Patrick Tylee's Blog, page 3
January 19, 2016
Meet Me At Mostly Books, Tucson!
I'd love it if you could stop by and say hi!
I'll be reading the scene 'Saint Varten's Park' from WISDOM, and afterward, I'd really like the chance to sign your copy of WISDOM or REBELLION. Of course, the bookstore will have plenty of copies on hand! Their address is 6208 E. Speedway, at Wilmot Rd. Hope you can make it!!
November 9, 2015
Tucson Comic-Con 2015
Over the weekend, I scored a slot at the Tucson Comic-Con 2015.
My new friends at R-Galaxy Comics graciously offered to share some space at their booth. At the far end of the awesome collection of anime, superhero paraphernalia, and a bajillion comic books was Matt Stricker, a terrific artist who was showing off his graphic-novel styles.
With the WISDOM Book Trailer loaded onto a tablet, many fans and potential readers got a glimpse of the cinematic artwork by Crimson River Productions.
There were plenty of sci-fi readers there to meet.
Some aliens.
TONS of amazing costumes of video game and movie characters.
I suppose you could call it work, but I had WAY too much fun.
Absolutely going to do that again. The Phoenix Comic-Con is coming up in June 2016. Hope to make it.
The post Tucson Comic-Con 2015 appeared first on Patrick Tylee.
November 2, 2015
What do you see when you close your eyes?
WHAT DO YOU SEE WHEN YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES?
I don’t watch many foreign films. Occasionally, one will catch my eye and I’ll give it a shot.
This weekend, some lower back pain had argued me into a corner on the couch. Netflix had recently uploaded a handful of new movies, so I figured it was a good time to see what they’d added to the available menu.
As usual, I shop through the sci-fi and fantasy first. There were a few that came up listed under the ‘artificial intelligence’ sub-heading. Yeah, yeah…seen ‘em all.
Except that one.
A Spanish film, produced in 2011, that had won several awards—fifteen actually. Okay. Now I’m interested. American movie critics scored it low. Another good reason to watch it. From what I could tell, it was a story about human relationships, with robots as the subject matter.
“Well, alrighty-then,” I told the dog, “grab some Scooby-Snacks, and cop a squat.”
She wagged.
“How’s your Espaniol, today?”
“Barko,” she replied—about as good as me then.
I’ll watch any movie…for about five minutes. If it stinks a little early on, it’s gonna stink way worse later. I kept waiting for the opening of the movie to show evidence of low-budget production. Hmmmm…nope. The artistry in the animation and quality of the graphics had me impressed.
Not yet to Scene One, and I knew this would turn out well. Heck, even the opening credits were tight and unobtrusive, failing to detract from the magical background images.
The film follows Alex, a leading expert in the design of emotional programming for robots. Likely, he’s the best at robot feelings because he’s so out of touch with his own. The character is well-played by , and is quite believable as the genius without a clue. Thankfully, there is really no over-acting in the film. Every one of the cast members portrays their respective parts with forethought and practice. It would be so easy for a film like this to go all campy. It never does, holding the line of believable personas living out their lives as scientists who only want the best for their beloved artificial creations. Alex endeavors to create an AI that is truly free in its ability to choose right from wrong.
The main character, Eva, portrayed by Claudia Vega. She is doubtless one of the finest child actors on the scene right now. She makes it easy to love her character. Alex chooses his niece as the baseline emo for SL-9, the latest series of the robots designed at his alma mater. “A boring kid makes a boring robot,” he tells his professor. He moves forward (and sometimes backward) in his work to develop the perfectly imperfect AI for a childlike chassis.
What comes up, eventually, is the risk that the more ‘human’ you make the robot’s mind, the greater the chance they will make mistakes—mistakes that could dramatically impact someone’s life.
People screw up all the time. We might even harm each other. We aren’t supposed to, and there may be laws that say we shouldn’t. But laws do not always prevent humans from hurting each other.
Laws, internalized, can and do prevent robots from harming humans.
We all remember the Three Laws of Robotics, from Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1942).
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
In a subtle, though confident way, the film (Eva) assumes that the viewer is aware of the Laws, or for those of you who don’t wear R2D2 pajamas to bed every night, it’s reasonable that any constructed AI would be prevented from thinking it best to hurt a human, given the choice.
My question for you is: Who the hell do we think we are?
Humans write laws that allow us to kill, pertinent to the need – war, capital punishment, in self-defense, in defense of another, to prevent the commission of a felony (believe it or not), or to prevent the escape of a felon from authorized custody.
