Reyna Favis's Blog, page 5

When a Plott Hound Adopts an Introvert

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She bit him on the ear. It wasn’t a serious bite, but in this battle of wills, the little puppy wanted to make it clear to my husband Rich that she did not want to go potty outside. Outside was for playing and sniffing. There were far more comfortable places to go potty inside.

The day we adopted her from the animal shelter was bittersweet. Cancer had just taken Zero, our perennially upbeat and bouncy Boxer-Pittie mix. We were still grieving her loss, but we had an opening and this tiny puppy needed a home. For us, adopting another dog in honor of the one who passed was the only way we knew to survive the grief. But life with dogs had taught us that Heraclitus knew his stuff—you can never step in the same river twice. The new pup could never replace the lost one.

For seventeen years of our marriage, we had Roland, a diabolically clever, ninety-pound Doberman–Shepherd cross who never really took to other people, although he loved us. Then, because no single dog could fill his paw prints, we adopted Sammy and Zero. When Sammy came to us, he was a severely malnourished, yellow lab-like dog, with a pink nose and a chronic lung condition. We used to say, if you couldn’t get along with Sammy, you couldn’t get along with anyone. Sammy was the Webster’s dictionary definition of sweet and, if you flipped back a couple of pages, you’d see Zero’s picture under the definition for joy.

At the shelter, the new puppy had a look of hopeful expectation that grabbed me by the heart. Her paperwork said that she was a Plott Hound mix and I remember wondering about that. I had never heard of this breed, but she was cute, and she was the last of her family group left in the shelter. Her mother had been a pregnant Plottie from a South Carolina kill shelter, transported up north to spare her life. She birthed her puppies in New Jersey, but had a rough time of it, with most of the litter dying from parvovirus, leaving only our little girl and her brother. With both her brother and mother adopted, this small and helpless puppy was alone in the world.

Because we wanted to name
the new puppy in remembrance of Zero, we tried to choose a fitting name that
had a ‘z’ in it. She was named Maple in the shelter, because of her coat color,
but this dog was no Maple. For a while she was Ozzie, but that didn’t stick. Eventually,
while thinking about entertaining things to do in the vet’s waiting room, we
finally hit on a name that worked. Our vet’s name was Dr. Zaccheo. We would
name our girl Zackie-O, adding the glamour of Jacquelyn Onassis to the
possibility of amused guffaws from the veterinary staff.

As Zackie-O grew, it became clear that hounds were different from anything we were used to. This hound, in particular, had an intense willfulness that would have been off-putting had it not been for her goofy, playful nature. Her essential goodness made it possible for Rich to forgive her for biting his ear. It also explained why Sammy tolerated her pushiness and crazed yowling whenever their food was served. Our gentle Sammy was labeled a hooligan by the pet sitter after she witnessed him pushing Zackie-O on to her side, the aftermath of the puppy getting on his last nerve.

Zackie-O soon claimed me as her own. I had to make a special effort to ensure Sammy got enough attention when she’d force my hands away from him to give her more pets.

“You don’t own me,” I
told her during one of these episodes.

“Wanna
bet?” she seemed to respond, cocking her head at me and
pushing on, unperturbed.

The pushiness and willfulness escalated as time went on. Out of desperation, we read as much as we could about Plott Hounds to understand what we were up against. We finally came to realize that the behaviors she was displaying and expanding upon were the direct result of her heritage. Plott Hounds were bred in the hills of North Carolina since the mid-eighteenth century to hunt big game—bear, boar and mountain lion. Being headstrong was part of the breed and Plott experts emphasized that training had to be accomplished with a firm, consistent hand and always through positive reinforcement. One training site stated flat out that these dogs weren’t afraid of bears and they won’t be afraid of you.

It wasn’t long before we
saw the first evidence of her incredible scenting ability. While the puppy was
crated, Sammy stole her pig ear, taking it two rooms away, behind a chair and
under a blanket. Upon Zackie-O’s release from confinement, this little puppy
stuck her nose in the air and followed the scent to Sammy’s hiding place. We’d
had dogs all our lives and we’d never seen anything like this, especially at
such a young age.

As she grew larger and stronger, our house came close to bursting at the seams, with her wild running and boundless energy. The flip side of the coin was that Zackie-O was relentlessly cheerful and deeply affectionate. We came to believe that she came from hunting stock and harsh correction to stop her natural inclinations would end up breaking her spirit. Even though she was becoming hell to live with, we didn’t want to change her.

We carved out special time in our schedules to help her get her ya-ya’s out. We went on long walks and played endless games of chase in the yard.
If you looked up our house on Google Earth, you’d probably see a brownish red streak in the backyard. We endured dirty looks from the neighbors, as her ringing bark and excited baying carried for miles through the suburbs. (Some people say Plotts are a bag of lungs on stilts.) Zackie-O was not yet full-grown, but she was a blur of high energy and a crisis was looming.

