It’s the start of a summer and thus a start of a county fair season. This year felt different — the carny people were gone!
Background Knowledge, Ethnographic & User Data, My Books, Newsletter
State Fair Season
by Olga Werby •
My Books
Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Diagnostic Errors, Ethnographic & User Data, Mental Model Traps, My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
Expanding Definitions
by Olga Werby •
I have taught children, teens, and adults for many years. And I am noticing a trend — as a people, in the name of a more just society, we try to make our definitions ever more expansive. Sounds like great thing, right? But consider this. Decades ago, children diagnosed as autistic were few and their symptoms had to be severe to get this diagnosis. Now we have an autistic spectrum. More and more children and adults get placed on this spectrum. We seem to want to catch as many autistic individuals as we can by expanding the definition of what it means to be on the spectrum. We are being ever more expansive in the name of justice. But shouldn’t we be expanding the spectrum the other way instead? Perhaps it is better to be more inclusive in our definition of what it means to be on the “normal” spectrum. We are all different. We all have a grab bag or positives and negatives. And that’s a good thing. It takes all of our differences to create a great society. So we can treat ADHD kids as different from “normals” or we can think of them as us. Dividing children…
book promotion, My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
Emotion Field
by Olga Werby •
I saw a question on Twitter: Can readers become emotionally invested in a story if the main character is interesting but not sympathetic? My answer was that I need characters that I can care about. A superhero that has all kinds of cool and interesting superpowers is ultimately boring unless there is an emotional narrative that I can care about. I think the most important answer an author can give to their readers in the first few pages (or paragraphs) of their book is why they should care enough to read more? And that answer is always why the reader should care. I find that caring about sympathetic characters is easier than for villains, no matter how interesting those villains are. I can go for a story about a young kid who grows up to be a villain because the world forces him to become one — he wasn’t born evil, he was made to be. Villany was forced on an innocent soul in order to survive. But this just means that I’m reading a tragedy. There are lots of different types of stories. It’s never about the genre. Science fiction is just fantasy wrapped up in fancy techtalk. Romance…
My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
Evolution of Empathy
by Olga Werby •
It’s Valentine’s Week and I thought to remark on empathy. First, a bit of a definition. Sympathy is when you relate to the emotional states of others. Usually, we sympathize with someone’s pain and suffering. It’s common to express (or invoke) our sympathies when someone is in a hospital or when a person we know had died. There is a whole industry dedicated to sympathy expression — flowers, cards, food, etc. Empathy is different. We might express sympathy for someone accidentally hitting their hand with a hammer, it’s a polite thing to do. But when we empathize with that person, we feel their pain. That’s a whole order of difference in our perception and understanding of the emotional and physical conditions of others. We can express sympathy without feeling any empathy. Thus sympathy is a social, cultural construct. Empathy is a true internal emotion. Empathy is something that takes time to develop. Human babies are not born empathizers. But those who learn empathy, somehow, truly become human then. For the longest time, scientists didn’t believe that any other animals other than humans were capable of feeling empathy. Of course, anyone who has ever had a pet or observed animal behavior…
Background Knowledge, Background Knowledge Errors, book promotion, My Books, Pipsqueak Articles
Holiday Thread
by Olga Werby •
I follow an Iranian woman on Instagram that demonstrates in short videos her embroidery techniques. She does beautiful work — intricate flowers, leaves, curlycues, snowflakes. Her pigment choices are amazing and she does very detailed art in that multicolored thread. I know how to sew and I had a vague idea of how to embroider — I mean I can pull off a flower or a leaf if I had to. But my “knowledge” of embroidery comes from extrapolating what I know about sewing and guessing at the rest. But this woman is actually a master of this skill. And by watching her for a few seconds here and there doing her art, I realized that thread conservation is an important part of embroidery! Not only is beautiful thread expensive (e.g. gold thread), but the bulk that would be added to the material by doing the design on both sides would be awkward. Double-sided embroidery would mess up the delicate expression of the final piece of art. So there is more to this skill than I realized at first blush. Many crafts require expertise that is hidden from casual view. In many cases, the achievement of effortless grace is anything…
Book, book promotion, My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
2021 Self-Published Science Fiction Competition
by Olga Werby •
Writing is a very solitary activity. You sit alone for hours, lost in your own thoughts, hopefully putting some words down on a page. And at some point, if you are lucky, you will finish a story you set out to write or, more accurately, you will finish a story that came out as a surprise and not at all what you expected. So far, I have managed to do this repeatedly. And some of my stories went on to win competitions. So today I will write about one such competition — the very first Self-Published Fiction Competition! 300 books. 10 blogs (judges). It will take a full year to determine one supreme winner, but a few quarter-finalists have already been selected. Yours truly has made the list of quarter-finalists with Harvest. You can read more about books from my block of Book Blog of Judges at Tar Vol on. The SPSFC trophy is pretty cool, too… This is not the first time I have participated in such competitions. I entered God of Small Affairs into a similar competition but for fantasy, SPFBO. It earned a semi-finalist status: So here’s hoping for another success! In the meantime, writers that are…
My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
Mothers on The Hero’s Journey
by Olga Werby •
A Common YA Fantasy Novel Plots: A bunch of kids lead perfectly ordinary lives. One day they learn that the universe is full of magic (or strange science) and if they don’t put down their homework right now (like right now!), everyone they know and love will suffer horribly (or the universe will come to an end, whichever happens first). Hard as they argue, their parents just won’t let them go out after bedtime to save the universe. So after endless texts back and forth, the friends decide to just finish their homework and go to bed. It’s a school night, after all. But in the middle of the night, they wake up and realize that it is up to them to save the world. They sneak out of their house, leave their parents and homework behind, and go out into the night. While wandering at strange times and in unfamiliar places, the friends meet a stranger that tells them he knows the way. The friends, sleep-deprived as they are, believe him and follow him to destinations unknown. The stranger makes the friends do more and more dangerous and crazy stuff. And these young adults do it just because the…