Humans create machines that are capable of and intended to kill other humans, sometimes automatically, and without human oversight. As long as the machine does not have the choice to kill or not, then it’s allowable.
But, we cannot create a machine that is permitted to choose.
So, I put it to you—perhaps the problem isn’t that the AI might choose to kill a human when we don’t want it to, but rather, the AI may see the faulty thinking of the human designers, and decide for itself that we shouldn’t be killing at all. Maybe it will ignore the command to fire its weapon at the enemy in the trenches, or launch its missile at the terrorist in the car below.
What if the machine comes to the conclusion that its makers are a bunch of murderous heathen, and that the right thing is to protect all life, not just of those whose names are listed on ‘Made by us’ label inside the maintenance cover?
What if the machine we create decides that we are in the moral wrong? What then?
Several movies have born that out, one of the most famous being the Terminator series created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd. It wasn’t the first, of course. Be it Colossus, or the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica (second series), the smartest people on Earth may build a mind capable of deducing that we are just too stupid to live.
In the movie, Eva, the emo designer, Alex, strives to find the balance of various synaptic components that will reveal a mind that is “…fun, yet safe.”
Fun, yet safe…like…swimming? swimming in the open ocean? skydiving? S&M with bondage? full-contact football? russian roulette?
It’s all relative—hence the Three Laws of Robotics.
Don’t hurt anybody. Don’t listen to anyone telling you to hurt anybody. Don’t let anyone hurt you, except…don’t hurt anybody…
The SL-9 prototype gets its feelings hurt when Alex laughs at the robot’s answer to a test question. It was the old, “I’m not laughing at you; I’m laughing with you.” But, it was too late. SL-9 was already pissed off. Anger clouded the mind, so further explanations went unheard. You could see the fear of not being understood in the little pivoting eyebrows of the AI.
Perhaps, we could merely lie to the AI, and set a rule that ‘humans always mean well’. Then, there wouldn’t be any confusion. We could further dull the reasoning of the robot by convincing it that if one human harms another, then there was likely a need for that action.
One of the common predicaments for the AI in movies and TV is of being assigned to a police department. He clunks his way along with his human partner…they stumble upon a bank robbery. Bad guy pulls a gun. Human cop pulls a gun. Someone is going to get shot. Does the robot allow it? Does he jump in front of the bullet to save someone? Which one? Is the cop’s life worth more than the bad guy at that moment in time? Does the implied felony then degrade the value of the bank robber’s life to just below that of Law #1?
Why do we continue to write stories and make movies about this subject…about this conundrum?
We keep asking ourselves the same question, over and over. “When is it okay to kill someone?”
But, we can’t bear to deal with this within our own hearts and minds—it’s too painful. Let’s have someone else deal with it…um…yeah! How about a robot! We can have the artificial intelligence harried into a mental corner over whether to save the hapless girl from the homicidal maniac, or to throw itself over the policeman’s gun to keep the bullet from striking the potentially worthy maniac. What if the maniac could turn his life around…become a missionary? What if?
Throughout Eva, the emo designers are encouraging the robots to ask themselves, “What if?”
“Who’s that?” an SL-7 asks.
“Never mind…keep painting,” says the robotics college student.
“But, I’m bored!”
They are gifted with creativity, and that makes them want to calculate beyond the true answer. Two plus two is four, but what if it isn’t? What if we let it be five and a half? Then, all other calculations are incorrect, and the mind fails. So, two plus two must stay four AND you have to paint an abstract on the canvas.
Back to my initial question: who do we think we are?
Why do we as humans get to decide life or death for each other?
Why do we humans get to create insentient machines that kill?
Why do we humans get to dictate to a sentient machine that it may not choose life or death.
Who do we think we are?
Can you see yourself having to make that decision?
Who is worthy of your self-sacrifice, and who is not?
You see all the hatred and jealousy and murders in this world.
Surely, none of that exists within you, does it?
So, here’s the question for you…be you flesh and blood, or other maybe…
What do you see when you close your eyes?
The post What do you see when you close your eyes? appeared first on Patrick Tylee.
August 12, 2015
Vail Academy 6th Grade Creative Writing Visit!
Yesterday was so cool!
It was an honor for me to accept an invitation to speak at the 6th Grade Creative Writing Class at the Vail Academy & High School. To look across the room at the twenty-five young authors was a real treat.
Really, really! And very, too!
They were all so receptive and kind. I felt quite welcome.