Salvation came in the form of a warning from a website that said Plotts needed an outlet or they’d destroy your home—owners must either hunt them or put them to work in something like search and rescue. As she approached the one-year mark, we realized that we had no desire to shoot anything. Fearing that structural damage to the house was imminent, we began looking for a search and rescue team that used dogs to find missing people. Because Rich used to compete in orienteering, he was already an expert at map and compass navigation. He would be the flanker, taking charge of communication, navigation, keeping watch for safety hazards and looking for signs and clues from the missing subject. I would train as Zackie-O’s handler.

When we first met the
team, the K9 officer told us Zackie-O was ahead of the curve in her abilities. Even
more encouraging, we saw other members of the search team with dogs just as
crazy as our Zackie-O. We learned the term “high drive” and how this was a
valued trait for search dogs. Dogs like this became hell-bent on finding the
missing, never giving up or becoming distracted from the search. Dogs like this
saved people’s lives.

This epiphany was the turning point and was a moment so charged with happiness and optimism, that it carried us through the rigorous training to come. It was a sense of finding Zackie-O’s true calling and a chance for her to reach her potential. My girl could do this. My girl might even excel at this.

And so it began, with me behind the eight ball from the get-go. I had no prior training in wilderness navigation and I completely lacked a natural sense of direction. Zackie-O came into it already knowing how to hunt, so it was simply a matter of subverting her natural instincts from tracking big game to following the specific scent of the missing person. K9 training became a focused effort in teaching me how to read her and learning how to interpret what she was communicating to me in the context of the terrain’s topography and its effect on scent.

Clearly, I was the weak link, but Zackie-O was patient with me. Over time, I became better at seeing subtle clues in her behavior and feeling changes in the tension of the lead, as she hunted down hidden subjects. For her part, Zackie-O became more overt in telling me what I needed to know. It was like learning ballroom dancing with an expert instructor as your partner. After nine months of intense training, we certified as a K9 handler team. We’ve been called out to find lost hunters and hikers, despondents, elderly people with dementia, autistic children and vulnerable people with neuropsychiatric disorders. We sometimes go for miles, following the trail of the missing. And when I grow tired, my girl drags me up the next hill, driven to find the person with that special scent.

At seven years old, Zackie-O has largely given up biting people on the ear. But if you don’t stop her, she still has a strong attraction to ears and will happily give a wet willy to anyone who doesn’t struggle hard enough.

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy). Feel free to friend me and send me a message so I’ll know you’re not just a bot.

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

Introvert’s Writing Epiphany

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I thought that the act of writing would be like reading, but more intense. You know that feeling you get when you’re transported by a story, snug under a blanket on a gray day, sipping cocoa and surrounded by contented, sleeping dogs? The German word is gemütlichkeit; in Danish, it’s hygge. An NPR article on hygge, describes it as the pursuit of everyday happiness and the art of creating a nice atmosphere. But it’s basically building in elements of togetherness, of savoring simple pleasures, of relaxation, of comfort on an everyday basis.

Writing is the exact opposite of that.

If you’re doing it right, writing is a solitary pursuit that pushes you into your discomfort zone. And there’s no emerging from that until the book is done. You spend your time agonizing over the hair’s breadth of difference in meaning between synonyms, worrying about pace (too slow here? too fast there?), trying to work out character arcs that mesh with the plot and are right for the characters, wondering if you’d be better off writing non-fiction because that has brisker sales, feeling inadequate because you’ve done nothing towards proper marketing this quarter, and having Talmudic discussions with your writers’ group over commas. [ N.B. There is also a post-marketing discomfort zone, so the fun never stops for writers.]

This still easily beats a day at work in corporate America. I used to spend exorbitant amounts of time in teleconferences that led to no forward motion for projects. I’d practice my search and rescue knot tying skills while some raging extrovert babbled on and on, completely convinced that the number of words expelled was more important than the quality of the idea conveyed.

Figure 8 on a bight—that talking dude bites the big one…

Figure 8 follow through—no one is ever going to follow through on anything discussed today…

Munter hitch—what’s the hitch? Where do I start, dude?

Corporations are creatively impoverished environments largely because of these endless teleconferences and meetings that fail to engage the higher level thinking needed to solve difficult problems. Thinking at a higher level needs alone-time, not group-babble; it needs deep work, isolated from distraction, not more face-time.

These corporate group activities are unproductive because they lack the fundamental criteria needed to achieve the flow state, otherwise known as “being in the zone.” Flow has been described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi as an experience of intense and focused concentration, where you lose your sense of self and become one with the activity. Time becomes meaningless and you experience the activity as intrinsically rewarding.

The flow state is also known as the introvert nirvana.

If this introvert writer can manage to stop herself from diddling around on the internet and to get down to business, it is possible to get in the zone and to create something that hadn’t existed before.

In addition to slaving away in solitude, all the other basic requirements to achieve flow are met in the writing environment: 1) The goals are clear (I need to write a book); 2) Feedback is immediate (what kind of amateurish garbage did I just type?!); and 3) There is a balance between perceived skills and the perceived challenges (I know a lot of words and I need to choose the right ones and put them down in the proper order).

The best part of the writer’s flow state is that all the niggling annoyances described above fade into nothingness and the story writes itself. It’s been shown that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain best known for self-monitoring, deactivates during flow. This is the best way to shut up the inner critic and write without hesitation.

