H.M. Clarke's Blog, page 18
September 13, 2014
Saturday Einstein Quote!
Don’t forget to sign up for Exploration Rights in my Newsletter to get access to my Member’s Area, extra goodies, giveaways and contests!
First Name
September 11, 2014
Book Review – Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens
Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya
by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube
This book is chock full of site plans and photos, artifacts and loads of maps.
This is a highly informative work considering that most of Maya history comes from the Glyphs/writing left on buildings and monuments.
This book is a very good quick reference guide for those who do not want to wade through huge blocks of history text to get to the information you need. The volume is divided into sections separating the Maya into their city states and showing their impact on the world around them (as well as the impact on them from outsiders).
The Maya are a precise and warlike people who, it seems, overstretched their natural resources which then lead to their city states to eventual ruin and abandonment.
And now the Maya people today (who have a strong oral tradition) are being taught to read the writing of their ancestors by the Archaeologists who study the ancient Maya.
Writing and language are so much a part of a person’s cultural identity, that when you lose your connection with it, you lose a part of yourself.
-Hayley
Don’t forget to sign up for Exploration Rights in my Newsletter to get access to my Member’s Area, extra goodies, giveaways and contests!
First Name
September 6, 2014
Writer’s Block
This is what you do when you have writer’s block…..
You either spend a lot of time making an image about it, or looking for one about it.
Just go back and read my earlier article on procrastination...
I know what I have to write, its just getting down and doing it. So maybe its not really what you would term the traditional writer’s block. More procrastinating about sitting down to finish a piece. (Which is why I am writing this at the moment – so I don’t have to finish a scene 
).
And that, I suppose, is my cue to go back and finish writing it!
Catch you all next time
-Hayley
Don’t forget to sign up for Exploration Rights in my Newsletter to get access to my Member’s Area, extra goodies, giveaways and contests!
First Name
September 4, 2014
Winter’s Magic is here!
Book Blurb
Kaitlyn Winter is biting at the bit to become an active agent for the Restricted Practitioners Unit. And on her first day in the job she is thrown into a virtual s**t storm (to put it nicely).
First, she gets targeted for Assassination by The Sharda’s top assassin
Second, her Werewolf best friend decides that her being ‘Straight’ means she can’t protect herself and places her in protective custody
Third, the love of her life still won’t notice her existence and the Tempus Mage who’s set to keep an eye on her is infuriatingly attractive….
Winter’s Magic is now available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle here
hmmm – I might even do a video showing off how good my paperbacks actually are ‘in the flesh’ – I always put little added tweaks in them, that you can’t really put in an ebook …
Don’t forget to sign up for Exploration Rights in my Newsletter to get access to my Member’s Area, extra goodies, giveaways and contests!
First Name
September 2, 2014
10 things Every Serious Writer Has
I saw this and just had to put it up 
Don’t forget to sign up for Exploration Rights in my Newsletter to get access to my Member’s Area, extra goodies, giveaways and contests!
First Name
Writing Update – 2nd September
It has been storming and thundering here in Ohio, which means it has been hot, wet and humid. I HATE the humidity. At this time of year I do find it harder to write. The nice weather (when it not storming) calls out to be experienced and who can ignore that call for long?
Things here have been chuffing along quite nicely at the moment. Winter’s Magic:Act One is out on Thursday, the manuscript for The Dream Thief is coming along better than expected, and The Enclave has just received a five star review from Reader’s Favorite.
I have also been interviewed a few times since my last update. One of which I have linked below. I will link the others when they are posted.
I have been fairly sick the last week, along with the rest of the family, but I still managed to drag my bones out of bed to write and do the interviews. The humour in the interviews was tuned down a bit because of the illness, so perhaps that is a blessing of sorts.
My Novella for the Anthology is going well and hopefully we can start to talk about this project ‘properly’ in a few months’ time.
I leave you now with the link to one of my interviews – ‘til next time. Interview for Mary Harner – You can view it here
Cheers
-Hayley
Don’t forget to sign up for Exploration Rights in my Newsletter to get access to my Member’s Area, extra goodies, giveaways and contests!
First Name
August 29, 2014
Yawning Spreads Like a Plague in Wolves
Evidence of contagious yawning in chimps, dogs and now wolves suggests that the behavior is linked to a mammalian sense of empathy
By Helen Thompson
SMITHSONIAN.COM
AUGUST 27, 2014
Chimps do it, birds do it, even you and I do it. Once you see someone yawn, you are compelled to do the same. Now it seems that wolves can be added to the list of animals known to spread yawns like a contagion.
Among humans, even thinking about yawning can trigger the reflex, leading some to suspect that catching a yawn is linked to our ability to empathize with other humans. For instance, contagious yawning activates the same parts of the brain that govern empathy and social know-how. And some studies have shown that humans with more fine-tuned social skills are more likely to catch a yawn.
Similarly, chimpanzees, baboons and bonobos often yawn when they see other members of their species yawning. Chimps (Pan troglodytes) can catch yawns from humans, even virtual ones. At least in primates, contagious yawning seems to require an emotional connection and may function as a demonstration of empathy. Beyond primates, though, the trends are less clear-cut. One study found evidence of contagious yawning in birds but didn’t connect it to empathy. A 2008 study showed that dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) could catch yawns from humans, and another showed that dogs were more likely to catch the yawn of a familiar human rather than a stranger. But efforts to see if dogs catch yawns from each other and to replicate the results with humans have so far had no luck.
