Simon Denman's Blog: Simon says, page 3

Science Fiction Plausibility & The Donnie Darko Effect

My eldest daughter and I recently rented the film Source Code, a fast-paced time-slip / alternative-reality action thriller in which an US army pilot, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, awakens on a commuter train with no memory of how he got there, and inexplicably inhabiting the body of a total stranger. After 8 minutes, the train blows up, although you’ll be pleased to hear that this is not the end of the story. As Science Fiction films go, it’s not bad – providing you don’t examine the science too carefully. The plot rips along, ticking all the boxes for action, fantasy, romance and mystery with even a hint of philosophical questioning, which sets you thinking (or rather scratching your head) after the film ends. So it was no surprise when, as the credits started to roll, my daughter turned to me with the now familiar words, “Wait a minute! So what really happened?”  This need for some level of scientific plausibility or at least consistency is one of the traits (not sure if good or bad)  which I share with my daughters. We’re quite willing to suspend disbelief and concede one or two ruptures in the known laws of physics, providing the story remains logically consistent within that new, slightly modified version of reality.  Source Code, in my view, goes over the edge in this respect, requiring just a little too much suspension of disbelief and leaving me with a sense of frustration instead. After debating with my daughter the possible explanations for the film’s eventual outcome,...

Why do we like Music? – Part 2 – Answer: Fractals?

In part 1 of this essay, we looked briefly at the history of music and at possible explanations for its universal appeal.  Today, I want to discuss three recent pieces of  research which further support and expand on what we’ve already discussed. Music evolves As stated previously, it was specifically my inability to appreciate Chinese Opera, that finally convinced me of the cultural origins of music’s appeal, but some interesting research from Imperial College London recently came to light, which seems to further support this position. Using a computer to create, “breed” and mutate random sequences of sounds, using the subjective ratings of human volunteers as selection criteria, the researchers showed how after a few thousand generations, the sequences had evolved towards something significantly more “musical” than those with which they’d started. For me this resonated well with my previous thoughts that we are attracted to certain music, not because of any innate capability of these sound patterns to affect our brains, but because we have learned to associate certain music with certain occasions, emotions and feelings. Music is good for our brains Although the effects measured may not have been as dramatic as those created by DreamZone in my novel Connected, a recent study by a team of researchers from Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, found that  …childhood music instruction has strong linguistic benefits and improves performance on everyday listening tasks. Also that: There is a body of research that suggests music training not only improves hearing, it bolsters a suite of brain functions. Musically trained kids do...

Why do we like music? – Part 1

Music seems to have a been a part of human culture since the beginning of culture itself. Earlier this year, researchers excavating caves in southern Germany found ancient flutes carved from mammoth ivory, subsequently shown via Carbon dating to be between 42000 and 43000 years old. This means we were making music at least as far back as the time when we shared the Earth with Neanderthals.  But why? There are several theories for how our proclivity for music-making might have evolved, but most likely is that it arose in parallel with language as both a means of communication and a force for social cohesion. Through song, dance, ritual and ceremony, music helped to bring the people of our tribes together. Music of the spheres The word music originally derives from mousa, the Greek word for muse (which I wrote about in a previous essay on artistic inspiration), revealing the classical belief that music was a gift from the gods. This connection with the divine and the associated idea of the heavens being imbued with some kind of inherent music of the spheres was picked up during the renaissance by composers (many of whom were commissioned by the church) as well as artists and poets such as John Milton, who in Arcades, spoke of, the heavenly tune, which none can hear Of human mould with gross unpurged ear. Although now a devout atheist, I have never lost my love of the ecclesiastical music in which, as an enthusiastic member of my school choir and orchestra, I was immersed throughout my childhood. Indeed, to this day, it...

Is Eastwooding a selfish meme?

Yesterday evening, as I browsed Facebook and Twitter, I became aware of, and then part of, something strange. I had already heard something about Clint Eastwood’s debate with an empty chair at the US Republican convention on Thursday, which struck me as an odd thing to do, but living on the other side of the Atlantic, had not yet had a chance to watch it. When I did, I was initially saddened to see that one of my all-time favourite Hollywood tough guys might have overestimated his talent for comic oratory, although if better informed (or scripted) and perhaps twenty years younger, I’d like to think he might still have pulled it off. Then I received a tweet asking, Is Eastwooding the Next Planking Internet Meme? linking to a number of photos of people apparently conversing with empty chairs. At this point a number of thoughts went through my mind: I remember my teenage daughter trying to explain Planking to me, but not really getting it. Is this really an equivalent Internet meme in the making? That’s kind of exciting. Some of these photos are actually pretty funny – at least in a quirky American kind of way Maybe I should retweet this. Maybe I should create my own Eastwooding photo and post that too. Of course, I wasn’t the only one to be entertaining such a sequence of thoughts. Within an hour or so, tens of thousands of others had uploaded photos or retweeted various links and commentary connected with the twitter hashtag #Eastwooding. According to...

Is self-publishing redefining the rules of book genre?