Writing truly is more intense than reading. The surprise is that this is not because writing provides a more vivid experience of living in a fictional world. The intensity comes because you burn the mental energy to get to the mountain’s peak and finally reach introvert nirvana. Just like the flow state encountered during strenuous physical activity, endorphins are released during writer’s flow and the receptors in your brain are treated to a shot of dopamine.

In my experience, writing and flow are the active forms of mental process, while reading and hygge are the passive forms. Both are enjoyable, but in vastly different ways.

Get ready for an SAT-level analogy: writing is to reading as flow is to hygge.

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

Holiday Gift from the Introvert: “Soul Sign” Preview

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Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays! As a special treat, please enjoy an excerpt from the next Zackie Story scheduled to be released in 2019.

SOUL SIGN: A Zackie StoryCHAPTER 1 

Any day on this side of the dirt is a good day.

Like other mostly true proverbs, there were exceptions to the rule. For instance, there were those whose remains rested below the dirt, but whose spirits wandered around topside. These souls suffered miserably until they got the help they needed to find their way. After meeting Cam and Zackie, I had gained vast experience in the art of surviving and dealing with these restless spirits.

I clenched my teeth and repeated the mantra about it being a good day as I carried out another moldy box of broken kitchen gadgets from the basement. What had started as an outing to see the restoration of the eighteenth-century Roseberry Homestead had turned into forced volunteer labor. My only consolation was that I had invited Cam to see the house.

Covered in cobwebs and dust, he carried a similar decaying cardboard box. Cam extended his lower lip and blew upward to dislodge a dust bunny from a shaggy, gray eyebrow. His face flushed with exertion, he glared at me. “Fia, the least you could do when you issue an invitation is to simultaneously issue a warning that there will be work involved. I could have politely declined to become a 911-call-waiting-to-happen.”

Shrugging, I walked on to the dump area. “Blame it on Peyton. I didn’t know either.” I tossed my box with a satisfied sigh, wiped the sweat from my face with a dirty sleeve and took a break to watch Cam struggle.

Cam was like me, except old and British. He was in his fifties and I was in my twenties, so we had just enough in common to argue about. Besides being search and rescue workers, we shared the ability to communicate with the dead, and we were both dedicated to helping lost spirits move on. The moving on part would not have been possible without Zackie.

Zackie was…complicated. First and foremost, she was a Psychopomp, escorting these lost spirits to the afterlife. Whenever I asked Cam about her true age, he’d dance around the subject, but he did once mention Anubis, the ancient Egyptian jackal god, patron of lost souls and the helpless. These days, she resembled a Plott Hound – so much so, that a backwoods bear hunter christened her Zackie when he offered to buy her from Cam. Too amused by this nom de guerre to establish a better name, Cam just went with it, and so, Zackie she remained. Fortunately, she had a sense of humor, even if she tended to lack empathy for the living. She demonstrated this trait by lazing in the sun while Cam and I labored with the endless boxes.

“Hey, you two. Less chatter, more hauling.” Peyton hefted two stacked boxes to the dump zone and deposited them neatly on top of the pile. She was a large, muscled woman, ex-military and resource officer on my search team. Peyton was also training to be a master stonemason, so I was sure she was enjoying seeing how the old stone house was being restored. More important, she was recovering from a spirit haunting and needed something to brighten her outlook.

Cam muttered some dark expletive under his breath and brought his box to the mound of garbage. Eying the top of the pile critically, he shook his head and then opened his arms to let gravity do the work. His box dropped heavily, landing at the foot of Peyton’s growing mountain of junk. Unsurprisingly, the cardboard burst open on impact and a cascade of very old, but still colorful, brittle plastic toys tumbled on to the grass.

Peyton blew out a breath. “Now look what you’ve done.” She knelt by the spill and began scooping the debris back into what remained of the box, but then paused in mid action. “Hold on…what’s this?” Reaching into the ruined box, she pulled out a stack of sepia photographs, the edges curled and brittle with age.

Cam and I watched over her shoulder as she flipped through the old photos. “What the f-ff…”  Her hands stilled and she froze. “They’re all dead. These are pictures of dead people.”

“Hand them here.” Cam reached out his hand and took the stack. I stood at his elbow and looked more carefully at the photographs. There were pictures of children and adults, eyes sunken and their bodies lacking the vitality and animation of the living. Some were on beds or in caskets and surrounded by flower arrangements. Others were propped up by what may have been family members or, even more disturbing, wooden supports that fixed the bodies in standing positions. Hands, unless carefully posed, were frozen in uneasy and unnatural positions that registered in a primal part of my brain and branded the people in these images as empty of life.

Copyright © 2018 by Reyna Favis

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Image attribution: By Acid the meme machine (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

Never Play an Introvert

[image error]Go on. Make my Day.

He wore a poker face. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding, serious or playing some kind of complicated mind game. My brother didn’t blink. I held his gaze, but my right hand crept along the table top until it located the knife I’d used to cut the turkey. 

