Goldsinger
I know what I'm going to be spending my money on this christmas - a gold tooth. That is, some repair work on two molars and a gold cap to hold one together, which is one third the price of a natural colour cap, and much cooler.
Two weeks ago I subscribed to an email newsletter called Big Fat Lies. The blurb promised me that it would explode the commonest myths about exercise, fat burning, diet and such. Well, after 7 editions, these are the astounding revelations so far:
* You don't need supplement pills to lose fat
* You don't need to starve yourself to get thin
* Magazine articles are not reliable
* Protein shakes don't burn fat
* "Thermogenic" pills don't work
* There's no shortcut to exercising off fat stores
* "Bad genetics" is a myth
Well...duh!
Maybe I should set up a competing newsletter, informing subscribers of similar breakthroughs:
* Water is good
* Food which is digested slowly (fiberous vegetable, pulses) makes you feel full for longer
* Fruits are better than ice cream if you want something sweet
* We all backslide sometimes, and guilt tripping is unhelpful
* Magic doesn't work
I could get rich by writing a waffly book describing the blindingly obvious, misusing scientific jargon to make it seem like a revelation. Or maybe someone's already had that idea.
There was also a "special article" from BFL called "Can You Think Yourself Thin?". It's vague and rambling, but the central thesis is that the brain is exactly like a computer, and therefore you can program your subconscious mind with new habits and goals using affirmations and visualisation. Oh, and this has all been proven scientifically.
No serious thinker has believed that the brain is simply a computer since about 1950, the conclusion that the subconscious can be programmed wouldn't follow logically even if it were true, and the few scientific tests done on positive thinking show it has no effect whatsoever. Pessimism sometimes creates failure, but optimism never creates success.
However, stripped of all the pseudoscience and obscurantism, the article does contain one truth: it takes roughly 21-30 days to break old habits and form new ones, and this is a very difficult process. But I don't need a fitness guru to tell me that.
I finally got around to trying out the Write Ambition software. It basically gives you a series of open-ended questions, and boxes to write your notes in answer.
Unde the heading of "Theme" there are questions like "What moves me about the themes of my writing project?", "What style is my writing?" and "What would happen if...?"
Under "Character" there's "How relavent is [character] to my story?", "What is [character]'s secret?" and "How could [character]'s goals be thwarted?" amongst others.
If I were writing character driven drama, I'd probably find it quite useful. As it is, I find Windows Notepad more helpful for sketching out ideas for a sci-fi murder mystery.
Science Fiction and Murder Mystery - my two choices of fiction reading. I'm sure that says something.
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Murder mystery and science fiction seem to throw up an idea of fantasy. But do you have any sense of realism when reading/writing these genres?
ReplyDeleteWell, I think science fiction does one of two things. It can either take the world we know, change some aspect of it, and see what effects the change has. Or it can project the world we know onto an alien society or a future time, using the future as a way to examine the present.
ReplyDeleteAs an example of the first type of sci-fi, there's HG Wells' "The Time Machine". How would the invention of time travel affect the lives and attitudes of the victorian middle classes? They might travel into the distant future or past, and try to continue living as before in an environment that doesn't suit that lifestyle.
They would gain knowledge of the future, which has "gone wrong" from their perspective, because it doesn't resemble a more advanced version of their own society. So, they'd try to "corrrect" it.
As an example of the second type, there's "Star Trek". What happens if you take a military ship, with a strict hierarchy of people living together for years at a time, patrolling the borders of a peaceful but powerful empire...and transplant the whole scenario into space?
The author may believe that distinctions of class are no longer relavent in the time they're writing, but racial conflicts are a serious concern. So class differences are smoothed out - though imperfectly, because there are still redshirts on the ship - and race riots in the writer's world get transformed into warring alien planets in their fiction.
So in the first type, the world is mostly "realistic", but changed in some way that isn't. In the second, reality (as the author concieves it) is exaggerated, projected onto a larger canvass, but retaining the same basic structure.
As regards Murder Mysteries, at heart they're just puzzles - with a storyline added, partly to make the puzzle more diverting, and partly as a way to both introduce and hide the clues needed to solve it.
In the last decade or so, the novelistic aspects of Murder Mysteries have become more fashionable, so we're seeing novels that examine the societal and emotional effects of a murder, as well as setting the puzzle of whodunnit.
So, does this stuff feel unreal when I read it? I suppose it does, and that's why I like it. The stuff of conventional novels - people, their confused emotions and turbulent social interactions has never been particularly interesting to me. I reckon I know broadly how people work, psychologically and socially, but it's not something I want to take part in.