Sarah Kanning

Ray Hyman discusses how unconscious expectations can cause such allegedly psychic phenomena as dowsing, table tipping and table rapping, automatic “spirit” writing, and form the basis of some diagnostic methods in alternative medicine in this excellent article from Quackwatch: How People Are Fooled by Ideomotor Action.

For fictional applications of some of this information, I recommend Sarah Waters’ novel, Affinity, a sort of romantic suspense novel set in Victorian England; several aspects of Spiritualism are central to its plot.

Courtesy of XKCD: A Webcomic - Android Girlfriend.

As you were.

If you are really, truly, very bad at naming characters, and you write fantasy fiction, here at last is help: the Fantasy Name Generator.

I wish I could think of the author who did this, but I was reading about someone (whose writing I respect and whose invented names generally went well with her characters - that much I can remember) who looked around at her bookshelves and took random syllables from the names of the authors on the spines and mashed them together. (Maybe it was Laurie J. Marks of the Earth Logic series?)

If you know, Dear Reader, please aid my recollection. (And if you have any other wonderful tricks for naming characters, please share them!)

Quick link to a short list of bedtime storytelling tips from Lemony Snicket, author of some pretty fun juvie lit books. It’s funny, and may even have some relevance to story writing as well as storytelling. And he cites Raymond Chandler. What could be better?

My personal favorite tip is #2: “Name the villains after people who wronged you in high school.”

And how did I arrive at a web site dedicated to dispensing advice for parents? Ah, the web works in mysterious ways, doesn’t it?

Lemony Snicket’s Bedtime Storytelling Tips | Tips Kids Everywhere - DailyCandy.

Okay, so it turns out it was bad timing for me to read The Road by Cormac McCarthy last week, right before the World Health Organization (WHO) raised its pandemic alert from 3 to 4 (I think levels 5 and 6 are the official “holy crap” levels), AND two (mild) cases of swine flu turned up here in Kansas.

It could have been worse - I could have been re-reading The Standby Stephen King.

All this to say that I spent a good part of yesterday procrastinating on my writing by looking up food storage information and products on the web and internally debating the relative merits of single-burner, dual fuel camp stoves vs. butane or propane setups.

Can you tell I have a writing deadline looming on May 15?