It came down to this. My mother, as usual, had cooked waa-aay too much food to be consumed in a sitting. She always aims to provide for us, to make sure we had leftovers to last a week whenever we visited. My brother and I were now arguing about who had to take home the brunt of the leftovers.

My brother complained that he still had two roasts in his refrigerator from the last two times he’d visited. I also had a roast sitting in my fridge, but I wasn’t going to reveal he had me beat two to one in the roast department. Instead, I sliced off the leg from one of the two turkeys my mother had cooked and added it to his pile, daring him to naysay me. 

I saw his lip tremble and I thought he would break. Instead, he grabbed the remainder of the mashed potatoes, leaving me with the stuffing… oh God, the stuffing…there was so much stuffing…

We went on like this, divvying up the leftovers until only the four pies that comprised the dessert were left. And that’s when he said something that knocked me off my game and totally threw me. 

“If you don’t really want any of the pies, I’ll take them all.” 

Wait, what? I don’t get any pie? What was he trying to pull here? I stared at him, slack-jawed. 

“No, seriously. I’ll take all of them. You don’t have to worry about it.” 

Now I really wanted a pie. I almost appealed to my mother, tattling that he was taking all the pie. And then it dawned on me. “Is this some kind of weird reverse psychology move?” 

I saw his left eye twitch.  

Gotcha.

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

The Introvert and the Witching Hour

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I was born in Germany not far from the Harz Mountain in an ancient village where you can still see the remnants of an earthen wall erected in the Middle Ages. It’s a place steeped in the folklore that fueled the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and inspired Russian composer Mussorgsky to write the unsettling and dramatic Night on Bald Mountain.

A treeless summit above the Bode Gorge is known as the Hexentanzplatz, literally “the Witches’ Dance Floor.” Pre-Christian celebrations in honor of the forest and mountain goddesses are presumably the source of this name. The highest peak on the Harz Mountain, the Brocken,  is rumored to be the site where Europe’s witches gathered on Walpurgisnacht. The Brocken is the setting for one of the most famous scenes in Goethe’s Faust, when “the mountain’s mad with magic.” While the US associates Halloween with the season of the witch, the opposite side of the seasonal cycle, May Eve, is when the ancient Saxons gathered for celebrations of mad magic.

This was the trysting time of witches and a time to drive out the darkness of winter.  The nine nights before May Day belong to the Wild Hunt, a ghostly troop of riders representing winter. Walpurga, goddess of woods, springs, and fertility who lends her name to Walpurgisnacht, is hounded by these spectral hunters. Villagers leave windows open to the white lady of May, so she can find safety and bring summer to a winter-weary land. Christian influence sought to stifle these older rituals. The goddess was transformed in the eighth century into Saint Walpurga, and the rites of Spring became a way to dispel the forces of pagan darkness from the villages.

Despite this effort to erase the vestiges of older religions, there remains a generational memory. Because of a thick growth of dark hair when I was born, I was dubbed the Black Witch by hospital staff. In my childhood home in the US, a small kitchen witch hung on the wall near the stove to bring good luck and “keep roasts from burning, pots from boiling over, and sauces from spilling.” I was brought up on stories of the hands of misbehaving children growing out of their graves and of a pirate who struck a deal during his execution. He asked the mayor of the town to release as many of his men as he was able to walk past after he was beheaded. The headless body arose and walked past eleven men before it was tripped by the executioner, who went on to renege on the deal and put all the pirate’s men to death. When asked by town officials if he was not tired after all this, the executioner unwisely replied that he could easily execute all of the town officials as well. For this, the executioner was himself sentenced to death.

The village where I was born harbors its own tales. As an adult, I was fortunate to be able to visit and see the conserved structures from hundreds of years ago that keep the old stories alive.

A gate tower originally built in 1343 burned down in 1424 and was rebuilt over the course of 12 years. The structure seen today has a very distinctive twisted roof. One folk tale that explains this architectural feature claims that when the devil caused the men of the village to drink in excess, the women drove him away. While fleeing over the town’s wall, the devil grabbed the tower and twisted it while making good his escape.

The earthen wall surrounding the village today was contracted by the town fathers in 1506. A man named Andreas was appointed overseer of the project. Because farmers from the surrounding area would also be protected by this wall in times of danger, they were conscripted to work on its construction.

When I was told this story, Andreas was described as the “party-hearty” guy who bribed the farmers with beer and cajoled them into doing the back-breaking labor to create a high, heavy pile of earth to protect the village. In another telling of the story, Andreas was a cruel taskmaster and the farmers detested him. They blamed the townsfolk for their plight and took to calling them “Anreischke”, after Andreas, which was pronounced “Anreis” in the low German dialect. In retaliation, the townsfolk had a wooden bust of Andreas created and mounted in a clock. The dreaded Andreas would come out every two hours and nod to the farmers coming to market, reminding them of both their loathsome taskmaster, as well as their dependence on the village. This clock still operates today and you can see the Anreischke Man peek out right on schedule throughout the day.  Given that Germans invented the word “schadenfreude” to describe the pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune, I tend to believe the latter story.

Like the Brothers Grimm before me, I’ve been inspired by the history and the stories of this ancient German village and the Harz Mountains.  I like to think that something of these tales bleed into the stories I write.

