it later.
5. Do your homework.  Let’s face it: nobody likes homework.  Doing your homework, as a writer, means researching details of your background and setting and characters in enough depth to make it all come alive.  Over-research, if possible.  That doesn’t mean you have to include every single detail of your research in the story.  You’re not writing an encyclopedia.  Include enough to give the story a feel of realism.  You’re trying to put your reader in other times and places and you should include just enough to magically transport them to your fictional world.  I like the word verisimilitude.  This means ‘the quality of appearing to be true or real; resemblance to the truth.’  If you write fiction, as I do, you only need to do whatever it takes to make the reader think what you’re describing is or could be true.  The reader’s imagination will do the rest.  But to do this, you’d better do your homework and get it right.  Readers love to call you down on factual inaccuracies.
6. Read your own work like a reader.  This is part of editing and re-writing.  Read over your work and try to read it as if you just bought the book and have settled down for an hour late one night, with a glass of wine, to read it.  I like to read over each 100 pages I’ve just written.  Does it engage you?  Does it make you want to know more, to keep turning the pages?  Does the story hold together?  Are there gaping holes or inconsistencies in the plot?  Do the characters do believable things?  If any of this is not true, you’ve got something to fix.  The proof of good writing is in reading. 
7. Know your readers.  Know who reads your stuff or who you want to read your stuff.  Know your genre, if you’re writing fiction.  Study your audience.  Are they mostly middle-aged white guys with a yearning to be Rambo or Navy Seals?  Are they teen-aged girls?  What’s expected?  Maybe make a little twist on that.  Know how your readers want a story to unfold…fast, with lots of action or unique ideas or lots of richly detailed characters or maybe an ersatz Downton Abbey?  There’s nothing wrong with writing what may be called a ‘trashy novel’ if people will buy it and be entertained by it.  It’s an honorable profession, maybe honorable than most.  Storytellers have a long history with us human beings.  They hold the collective wisdom of the tribe.  They explain or demonstrate or illuminate things that are important.  They give words to our feelings or hopes and dreams and our fears and horrors.  They’re part of what separates us from apes.
    
   These are my ideas on some attributes you will need to succeed as a writer…of anything.  There are more.  People will disagree on some of these.  You may want to add your own ideas.  But I’ve found all these to be useful and helpful hints on what it takes to be successful in putting words down for a living…or even just for fun.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 21.  In this post, I want to take a closer look at the tradition of storytelling and the role it has played in making us humans what we are today.
    
   See you next time.
    
   Phil B.