WORK? BUT IT'S CHRISTMAS!

 

I love Christmas, but even I think this is too much!

I’m working on a new novel. In fact, I’m working on an entirely new series, but you’d never know it by my output here in December. As the days count down to Christmas and New Year’s, I can’t find the focus to devote to building my fictional world or molding my fictional characters, putting words in people’s mouths or setting the scenes they’re in. I might as well be nine years old again, waiting for Santa to come down the chimney.

I’m a bit of a Christmas freak, you see. Things weren’t always great when I was growing up; I had a few really rough holiday seasons. There are two ways to react to that once you’re grown: turn into Scrooge and reject Christmas or decide, now that Christmas is under your control, the holidays will be the best they can be.  I took the second road.

Every year, I go all in on the decorations and the cheesy movies and the music and the sentiment. I’m trying to pull back a bit on the presents—at this age, my husband and I have everything we need, after all, and my kids just need money—but Santa and her elves do get creative with what goes in the stockings. That can include nice little goodies as well as gag gifts to make Christmas morning fun.

We’ll be traveling to see family just before the holidays, too, with a long road trip to see both daughters and the grandkids. My youngest daughter was born on the Winter Solstice, so that’s been an automatic pre-Christmas party every year since. Then we’ll have guests here at home over Christmas and New Year’s.

With all that going on, there’s not a chance in the North Pole I’ll be able to concentrate on work. I’m not the dedicated author that, say, Stephen King is, writing eight hours a day every day of the year except his birthday and the Fourth of July. But then, I’ve always believed he’s able to do that because he has wife Tabitha keeping the emotional and housekeeping home fires burning for him. He probably just pops out of his office for the Christmas dinner and presents she’s arranged, then goes happily back to work. Can’t be that way for those of us women who make the home magic happen.

But, you know, I’m not unhappy or resentful about my December hiatus. I don’t feel too guilty about slacking off during this time of joy and peace to the world. Our minds should be on something else besides the next step on the career ladder. The long, cold days of January will be upon us soon enough. Plenty of time to work then.

Cheers and Happy Holidays,

Donna

 

 

SEARCHING FOR THE OPTIMAL WORD

As authors, we all know by now how to work the “search engine optimization” game. That is, we’ve learned how to ensure that when someone searches for us or our books on Google (or some other Internet search engine), they find our websites and titles first, and not some random schmoe with a similar sounding name or domain. As I explained in a recent post, keywords work the same way to direct searches for our books on Amazon. Assign the right keywords to your titles and readers find your books a lot faster.

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) have discovered in a new study that our minds search for words in a way that is very similar to SEO, giving preference to words with similar meanings to create a kind of linguistic network. Some words are easier to remember because they are semantically linked, leading to areas of high traffic in the network, while others are harder to remember because they have fewer meaningful links, leaving them on the “outskirts.” It’s as if some words show up first in the Google search and others show up on page five—or 100.

The right words are easy to remember--apparently.

"We found that some words are much more memorable than others. Our results support the idea that our memories are wired into neural networks and that our brains search for these memories, just the way search engines track down information on the internet," said Weizhen (Zane) Xie, Ph.D., a cognitive psychologist and post-doctoral fellow at NINDS, who led the study published in Nature Human Behaviour. "We hope that these results can be used as a roadmap to evaluate the health of a person's memory and brain."

The study focused on common words like “pig,” “tank,” and “door,” which turned out to be much more memorable than other common words like “cat,” “street” and “stair.” The researchers used brain wave recordings, memory tests and surveys of billions of words from a variety of sources for their work, the idea for which arose out of small study of epilepsy patients with intractable seizures. In that study, a team of scientists led by Dr. Kareem Zaghloul at NINDS used a simple test for recalling pairs of words to observe how neural circuits in the brain record and replay memories. They saw that some of the 300 pairs of words they used were easier for their subjects to recall than others.

At first, the team dismissed the results. Yet when researchers tried again with the same words in different pairs, they discovered the same words gave their subjects trouble no matter how they were paired. The scientists remained skeptical, hypothesizing that differences in the subjects’ backgrounds might yield a different “relationship” to the words, giving them more or less “weight.”

But a larger study of 2623 healthy volunteers on an online crowdsourcing site yielded similar results, proving that the small, epilepsy study was no fluke.  