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For a good source of information on things to do on Walpurgisnacht, see Night of the Witches: Folklore, Traditions & Recipes for Celebrating Walpurgis Night by Linda Raedisch.

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

How to Introvert: Lessons from the Octopus

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When Ringo Starr composed Octopus’s Garden, he was under the mistaken impression that octopuses are social animals and would be happy to invite strangers into their territory. Nothing could be further from the truth: octopuses aggressively guard their homes and unless mating, usually exist as solitary creatures, living and hunting alone.

Probably because these cephalopods have acquired the reputation of being the curmudgeon of the sea, the results of a recent study on octopuses has gained worldwide attention. The study involved exposing octopuses to the drug ecstasy and observing whether, in a partitioned tank, the test octopus would spend more time playing with a Star Wars figure in one chamber or with a caged octopus housed in another chamber.

Be aware that what I write here is a highly simplified explanation of the experiment and results. The actual experiment used very nice controls and was carefully conducted, e.g. varying the sex of the interacting octopuses, determining drug dose, quantifying time spent in the neutral chamber and the number of chamber transitions and how much of the octopus needed to pass through the chamber opening to call it a transition*, etc. Scientists put a great deal of effort and thought into their experiments because other scientists are more than happy to hammer them if they err. This is called peer review.

The impetus behind performing the experiments came from the recognition that the site that binds ecstasy on a serotonin transporter in humans bore an uncanny resemblance to the same region of a similar protein in the octopus. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter thought to influence mood in humans and when ecstasy displaces serotonin from the binding site on the transporter, it releases this neurotransmitter to affect brain cells and change social behavior. The researchers wanted to answer the question of whether this messaging system still worked in a similar way in the octopus, despite the fact that 500 million years of evolution have elapsed since humans and octopuses shared a common ancestor. Still, a worried reader of a news report on this study commented that giving octopuses ecstasy must be part of a larger research program that involved dosing scientists with LSD.

But back to the experimental results…

The researchers observed that undosed octopuses spent more time with the toy, while octopuses high on ecstasy would get up-close and personal with the other octopus. The investigators concluded that, like humans, ecstasy has a prosocial effect on octopuses.

I had a first-hand experience of the prosocial effects of ecstasy some years ago when I rode the New York City subway to work. The dude I met was dressed in business casual attire, although a tad on the unkempt side. He was smiling and his eyes were shining, and he was soooo happy to be going to work, but wasn’t exactly sure where work was and what stop he should take. In addition to an unnatural level of joy, he also had a child-like trust that made me fear for his safety. I tried to explain to him at which stop he should get off the train and he nodded, delighted with this information, but I wasn’t sure he was processing it. My stop came before his and as I stood on the platform watching uncertainly while the train pulled out, he gave me this beatific smile and floppy-handed wave.  I hope he’s still alive. The dude had no natural defenses.

And this must have been what the social object octopus was thinking as ecstasy-impaired brethren or sistren plastered their ventral parts all over the protective cage. Dude, you are totally gonna get eaten! 

Octopuses are generally canny creatures who have perfected the art of introversion into a survival strategy. One hallmark of introversion is self-reliance and octopuses have this trait in spades. When confronted by a predator, this wily cephalopod can sacrifice a tentacle, leaving it to writhe and wriggle as a distraction while the rest of the octopus makes an escape. The octopus will grow back this missing tentacle, so no worries.

Also, never underestimate the octopus’s ability to fight dirty. Just millimeters from the jaws of death, they can outwit a pyjama shark by slithering a tentacle into its vulnerable gills, suffocating the shark until it releases our eight-legged friend. But consider that octopuses are not always prey; they can also be the aggressor. Beyond the necessity of hunting for food, these ocean introverts have also been implicated in the mugging of a diver.

[Expert tip: Always ask permission if you would like to take a picture or video of an introvert.]

Clearly, Ringo made certain erroneous assumptions as to how welcome he would be in an octopus’s domain. The inspiration for Octopus’s Garden purportedly came about while Ringo was cruising near Sardinia as a guest on Peter Seller’s yacht in 1968. The ship’s captain described to him how octopuses travel along the seabed, picking up stones and other shiny objects and creating gardens with them. As charming as this origin story may be, I hypothesize that this idealized interpretation of the octopus may have had its origins in a certain prosocial pharmaceutical.

 

* The answer is both eyes and mantle.

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

Introvert Says “The Muse Will Not Escape My Plott Hound”

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Giving a reader a great story that allows them to take time off from the work-a-day world isn’t easy.

Escapism requires work…a whole lot of work.

I’ve written a little over 30,000 words for SOUL SIGN, escapist literature and the third book in the Zackie Stories, and I’ve hit the 30K slump.  And that’s okay. I’ve been here before with the previous two books, so this is right on schedule.

At about 30K words, we reach the point in the story where the author has completed the set up, created the mystery and the gnawing questions, and must now set the characters on the road to finding resolution. For writers, this is where you have to dig in and be disciplined about getting the story finished. Distractions abound and shiny, new ideas for other efforts scream for attention. For readers, this is the place in the novel where you are helplessly hooked and feel compelled to finish the story to find out what happens. But the compulsion to keep reading only happens if the writer has done their job.