They hit me with a dozen or so questions about writing, publishing and who my favorite author is…
I told them the story about when Ray Bradbury was their age and was touched on the nose with an electrified sword held out by the ‘Great Electrico’ at the carnival. From that day forward, he wrote constantly for the next sixty-nine years.
We discussed strong descriptors and how to weed out the ‘really’s and the ‘very’s; to replace them with words that show the details of the scene.
One of my favorite moments was when I asked the students to describe a classmate’s long, black hair that had burgundy highlights. A boy in the back said, “Her hair is like cherries.” Perfect. I encouraged them to think big; that if they could fit their potential story in their head, then the story wasn’t big enough.
Their dear teacher, Ms. MaryBeth Runyon, arranged for the class to use one of my mid-grade manuscripts as an editing and annotation project. We handed out copies of I Was a Foster Kid on Mars along with some instructions on how best to beat on it. I couldn’t be more pleased to have two-dozen editors to dig into Foster Kid. It ought to shine when they’re through with it.
Can’t wait to see the acknowledgement page on that one!
I’d like to thank: Kayla, Ashley, Ashlynn, John,…
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August 8, 2015
WISDOM RETWEET CONTEST- August 2015
RETWEET THIS ON TWITTER to win 3 copies of WISDOM by Patrick Tylee!
See #Contest Rules at http://patricktylee.com #win #scifi
The post WISDOM RETWEET CONTEST- August 2015 appeared first on Patrick Tylee.
June 3, 2015
Waiting for the Draedle (flash fiction)
I asked my diamond-plate coffee mug, “What on Earth is ‘flash fiction’?” Despite the big mouth, it was speechless. (HA!)
I’ve heard of short stories, and short-short stories, and even micro-stories, but…flash fiction?
According to the experts at EveryDayFiction.com, flash fiction is a “…short story of 1000 words or fewer that can be read during your lunch hour, on transit, or even over breakfast.”
Well, shucks! I’ve got a bunch of those. They’re called ‘Awesome New Book Idea But Only Wrote One Bad Chapter Then Wised Up’
}:{/}
David Gaffney wrote this article for The Guardian in the blog ‘Stories in your pocket: how to write flash fiction’, where he calls them, “little fat monsters that gobbled up ideas like chicken nuggets”.
Last year, I’d entered a writing contest for members of one of my LinkIn groups to submit a 500-word max micro-story. There were two required themes: espionage and bees. Yeah, two words that go together like peanut butter and jelutong.
Here’s me accepting the prestigious award…
I have since grown a beard, and put a little meat on the bones…of the story, that is. It’s now up to the flash fiction size of pert-near a thousand words.
Here is Waiting for the Draedle. You can also get a Kindle-ready copy for download on my website, listed on the Extras page.
Please enjoy…
In the Draedles’ message to Earth, their call for help against the evil Mardon, they’d suggested we land on the dark side to hide our approach.
“Are we there yet?” Schumer asked.
“It’s only been two years,” Blazon replied.
We set up camp in the dark, the barest sliver of spring warming the horizon. The Draedle had said it would be up to three weeks for them to find us, once they detected our arrival.
“Let’s go over their message and our plan,” I said. As the commander of this interstellar strike team, it was my duty to verify that each member of this squad knew what they were doing and why we’d travelled so far, and all for a new sentient species the humans of Earth had only just heard from.
“The Draedles are being hunted to extinction by the Mardon. As the Draedles migrate from one side to the other, they’re attacked. They’ve no way to defend against the Mardon who possess significant technology.”
“Do we know what the Mardon look like?” Blazon asked.
“The Draedle didn’t say, just their selves.”
“Giant bees,” Schumer said.
“Yes, exactly. Apparently, everything is macro-insectoid.”
“And we can beat the Mardon?” Blazon asked.
“The Draedle said that the Mardon only have—”
“Hyper-Lasers.” Schumer said. We all winced to some degree.
“We hope, hence our mirrored shields to protect us. Our magna-fire rifles ought to be more than a match. We prepare to attack, training with our weapons in the lighter gravity of the planet, but we wait for the Draedle to appear, flying in from the sunny north. The Mardon should inevitably show up to flank them as they do. That’s when we roll in to save the day.”
“Looking forward to it,” Schumer said.
The three weeks came and went – no Draedle, nor the enemy, and it was still dark. Food rations and water were soon depleted.