Now a study published today in PLOS ONE reports the first evidence of contagious yawning in wolves (Canis lupus lupus). “We showed that the wolves were able to yawn contagiously, and this is affected by the emotional bond between individuals, which suggests that familiarity and social bonds matter in these animals the same way as it does in humans,” says study co-author Teresa Romero, who studies animal behavior at the University of Tokyo.
The prevalence of contagious yawning in primates and other mammals could give us some clues to the evolution of empathy—that’s in part what makes the phenomenon so interesting and so controversial. If dogs can catch yawns from humans, did they pick up the behavior because of domestication, or does the trait run deeper into evolutionary history?
The Tokyo team took a stab at those questions by looking at contagious yawning in dog’s closest relatives, wolves. For 254 hours over five months, they observed twelve wolves (six males and six females) at the Tama Zoological Park in Tokyo. They kept tabs on the who, what, when, where, how many and how long of every yawn, then separated out data for yawns in relaxed settings, to minimize the influence of external stimuli.
Next, they statistically analyzed the data and looked for trends. They found that wolves were much more likely to yawn in response to another’s yawn rather than not, which suggests that contagious yawning is at play.
In image A, an individual (right) yawned during a resting period, and a few seconds later, image B shows the subject (on the left) yawned contagiously. (Teresa Romero)
Wolves were more likely to catch the yawn if they were friends with the yawner. Females were also quicker on the yawn uptake when watching the yawns of those around them—possibly because they’re more attuned to social cues, but with such a small group it’s hard to say for sure.
The results seem to add to the case for empathy as the primary function of contagious yawning. “We have the strongest responses to our family, then our friends, then acquaintances, and so on and so forth,” says Matt Campbell, a psychologist at California State University, Channel Islands. “That contagious yawning works along the same social dimension supports the idea that the mechanism that allows us to copy the smiles, frowns and fear of others also allows us to copy their yawns.”
Empathy likely originated as an ancestral trait in mammals, and that’s why it emerges in such disparate species as wolves and humans. “More and more research is supporting this idea that basic forms of empathy are very ancient, and they are present in a wide number of species, at least in mammals,” says Romero. Elephants, for example, comfort their upset friends. Even rats exhibit a basic helping behavior toward other friendly rodents.
Why does contagious yawning between members of the same species show up in wolves and not dogs? The difference probably comes down to study design, not biology. “Most likely, dogs also catch yawns from [other dogs], as now shown for wolves,” says Elaine Madsen, a cognitive zoologist at Lund University in Sweden. Further studies might reveal the extent to which human interaction has affected present-day dogs’ susceptibility to catching another species’ yawns, she says.
It’s impossible to say what true function contagious yawning serves in wolves, but the researchers argue that such behavior could cultivate social bonds. “If an individual is not in sync with its group, it risks being left behind. That is not good,” says Campbell. Just watching wolves yawn can’t definitively prove that empathy drove the behavior, but it’s certainly compelling evidence that wolves might feel for their fellow lupines.
- If you yawned while reading this, please tell me in the comments (hopefully you didn’t yawn out of bordom )
-HMC
Don’t forget to sign up for Exploration Rights in my Newsletter to get access to my Member’s Area, extra goodies, giveaways and contests!
August 27, 2014
My turn again with BlogRoll Tag! – On Publishing….
I was tagged by author Hiram Crespo who wrote the fascinating book ‘Tending the Epicurean Garden’, who asked me the following question:
What motivated you to write and then self publish your first book ‘The Kalarthri’?
All my life I have wanted to write books and stories. But I have never had the courage to actually pursue it. I had written a lot of stories and had a quite a few manuscripts under my belt – one of which was The Kalarthri. And then one day (well, a couple of days), I sat down and really thought about what I really wanted to do with it.
I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to be traditionally published or self-published and then thought about the pros and cons about what would happen to me if I did bring out my very own book. And here is what I came up with:
1) I don’t have to slave over my work until I have the next ‘War and Peace’. I am not writing to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am writing because I have these stories running around in my head that want to come out. Stories that I would like to read and have other people read. And they can’t do that if it has not been published.
2) I don’t have to write to a ‘word count’ because the industry says so. I wanted to be able to write my stories to the length they need to be and no more. I have heard some editors and agents tell their clients that manuscripts need to be ‘bulked out’. I did not want to do this.
3) What if people do not like it? Then people do not have to read it. Simple – I could not use this excuse anymore for not publishing.
4) The time is not right. But then I ended up thinking ‘The time is never right’ and if I kept on thinking that then nothing will ever happen and my stories would languish in their dusty box forever.
5) And this was the decider for me to publish – If I don’t do it now, then most probably I would never do it and I did not want to look back on my life and regret that I didn’t do this when I had the chance. I already have a small list of things that I regret not doing (and doing) in my life – I did not want to add to them.
So, to answer Hiram’s question on what motivated me to publish ‘The Kalarthri’… To be honest, it was the fear that when I am near the end of my life, that I look back and regret that I did not conquer my fear and publish.
And with this post ends this round of BlogRoll Tag….
I hope you’ve all had fun ‘playing tag’ and seeing what everyone had to say!
The link for seeing all of the collected Tags!
-HMC
Don’t forget to sign up for Exploration Rights in my Newsletter to get access to extra goodies, giveaways and contests!
August 21, 2014
And now…for something completely different!
August 20, 2014
Things to Read….My August Book Recommendations