Different writers take different approaches to doing their job, and it all comes down to personal preference. Some writers are planners. They outline the hell out of the story and then commence writing, never stalling because the story is essentially written. Other writers are pantsers; that is, we write by the seat of our pants and we are as surprised as the reader to find out what happens next.  [N.B. It is ironic that the term ‘pantser’ is a thing, since pants for writers are not. See item 3 in this article on buying gifts for writers. Also, John Cheever wrote many of his short stories in his underwear. ] The philosophy behind the pantser approach is that if we can’t keep ourselves entertained, we surely won’t be able to do that for the readers. Personally, I like being surprised. My characters do this to me all the time and I’ve learned to just go with it, allowing them to tell the story.

Each approach has its own dangers and shortcomings. For my personality type, outlining the hell out of a story has the danger of creating a fatal case of boredom that will make me lose interest in the story. There are plenty of other more interesting things to read or write about that will surprise me and give me that surge of dopamine I crave. In contrast to this planner problem, pantsers run the risk of writing themselves into a corner due to an utter disregard for planning. This might result in having to rewind the story by 10,000 words or more and trying again. So far, I’ve managed to avoid this hazard by coming up with something that will allow me to scramble up the wall like Spiderman, rather than sit sulking in a corner.

So, what motivates writers when they hit the wall and can’t find any footholds? Waiting for the muse to make an appearance rarely works. Realistically, you need to hunt that fickle wretch down, a crazed Plott hound dragging you through the brush to find her hiding place. The best advice I’ve read on the author’s craft is to write drunk and edit sober. Nothing is written in stone and most writing is salvageable, even if it has to be saved for another project. The simple act of writing something, anything, gets the mental wheels greased and creates a path forward.

But the true force multiplier for motivation? Caffeine. Devoted readers of this blog might have thought pickle juice would be the answer, but no, it is definitely caffeine. The emergence of coffee houses in the 17th century and the advent of the Age of Enlightenment was no coincidence. I would call it cause and effect. Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that emphasized reason, individualism, and skepticism, and specialized in questioning traditional views. Great thinking begat great writing, since all the profound thinkers of that era needed to capture their ideas before the caffeine wore off.  Similarly, pants-less writers need to consume vast quantities of caffeine to produce the kind of escapist stories that give readers a break from our dystopian reality and keep them turning the pages.

Escapism requires caffeine…many, many cups of liquid motivation.

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

Introvert’s Guide to Dogs

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Dogs deserve better than humans. While humans have very little to recommend them these days, dogs are steadfastly a force for good in this world. It was with this sentiment in mind that I found myself floored when a CNN article (The mysterious science behind lifesaving dogs) cited the conclusion of a study on canine empathy:  “[This] may indicate that dogs possess the capacity for a rudimentary form of empathy.”

The CNN article had just described how a dog named Polo saved the life of an eight month old baby girl when a fire raged through the family home. The infant was found with the lifeless body of Polo on top of her, shielding her from the worst of the flames. Rudimentary form of empathy?  Really?

In my experience, a dog’s empathy far exceeds that of a human. We only have to consider our inability to provide comfort to those suffering from grief or shock. We inevitably either say nothing, or worse, put a foot firmly in our mouth and say the wrong thing. A dog, on the other hand, puts his head on our knee and gazes soulfully into our eyes and we know he gets it. Comfort given; comfort received.

This type of non-verbal interaction is particularly appreciated by introverts. No one has the energy to engage in conversations when under duress and it’s particularly draining to introverts. Having the comfort of a dog when the SHTF is lifesaving.

Cases in point…

Sammy (pictured above) and Zero (a Boxer-Pitt mix) were the dogs in residence when I returned from the hospital after a major operation with potentially life-threatening repercussions. I could not lie down at first and so, spent a lot of hours sitting on the couch, popping pills and trying to read away the pain with a distracting book. Sammy lay on one side of me and Zero was on the other. They would sometimes work in shifts, making sure one of them was always there to watch over me and to offer comfort.

The trend to preserve human life continues with one of the current dogs in residence, Zackie-O the introverted Plott hound. Zackie-O is a trailing dog for the Search and Rescue Teams of Warren County.  She is trained to locate vulnerable people who have wandered off by taking scent from an object they touched and then finding and following that scent through the environment. And she does it well most of the time, so it came as a surprise to me during one training mission when, instead of taking me into the woods where the subject had presumably gone, she forcefully dragged me back to the parking lot. It was doubly surprising because she was looking for my husband, Rich. I assumed she would be highly motivated to find our other pack member.

As it turned out, Rich had inadvertently stepped in bear poo on his way out—an occupational hazard for wilderness Search and Rescue.  It is possible that Zackie-O’s thought process was: Sorry, but Rich has been eaten by a bear. I’m taking you back to the parking lot forthwith, because someone has to feed me tonight.