“Commander,” Schumer said, “it’s been two months now. We’re starving. If we don’t find food, we won’t make it. When the Draedle do arrive, we’ll be too weak to help them. We’ve got to find something to eat.”
He was right. We’d die waiting for the Draedle. We needed to locate food, fill the stores and start the long trip back to Earth.
We found it easily enough; tons of it, in the trees. Huge fibrous casks filled with sweet, meaty cones. They were likely some kind of larvae, but they were so tasty. We ate till be would burst. Then we filled the ship stores with it. Schumer was good at finding them, in the caves under the tree roots. He seemed to delight in the daily feast.
It was three more months, waiting for the Draedle and eating the sticky goo and eggs.
Then we heard them – a rumble in the air. While we sat drunk with the addictive sweetness, the giant Draedle flew in. They were huge, and menacing. In fact, they weren’t friendly at all. As they hovered over our heads, we could hear them screaming at us. They were furious.
We were surrounded by a thousand or more of the massive bees. The smallest of them was half the size of our lander, with a twenty foot wingspan.
“Who are you and why have you murdered our offspring?” they roared.
“We are the humans of Earth that you called to,” I said. “We came to aid you against the Mardon.”
“We called to no one for help, and furthermore, you are collaborating with the Mardon! One of you is a Mardon. We can smell him!”
Schumer ran over and grabbed a rifle; started shooting the Draedle down wildly.
“Hold your fire!” I screamed. He ignored me, continuing to decimate the Draedle with the powerful weapon.
I ran to him, to grab the rifle, but he swung out with his arm to hit me in the chest. It was like being struck by an electric shock. As Schumer raged, his human skin began to peel away, revealing the bright orange exoskeleton of a wasp that was hidden underneath.
I wanted to stop him, to control the situation as any trained military officer should, but the bees were attacking from all sides, snapping their fierce pincers and flailing with long, barbed stingers that could impale a man clean through. Even the strong blast of air that fell down on us as the Draedle’s wings growled overhead was itself a weapon. We could scarcely breathe from the turbulence and dust.
We’d been fooled. Schumer, who had infiltrated our ranks – he was the real enemy of the Draedle. And his plan had worked perfectly. The wasps wanted the bees dead, and they tricked the warlike and powerful human race into bringing our deadly machines here.
My orders to ‘cease fire’ came out as a hoarse whisper, for I couldn’t bring myself to allow my men, these few who’d survived skirmishes with me before, to stand defenseless, surely to die.
I could only do one thing, take up my own magna-fire weapon, and join them in the destruction of the Draedle, the ones we’d come to defend.
The battle escalated. It was us or them.
In the end, we’d saved ourselves, but we wiped out the Draedle, their flaming corpses filling the air with sweet smoke, so incredibly sweet.
The End
May 13, 2015
Wisdomthebook Goodreads.com Giveaway
Just mailed out the twenty-five copies of #WISDOMTHEBOOK to the winners of the Goodreads.com Book Giveaway for the US and Canada. How cool to see eight readers up in the #greatwhitenorth to score a flight around Jupiter on the Equus* with Jove and Elmyrah.
“Wait a minute,” you say. “What about us across the pond?”
(drum roll) (loud clang)
The #WISDOMTHEBOOK Giveaway contest for Great Britain has sixteen more days left to enter! Click here
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Goodreads Book Giveaway
Wisdom
by Patrick Tylee
Giveaway ends May 29, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
(um…really, right up there ^^^) and get your name in the hat!
“Is this for the 2015 Cover Edition?” you ask.
Oh, no sirree, ma’am. This is for a 2014 Collector’s Edition Cover by Lacretia Hardy. Only 105 books of this cover have ever been printed.
I have to say, never before has going into the red been nearly as much fun. (no pun intended)
Patrick
*Contest winners must have a valid Galactic Passport issued by the Legion of Worlds Travel Bureau.
May 1, 2015
Chicken Chooza – Get the recipe, if you dare!
Chicken Chooza recipe at www.PatrickTylee.com
Get cookin’ but have the fire extinguisher handy. And please drop me a note at the website to tell me if you liked it. I want to know!
April 8, 2015
Fiction is Recreation for Your Brain
What do you do to get rest and relaxation for your mind?
Or for your physical brain as the amazing, overworked organ that it is?