Then in a moment of serendipity at a Christmas party, Xie met Wilma Bainbridge, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Chicago, who, at the time was working as a post-doctoral fellow at the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Bainbridge had written a paper on the theory that some faces are inherently more memorable than others.  

"Our exciting finding is that there are some images of people or places that are inherently memorable for all people, even though we have each seen different things in our lives," said Bainbridge. "And if image memorability is so powerful, this means we can know in advance what people are likely to remember or forget."

Even though Bainbridge’s theory—the Search for Associative Memory model—had only been applied to images, Xie thought it could be applied to the work he and Zaghloul had been doing with words. “We thought one way to understand the results of the word pair tests was to apply network theories for how the brain remembers past experiences," said Xie. “In this case, memories of the words we used look like internet or airport terminal maps, with the more memorable words appearing as big, highly trafficked spots connected to smaller spots representing the less memorable words. The key to fully understanding this was to figure out what connects the words."

The researchers had to write a new computer model to do this, and, in doing so, found some of their simplest explanations for why certain words were more memorable didn’t account for their results. It wasn’t the number of times the words appeared in sentences that made them memorable, for example, or the “concreteness” of their definitions. It was, in fact, the semantic links—that is, the meaningful connections—attributed to the words that made them more memorable. (Though—to pause for an editorial comment here—how “pig” could have more semantic impact than “cat” is a mystery to me.) The more semantic links, the heavier the network “traffic” through the word in the brain.

To the scientists this is vital to the understanding of how the brain works and can lead to better medical intervention in the future. For me as a writer, though, not only am I picking up all kinds of plot bunnies for my telepathic Thrane aliens, but I’m also working overtime to figure out which words might have the best neural connections for my next best-selling title. Without somehow resorting to the use of “pig.”

Cheers, Donna

*Information for this post provided from: "Why some words may be more memorable than others," NIH/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, as reported in Science Daily.com, June 29, 2020. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200629120204.htm

LOST IN SPACE? GET A BIBLE!

Laurie’s post about swearing in SFR this week made me think about the alien vocabulary my characters have been accumulating in the four books (and one short story) of the Interstellar Rescue series universe. There’s the swearing, of course, but I’ve developed a few alien terms for creatures that don’t exist on Earth, for example, and for religious, political or philosophical concepts, too.

The IR universe is a pretty full one after nearly a decade of writing, so there are planets (complete with cities and topographical features of note) and sectors of space and jump nodes that take you here and there. There are historical events, like famous skirmishes between the Rescue teams and the bad-guy aliens, or the discovery of the jump node transportation system (and the destruction of the home world of the alien species that discovered it). Each of my characters has a backstory, too, of course, that fits into the history of the universe. 

The series bible: not divinely inspired, just organized!

How to keep all of this information straight? Well, it’s pretty clear I should have graduated long before now from my “system” of scribbled notes and sketches with computerized notes for each book. I need a genuine series bible. Only lack of time and pure laziness/terror has prevented me from organizing all the material I work with in creating my IR universe into a coherent reference that both readers and the author can depend on.

What would I include in my series bible? In no particular order:

--A glossary of terms. This would be both of alien words and any pseudo-scientific terms I’ve invented, such as “mindwipe,” the term I use to describe what the Grays do to their captives to erase their emotions and memories of Earth.

--A list of places. Planets, space stations, significant jump nodes, cities/towns, colonies, topographical sites of note, such as the Sea of IzRa, to which characters might refer.

--A rough map of the “galaxy.” A number of jump nodes are mentioned in the series, as well as their relative distance from place to place in ship-days. The map would give readers a way to visualize where the nodes and places are in relation to each other. This would in no way be a real map of the galaxy, just a look at where things are relatively.

--A list of major characters. This wouldn’t be exhaustive and would only give the briefest details about the character—in which book they first appeared, planet of origin, relation to others, etc.

--A list of species. A description of the characteristics of each sentient alien species that appears in the series. Descriptions of creatures like the psoro (a Barelian “buffalo”) or the targa (a Thrane wildcat) will be found under the glossary, not here.

I’m sure there are other pieces of information that should be included. As I’m assembling my bible, they’ll make themselves known. I do know this is one of those tasks that I’ve put off too long. No doubt there will come a day when one of my readers will notice I’ve put a planet where it doesn’t belong. Before that happens, I’d better lay it all out in Scripture!

Cheers, Donna