Like many début authors, I didn’t really think too hard about the genre of my first book until I’d finished writing it. And looking back, with large parts of the story seemingly writing themselves, I’m not sure I could have moulded it to fit a predefined literary pigeon-hole even if I’d wanted to. So it was only when I started the laborious and disheartening process of seeking representation that I began to realise the importance, at least to the traditional publishing world, of fitting neatly within a recognised genre. Of course, you only need to consider browsing the aisles of a traditional bricks-and-mortar book store to understand why this is – they need to know in which aisle and on which shelf to put your book. Publishing genre fiction also removes some of the risk since publishers already understand how the overall market is subdivided into groups loyal to each of the categories such as crime, murder-mystery, science-fiction, fantasy etc. and roughly how many they can sell into each. Consequently, agents and publishers tend to shy away from novels which fall between genres. Of course, there are the so-called cross-over novels, but the very small number of these which actually get published rarely come from new authors. This is when I realised that my novel, CONNECTED, didn’t fit so neatly into any existing recognised genre. In fact, I’d had some early warnings of this when, in the very early days, having accidentally let slip to friends that I’d just written a book, I struggled to answer the simple yet inevitable next...

Secrets of Self-publishing and eBook promotion – Part 2

In the first part of this article, I shared a little of my own limited experience in the world of Indie-publishing and explained how, no matter how good your book may be, like any product, its success (unless you are exceptionally lucky) will depend on how effectively you market and promote it. With this in mind, two weeks ago I published via twitter, Facebook and a few other on-line forums, the link to a quick anonymous Author Survey. Since then, I have had responses from 33 authors, 26 of whom are self-published. 12 of the 33 respondents have sold over 5000 books, 5 have sold over 10,000, 2 over 50,000 and just 1 over 100,000. Statisticians among you will no doubt point out that this may not necessarily be a representative sample and of course there are many different ways in which the following data could be interpreted, but I feel it provides some useful insights nonetheless. It should come as no surprise that almost all of the respondents have published their work in Amazon Kindle format. Just over half also offer other eBook formats and a whopping 71% have also published in paperback, although this may have been for earlier books – over half of the respondents published their first books over a year ago and 5 of them over 4 years ago. I then presented a number of marketing channels which are open to authors and asked them to rate the relative effectiveness of each. Now, one thing that’s important to note here...

Secrets of Self-publishing and eBook promotion – Part 1

This is the first of a 2-part article. In part 2 I will share the results of my Author Survey, posted 2 weeks ago. So, for many months if not years, you pour your heart and soul into a book, edit it to the point where you feel you have a winner, and then what? The Old Way. Unless you have connections in the publishing industry, you soon realise that finding a publisher willing even to look at the first page is about as likely as winning the Euro-millions lottery. So you borrow or purchase a recent copy of the Writers & Artists Yearbook and begin the laborious process of targeting literary agents. Having exhausted the relatively small fraction of these modern enough to accept email submissions, you reluctantly move on to the laggards. From these you try to select those representing authors of a similar genre to yourself and begin posting off printed samples (with strict adherence to each one’s specific submission guidelines). And then you wait… And you wait… And then, assuming you enclosed a stamped addressed envelope, you receive back the beautiful, pristine, unread pages of your manuscript with a small post-it note onto which the words, “No thanks!” or some other equally disheartening message has been hastily scribbled. After a dozen or so such responses, I imagine this is where many aspiring authors, until quite recently, would have given up. Of course there has always been the option of vanity publishing and no shortage of companies willing to relieve desperate writers...

Free will, the writer’s muse and other balls.

The origin of artistic inspiration has been a subject of fascination since the ancient Greeks, who wrote of nine goddesses or muses without whose benevolent gifts of insight, aspiring writers and other artists would presumably have been left creatively bereft. Before I started writing my first novel, I’d heard authors talk of how their books sometimes seemed to write themselves, but I never really believed it. Instead I assumed it was just a false show of modesty following the laboured completion of what must actually have been a far more complex and arduous process of creation. This made the experience, when it first occurred to me, all the more remarkable. A decade ago, with little more than a vague idea having rattled around in my head for the best part of twenty years, I finally summoned the temerity to put fingers to keyboard and, in the space of a week or so, had tapped out what would eventually become the first three chapters of Connected. Having been taught at school that this was entirely the wrong approach to serious writing, I then put this aside, and tried to draw up a proper plan for the rest of the story. For the next seven years, as my day job in IT marketing consumed most of my time and energy, another chapter and half sputtered from the tips of my weary digits before finally, I realised that the only way this book would get written would be for me to sit down, start writing and once again let...

Author Survey

  Since publishing my first book in June this year, I’m interested to learn how my fellow authors are finding this strange world of indie publishing into which I am now thrust. If you’re an author and as curious as I on this topic, please answer the 8 brief questions found in this anonymous on-line survey. It takes less than a minute. If you’re just interested to see the results, subscribe to my blog, Facebook, or twitter feed using the buttons on the right-hand side of this page, or check back here in a week or so. Thanks for visiting!

The Empathy Continuum – part 2

In the first part of this essay, I briefly introduced the idea of an empathy continuum, before diving straight into what might have seemed like a totally unrelated topic – our stress response system. In this post, I will try to explain how these two things are crucially connected and what this means for us all. So what is Empathy? The word “empathy” is thrown about a lot these days, often in vague and imprecise ways to cover to a variety of things from sympathy to compassion, but true empathy refers specifically to a natural capacity found in humans and known to exist in other mammals, allowing us to literally feel for others. To empathise is to place oneself in another’s shoes, see things from the other’s perspective, and to some extent, to actually feel what that person is feeling. Before we look at how this works, perhaps the first question should be why. Why did humans evolve empathy? When our ancestors first parted company with our ape cousins and stepped onto the African plains some six to seven million years ago, they had many disadvantages compared to both predators and prey, most of which were faster, stronger and better adapted to life on the savannah. To survive in this harsh new environment would have required, above all else, cooperation. Although there is still debate over exactly how and why our brain capacity increased so dramatically between then and now, most theories involve social cohesion, whereby through a combination of language, culture and shared responsibility,...