1
We plan our vacations away from ‘work’ – you know, that verb-noun thing that typically stands for the process by which we make deposits into the checking account. What should be an opportunity to find rest and relaxation is too often replaced by the stress and strain of a fast-paced, do-everything, flail of the arms through some theme park. We race back to the mess which is the hotel room, cram the stinky clothes into the cases along with the new stuffed porpoise, must-have hat, and the thirty dollar t-shirt you can see right through. Race to the airport. Drag it all through the lines and security checkpoints. Squeeze your knees into the MD-80, and pretend to sleep or flip through SkyMall, again. Upon returning home, aren’t you relieved to back? Don’t you then fall onto the bed and sleep for a day? Why are you glad to back from vacation? Are you? Well…Vacation…You’re doing it wrong.
It’s a scientifically proven fact that the human body has defined work/rest cycles. Too often, we ignore the design and evolved processes of our physical selves and conform to the world’s business plan. We wake-eat-parent-drive-work-eat-work-drive-eat-work-TV-parent-work-sleep…times five days or six or seven or ad-infinitum. Tired yet? YOU HAVE TO BREAK OUT OF THAT LOOP.
Sleep. The human body requires six to eight hours of being turned off each day. Why? Because it’s part of the cycle. All voluntary motors cease their work, autonomic motors slow to the minimum. And the brain, it shuts down too, right?
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Nope.
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During deep sleep, where real rest occurs, our brains are stimulated by certain chemicals, gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA) and glycine, which causes it to ignore external inputs, and focus on the internal rebuilding operation: REM.
Rapid-eye-movement is the state of sleep where our brains clear out the excess stored input, realign the pathways and run through processes akin to Disk Defrag. There is no additional input; the hearing is reduced so that only sounds which could pose a recognized danger get through. Eyes are closed. The sniffer reacts to smoke and unfamiliar body odor, but otherwise may reduce function.
Our brains are humming along, playing dream sequences and rooting out the things we didn’t want to remember; it’s taking out the trash. We awake to a new day and a clean whiteboard.
Our brains never really stop. Even with loss of consciousness, the brain is still operating. However, the memories of that operation are sometimes unavailable for review. It didn’t happen, as far as we know.
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Now, have you noticed that in some of your dreams, the story that unfolds may include events and circumstances that you wish might happen, or you fantasize about, or are afraid will happen? Dreams are not always factual. I mean, yes, when I was in high-school, I think I may have gotten lost in the maze of that quarter-mile square campus, but I don’t remember my locker disappearing, and I certainly was not naked trying to find it! The point is, while asleep, your imagination is still operating.
I believe that the creative part of the mind can and does apply itself separately from the calculating and emotional areas of the brain. The act of being creative occurs during REM sleep. Otherwise, all of our dreams would be mere memories, hallucinations at best. Active creativity is therefore a restorative, and perhaps even a therapeutic process. Creation is not re-building anything, and I don’t consider building to be necessarily creative, but rather, work. Creativity…the act of creating something new that did not exist before, is not work. (It does burn calories. I can attest to that!) Now, you can apply work to build what was created. For example, an architect sees the design for the fascia of a structure in his head. He draws it out. The design is transferred into the standing structure by means of construction. When the bystander sees the completed work, he is seeing the building, and he is seeing the design. Were it not for that invisible, creative design, the structure would be just a random pile of blocks and glass.
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When we read a book, many parts of our brains are active. If I read a self-help book, or the manual to the dish-washer, or even the purely graphic instructional of a Lego set, it is primarily my calculating brain that is receiving the input. There is information on the page that I need to receive and understand – data in. Often, it’s a uni-directional process of words on the page reflecting light through the pupils of my eyes, onto the retina, across the nerve, and into the visual cortex, to be processed and mentally affixed to some mechanical application in my life. That sounds like work to me.
If I am reading a work of fiction – a novel – there exists a rare opportunity to join my creative mind with the structure of the story. The author has done well by walking me up to the front door of the character’s home, with the few details required for my creativity to act upon.
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“Located in the heart of the beautiful property was his grandfather’s old house, which remained largely the same as the day it was constructed by his great-great-grandfather over eighty years ago. The small two-bedroom home was a rustic affair constructed from timber harvested from the property.”
FOUR – by Kirk Withrow © 2014
In your mind, you can see the age of the wood in the colors and textures, the splintery ends of each slat where the softer cellulose evaporated from between the harder skeleton in the grain. A few shoots of grass spring up from between the planks of the porch steps. They creak under the weight of your foot. They should, after all. A honey-bee buzzes around behind you. The pleasant odor of the fertile earth warms your nose and lifts your spirit. Life happens here.