Plotts are bred to hunt bear and I have never seen Zackie-O back down from any animal, no matter how big. She is decidedly unimpressed by larger dogs growling aggressively at her and she appears to have a deep interest in maybe someday getting kicked by a horse. I do think she was protecting me when she took me away from Rich’s trail, and possibly, dinner had nothing to do with it. I’m pretty sure Zackie-O has empathy for me, since she tends to stop what she is doing when I fall and she is in hot in pursuit of her subject; she is kind enough not to drag me on my belly. But for this dog, fully eliminating dinner from the equation is purely conjecture.

The concept of canine empathy crosses cultures, and in some Native American traditions, dogs serve as psychopomps, faithfully guiding the dead to the afterlife. In this tradition, when the soul departs from the body, it travels along the Milky Way and eventually joins the Creator in the twelfth heaven. The bridge along the Milky Way to the twelfth heaven is thought to be guarded by dogs who allow passage only to the souls of the good; those who ever abused a dog are prohibited from crossing.

Soul Search and Soul Scent follow this Native American tradition and portray a canine as the empathetic guide to the afterlife for troubled, earthbound spirits. The psychopomp in these stories is dedicated to protecting and bringing peace to lost souls. Contrary to her mortal canine counterparts, she has very little regard for the living, having endured countless millennia of our little dramas. The psychopomp may flick an ear in disdain when confronted with yet another repetition of human-on-human conflict, but she will not lift a paw to intervene. Cue the bored yawn.

Perhaps this is as it should be, since as I’ve said, dogs deserve better than humans.

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

Introvert’s Night Out

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I went grudgingly, all the while thinking I’m too freakin’ old for this. Going out on a Saturday night to see a band was an infrequent thing even when I was in my twenties. These days I am hauling that particular decade of my life on a trailer hitch. 

This night out was reminiscent of a scene in SOUL SCENT, when Fia and the gang take a well-earned night off from their work in rescuing the spirit of a suicide. Unlike yours truly, a militant introvert, Fia was so looking forward to going out with her friends and just cutting loose. Things started out well, the fun presaged when a priest and rabbi walk into the bar.  But this living joke signals a dark turn in the night’s events: cruel words lead to an act of kindness and then to a violent confrontation that brings an end to the fun night out. Fortunately for the story, Fia is young and resilient.

As I got into the car, I took a quick look behind us to see if I could spot the trailer hitch and my lost youth. But while youth may fade, introversion is forever. Before I could even buckle my seat belt, the sirens from the Introvert Early Warning System wailed and the broadcast in my head declared we were at DEFCON 1. This is not a drill—repeat: this is not a drill. Approaching extrovert territory. Shields up. Set phasers to stun.

The extroverts had congregated in a venue called All Star Music Empire to enjoy the nightlife and two rockabilly bands, Miss Laurie Ann & The SaddleTones and Jittery Jack with Miss Amy Griffin. The crowd was laid-back and friendly, welcoming us and pointing us to the drinks, cake, and pierogies. The presence of pierogies and cake reassured me that this crowd had good intentions, so despite lingering misgivings about the high concentration of extroverts, I holstered my phaser.  As I made my way to a comfy couch, I met someone who had recently adopted a Coon Hound puppy, so I told him about my Plott Hound. But before I could properly warn him that he was in for a wild ride with this hound puppy, the music started.

Rockabilly has a manic edge that bleeds through the restraining influences of  country and blues. Emerging during the early 1950s in the Southern US, it is perhaps the closest living ancestor of today’s rock and roll. Crawling forth from the musical primordial goo, it shook the hillbilly hay seeds from its proud, greased back pompadour and roared to life.

The music has inspired a thriving subculture, where vintage muscle cars and rolled up jeans complete the greaser look. Dancers kick loose with frenetic energy, jivin’ and boppin’ in time to the slapped upright bass and pounding beat of the drums. These dedicated followers of rockabilly shows know how to have fun.

And age didn’t matter. I could no longer cling to my mantra of being too freakin’ old for this. In a brilliantly executed lateral move, I now declared myself too freakin’ introverted for this, at least for the full-on, audience participation portion of the night’s entertainment. But don’t get me wrong, the music is awesome and you’ll someday find me at another show. Meanwhile, rave on, rockabilly people, enjoy the night.

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Image Credit:

By Wildfire Willie [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.

Introversion and e-DNA in Loch Ness

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Parts of SOUL SIGN, the third book in the Zackie Stories, will take place in Scotland. All things Scottish draw my attention these days and I do have a fondness for monsters, so…

So, the Loch Ness Monster is an introvert. According to lore, the beast rarely makes public appearances, which is completely consistent with introversion. (Check this previous post on defining introversion if you don’t believe me.) The sparse history of all eye-witness accounts can be found on the Loch Ness Information Website, but a quick summary of the highlights is included below.

Monster sightings in Loch Ness have been going on for a very long time. The first recorded sighting by St. Columba was documented in the sixth century AD by Adomnán, an abbot of Iona Abbey. While there were probably other sightintgs in the intervening years, the next one recorded was in 1863, when a gameskeeper saw a large fish-like animal in the waters. This report roused little attention because there had always been a local tradition of something big living in the loch. Things changed dramatically after Mrs. Mackay saw a whale-like creature in 1933,  and an amateur journalist/water bailiff from Fort Augustus wrote up the incident for the Inverness Courier. The story attracted interest from the London press on Fleet Street and the reclusive Nessie achieved celebrity status—whether she wanted it or not.

