Life, Interrupted

Of course it's going in the book.

No, I didn't rent it. The ghost knew I knew he was there, and he didn't want company.

Lots of interesting stuff over at the Book View Café​ blog today. Madeleine Robins​ writes about balancing acts in writing. You're writing a period mystery...and some of the attitudes and actions of the people of the past are abhorrent to well-meaning, thoughtful people today. You don't want to erase the sufferings of people who were abused and marginalized, yet you don't want to stick 21st century mores and words into your characters. What is the line there? How do you balance the concerns?

I think about these things all the time, too. I'm writing what evolved into a period fantasy. I can change things in my magical world, but how much? Will there be a civil war? There will be a war of 1812, because too many people had something to gain from it. But I am not sure Andrew Jackson will get to be a hero in a battle that should never have been fought. I plan to take William Henry Harrison's "victory" away from him, because if I can save Tecumseh I will.

Mad just had the Romani show up in her story. And her balancing act just became more intricate.

So--which way do you go? Should history ring true? Do you deny your characters the right to grow and change, see The Other as people, too--even if some of the things they say and do (at least at first) are not heroic? How do you handle this?

As a child, I loved the dictionary. They didn't teach phonics in my school--it was a different period of teaching experimentation--so I was constantly trying to figure out from the dictionary how words were pronounced. And I kept seeing Proto-Indo-European as a root language.

Who were they? How did it sound? Did anyone still speak it?

There are anthropologists still trying to answer those questions. Here's the latest stab at the language.

...and it may be evolutionary.

Charles Darwin hypothesized that musical skill led to better mating options not just for birds but for humans, as well. “Musical notes and rhythm,” he wrote in The Descent of Man, “were first acquired by the male and female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.”

For over 140 years, research had not been able to verify Darwin’s theory, that is until a recent study conducted by Benjamin D. Charlton confirmed that indeed, “music is a product of sexual selection through mate choice.”

But the findings come with some nuance.

Charlton and his fellow researchers at the University of Sussex found that women in the middle of their menstrual cycle—at their most fertile—tended to believe men with strong musical abilities carried better genes than men without that skill and thus preferred them as mates. For the study, 1,465 women listened to four different piano compositions of increasing levels of complexity and were asked which composer they desired most.

Women who were not at a point of peak conception were generally ambivalent, not preferring a single composer over another, but those who were on days six through 14 of their respective reproductive cycles overwhelmingly preferred the composer of the most complex song.

There you are, researching when humans figured out that iron was in our blood, and you stumble onto genetic questions about why one population has more occurrences of a genetic condition than others. And you lose the time it takes to read the article. If you're inspired to keep going, oh, the time lost!

There must be an explanation for why hereditary hemochromatosis is 30 times less common in blacks and 11,000 times less common in Asians than in non-Hispanic whites. A founder effect, the relatively young age of the mutation, and other unidentified demographic factors may explain this discrepancy. And perhaps, the allele may have discouraged iron deficiency or disease at a particularly vulnerable time in northern Europe.

The why is so important, as it raises fundamental questions regarding our own future.

Did you know where real Dragon's Blood comes from? It's not just something from a fantasy tale.

This may be the most alien landscape ever that is marginally hospitable and does not require an O2 tank. Socotra Island is worth a look. Liz Williams found this--many thanks!

You know how I'm always talking about how there's a 75% decrease in your chance of Alzheimer's if you're a ballroom dancer? How ballroom dancing, bridge, chess, and puzzles are your best defense?

Add reading to that. A 32% less chance for lifelong readers.

Damn, we should be healthier....

And then there's the glow-in-the-dark tree gang. I was swamped in the spring, so I missed all the Kickstarters including this one, but we're talking almost a half-million dollars to develop trees that could replace street lights, giving us a soft, ambient glow to a nighttime street. It's an exciting idea, although I am a little taken aback at how easy he predicts this has become.

As he says, the scary stuff will eventually arise. For now, we get glowing cats and small trees!

In the meantime? Read a book.

I just tossed in that last--the article doesn't explain anything about the languages. But this little article over at Listverse does what all good inspiration should do--it takes you somewhere else.

Thanks to the Rosetta Stone, we can read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. We have no Rosetta Stone for the neolithic age--we can't read the symbols we have found. A vast swath of ancient people across the world are silent. We don't know who they were, what they valued, or what they would want us to know about the times they lived through.

If we're lucky, we have artifacts. If we're really lucky, they haven't been hopelessly jumbled into a discordant song no one can sing. We can examine things where we find them, and try to understand the story they tell us.

Here are ten places to ponder. Some are stone circles, some henges, some settlements...some may be tombs. They may have been temples or calendars or even the annual social hall. A few of these places still see visitors--curious tourists, working scientists, spiritual pagans, and maybe even the Fair Folk.

The builders weren't aliens, for heaven's sake--they had our brains. Some were visionaries, some scientists (in that they looked at what was actually there, and worked their way through the evidence.) Skara Brae had drainage and toilets! They measured the skies in ways we lost, taking thousands of years to return to that knowledge. They impacted their world.

No, it's not a pyramid. They worked with the materials they had. But we should respect their solutions, and know that we are an incredible species, in our thinking and our doing.

Take a look.

This article is incredibly exciting in so many ways. I will not begin to attempt to deconstruct and explain all the ramifications of retroviruses, diseases like MS, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, a virus that may have been attached to our DNA for sixty million years, and something like influenza triggering a cascade in an infant body, manifesting in a ghastly disease decades later.

I leave those aspects to you, reading the article. I want to address this:

Even more puzzling is the so-called birth-month effect: People born in winter or early spring are more likely than others to become schizophrenic later in life. It is a small increase, just 5 to 8 percent, but it is remarkably consistent, showing up in 250 studies. That same pattern is seen in people with bipolar disorder or multiple sclerosis.

“The birth-month effect is one of the most clearly established facts about schizophrenia,” says Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
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And this is why, despite my fascination with science of all kinds, I am a storyteller.