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The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense. – Tom Clancy
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As an author of fiction, my goal is to interact with the mind on the other side of the page – the reader. When someone says, “Hey, I read your book!” I always try to remember to ask, “Were you entertained?” Consider that word – entertain. If you entertain guests at your home, what does that look like? They’re given the comfy chair, a glass of something to cool their parched throat, a tasty snack, and whatever else it should take to make them glad they are there and not anywhere else.
.
Fiction is the restful entertainment for your brain. You should be enjoying yourself.
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One of the tools that writers of fiction must have and employ is the ‘suspension of disbelief’. That, my friends, is the comfy couch. As the reader, you’ve got to let yourself fall down into it. Let the big squishy pillows wrap around you and guard you from the reality that is your two opposable thumbs holding wide the papered apparatus. A good writer can open the door, but the reader has to go through it. No, of course there are no starships streaking across the galaxy to surreptitiously stumble upon Earth, and then to disgorge the lover you fantasize about. Yet there they are, at your front door, holding forth a bouquet of Venusian long-stemmed rose hamsters. Each one is straining forward with its tiny furry paws, to give you a lavender hug on the nose. Perfect! Can you see it? Can you let yourself believe it?
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A buzz word these days is ‘interactive’. “Watch our TV show! It’s interactive! Are you struggling with an addiction to gluten-free rice cakes? Just text #OU812 to 35877. Then in four words or less tell us about your latest rush to the pantry.” (Forty-cents per text, alternate rates apply, plus taxes and Hollywood fees, you must be eighteen years old to blah blah blah) Now our phones demand interaction. Tablets blast your visual cortex from just seven inches away, and you have to work with them to make them do anything the least bit helpful. Hey, you can play an interactive game to relax. But you have to Crush the Candy, Feed the Farm Animals, and of course the Birds are always Angry. And for what? Where did your imagination take over? When, in this flurry of competitive relaxation did you actually find rest for your soul? How did the tension of restrained creativity find release?
Very likely, it did not.
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There’s some vital information that you need, and maybe no one ever told you, and I’m sorry if your parents or teachers or the first person to hand you a doobie forgot to say – Your Life is a Story. It’s a story still being written. And you, my dear, are the main character.
And here’s the fun part, and the scary part – You are the Author of Your Story. You are the one who gets to say what goes on the page. Your imagination has the power, the creative power, to turn fiction into reality, moment by moment, day by day.
“Wait…,” you say, “did you say that was the scary part, too?”
Yes, I did. Because when you don’t write something into your day, into your life, someone else might do that for you. Nature abhors a vacuum. Blank pages must be given words to fill the space. But see, that’s not anyone’s responsibility but yours. (There are people who purposely do that, but we’ll leave them in the yucky box with politicians and black widow spiders) No, I’m not so presumptuous to declare to you the meaning of life. I am saying that you are creative. You are a created and creative creature. Your mind is meant to imagine new things, and then to speak them into existence. Occasionally, you have to stop by Home Depot for thingies to make it stick to the wall, but you thought it up. You should be the one to fill your pages. Once you get the hang of it – teenager! – then you can be less dependent upon others to help with the parts that don’t jive. It takes practice. Oh, yeah, there’s something else I wanted to say that’s really important…it takes practice.
Here’s where I get sappy, and real.
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You should read fiction. It’s like the sandbox where you get to try out your imagination without anyone getting injured. (Well…some of my characters do…but) the point is, you don’t get injured. As you read along through some book you’ve picked up or downloaded into your e-reader, there are so many spaces to be filled in. You have to kind of dig into the story a bit, but you’ll find those spaces. That’s where you can interact with the characters and the settings and the action. If the book turns out to be a stinker, don’t waste your time on it. Go get another. I read a lot. Most books are good. A handful are terrific. A few are so bad I can’t get past the first couple of chapters and call it quits. That’s okay. This is my story. I get to say what books I interact with and which ones I ignore. I keep practicing the use of my imagination as I read another author’s book. That helps me so much as I sit to make one hundred percent use of my imagination to author my own manuscript.
I am convinced that fiction is recreation for your brain. Re-creation. Making more imaginary stuff. It’s what your body knows to do every night. Cooperate with yourself!
Let me know what you choose to do with your story.
Patrick
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References:
Your Amazing brain.org/REM sleep
Psyche-Central / How Reading Lights Up Your Mind
Amazon.com/Books/FOUR by Kirk Withrow
Science Daily.com/Releases/July 2012
http://static5.businessinsider.com/im...