Nessie’s territory has since been invaded by locals, tourists, journalists and scientists. It’s not been a peaceful life in the loch and my guess is that that scientists have been by far the worst in terms of disturbing the peace. Project Urquhart, named for the castle that stands on the shore of the loch, was established to better understand the ecology of Loch Ness. One approach was to examine populations of nematodes to establish norms for a large freshwater lake and to follow population changes with changes in climate.  Nematodes are tiny round worms that are difficult to see without the aid of a microscope, but have a long, skinny, snake-like appearance, interestingly reminiscent of some eyewitness accounts of the much larger Nessie (coincidence?).  Under the ruse of studying nematodes, the team from the British Natural History Museum detected several anomalies on their sonar, indicating the presence of something large swimming about.

There are several candidates for large things that could be swimming around the loch. My favorite is the plesiosaur,  an extinct prehistoric aquatic reptile that lived in the warm seas surrounding Scotland 70,000,000 years ago. The idea of giant squids or octopi has also been floated about. Neither of these are serious candidates for the monster.  They would have had to come in from the North Sea after the loch thawed out from a solid block of ice 12,000 years ago, and to survive, they would have required a gradual change in salinity from salt water to fresh in order for them to adapt. This was not possible when Loch Ness thawed out and became a large body of fresh water, so we can rule out a kraken. Mammals, like a long-necked seal, sea cow or whale, are also unlikely since these would have to surface frequently to breathe. Sightings would have been plentiful instead of rare, so these also are unlikely to be good monster material. Our best bet to explain monster sightings is the sturgeon. One found in a Russian river was 27 feet long and, based on the bony scales along the sides of its body, was estimated to be about 200 years old.  But, according to Loch-ness.org, if a huge sturgeon were ever caught in Loch Ness, people would probably not accept that it proved the monster might just be a bigger sturgeon. They would probably just wink knowingly, and say, “Ah, so that’s what Nessie eats!”

The latest approach to hunting for Nessie (while not actually aiming to do that) uses eDNA, or environmental DNA. Critters living in Loch Ness leave all sorts of DNA evidence in the water, thanks to shed skin cells, poop, eggs, sperm, and whatever else casually sloughs off of them. This might be why Loch-ness.org advises us that “You can drink the water from Loch Ness, but it is best mixed 50/50 with Whisky which hides the peaty taste and brown colour. If trying this please use cheap whisky. Don’t waste the good stuff!”

But back to the eDNA project… Scientists will gather water samples, enrich the DNA floating in the water and then sequence the hell out of it. By aligning the resulting unknown DNA sequences from the loch against 200 million known DNA sequences housed in a database maintained by the US NIH, the scientists will be able to match the loch DNA to the specific critters. One caveat that keeps me up at night is that the plesiosaur has no representative sequences in the database (click here for proof). This means that the scientists would completely miss it if plesiosaurs were pooping in the loch. This worries me.

Another thing that worries me is that if we were to find proof of exotic creatures in Loch Ness, trophy hunter bastards could flock to the Scottish Highlands and take aim. To prevent more sleepless nights, I began to frantically google British laws that might prevent this senseless slaughter. My efforts were rewarded when I found an article in The Scotsman that explained how diligent civil servants have already looked into this matter.

It all started in 1985 with a letter from the British Embassy in Stockholm to the permanent under-secretary at the then Scottish Office. The letter began: “I am sorry to bother you with an inquiry which will, no doubt, be greeted at first glance with gales of laughter.” It turned out that Swedish civil servants wanted to know if legal safeguards existed for Nessie, as they had concerns about protecting their own Storsj monster from poachers and hunters. Scottish civil servants performed their due diligence and determined that because Nessie was not a salmon, she was not protected under the Salmon and Fisheries Protection (Scotland) Act 1951. Under advice from the Nature Conservancy Council, it did appear that the Loch Ness Monster would be protected under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act, which made it an offense for anyone to “snare, shoot or blow up any protected species,” including Nessie. Whew!

I am very glad to learn that Nessie is protected from human monsters. I hope that in the near future, other exotic beasts on this planet will also be protected from trophy hunting.

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Image credit:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nessie.svg

Description: Image of Nessie                                                                                                          Author: Fornax

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If you would like to comment on anything in these posts, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please visit my author’s website to learn more about progress with the Zackie Story series, author appearances, or to send me a message, etc. Or if you prefer, you can also find me on Facebook (at least until another social media platform emerges that will actually safeguard user privacy).

Soul Search and Soul Scent, novels blending fantasy and supernatural suspense, are available for purchase on Amazon and are free on Kindle Unlimited.

If you enjoy the Zackie stories, please, please consider leaving a short review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your review makes a difference and is incredibly valuable, drawing in other readers and providing access to promotional opportunities that require a specific number of reviews to engage. I’ll be your best friend forever if you write a review.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog, click on the three bars at the upper right. The next full post will be available on or before the last day of the month.