How Not To Spam

If you live in the UK, you can buy my book 'Here Be Dragons' (and look inside it) here and if you're in the States, you can get it here.  Oh, and look inside it of course.

I have now succeeded in getting past the baggage which came with writing and publishing it.  My task now is in the area of publicity, and being able to distinguish between being too pushy and not being pushy enough.

I know people don't like spam, so I assiduously avoid being spammy.  The trouble is, however, that I don't understand why people hate spam and what they perceive to be it, and the two are connected.  When I see spam, my first reaction is not annoyance but puzzlement.  I wonder why people bother to send it because it seems futile.  I suspect it corresponds to r/K selection theory, although apparently that's outdated.

If you're an oyster, not only do you get free gender reassignment as part of your normal life span and a load of vegans arguing about whether it's okay to murder you, but also you get to produce literal clouds of gametes, either sperm or eggs.  Up to a hundred million eggs a year in fact, so it looks like the approach taken to reproduction by female oysters is more like that taken to reproduction by male humans than female ones, so the gender reassignment involved is not really very impressive at all.  When these eggs get fertilised and start to develop into oysters, they will mostly die or be eaten by fish and the like but a few will survive.  The advantage to the parent oyster is that they can get away with what we would think of as negligent parenting without it stopping them from having grandchildren, so the whole hideous business, from our perspective, continues.  This is known as an "r strategy".

As a human being, if my approach was to produce a hundred million babies and abandon them to the vagaries of fate so that most of them died but I had a few grandchildren would possibly get me arrested unless I happened to be a sperm donor or a dictator or something.  Also, if I happen to be the proud possessor of ovaries, the situation gets even more complicated because an unprecedently vast number of surrogate mothers would become necessary, or possibly a massive baby bottling plant or something, and - well, we're not meant to do that are we?  One reason why school is such a strange idea of course, but I've been into that before:

(Can't believe I said "are a fungi" on that video!)

Instead of all that, humans currently have what is known as a "K strategy" with reproduction.  We have a few children and spend loads of time and energy parenting them. We have that in common with other species, but it seems to be more common among mammals and birds than most other animals.  Even fish aren't keen on it.  It's interesting to speculate on what a K strategy with marketing would be, but I won't do that here.

This brings me back to spam.  Spam is an r strategy game.  Spammers emulate oysters by producing huge clouds of emails, almost all of which are ignored.  There is presumably the very occasional response, which keeps them going.  Since like almost everyone else, I don't respond to spam, I don't understand why anyone does and consequently the main thing I feel when I see spam is bafflement at two categories of people:  spammers and people who respond to spam.  I sometimes wonder if they're the same people because presumably they must think it works, so maybe it works on them.  Maybe there's a group of people who spend their time both sending and responding happily to spam and they're all one little cosy community.

One thing spam does not do to me, though, is irritate me.  Nor do I understand why anyone would find it irritating.  Even so, I am aware that many people are annoyed by it, and I presume the reason for that is that it feels to them like they're being used and not respected as human beings, which they're apparently not accustomed to feeling, possibly because they are mercifully distanced from the sheer indifference and uncaring nature of the world we live in.  It's probably true that spam is disrespectful, but disrespect is perfectly normal and not confined to email.

Since I don't know when that kind of behaviour annoys people, I try not to do it, in the same way as in the past I have tried not to stalk people.  When I have something I wish to push on people, I am stuck with the problem of not wanting to be pushy, in other words to use people, or to be perceived as such.  I also have a problem with splitting - I tend to try to simplify things by going to extremes.  I hope transitioning will help with this and I'm aware that I do it more when I'm stressed.

The result of all this is that I don't promote myself at all most of the time, and the fact that I happen to have a new book out might not be widely noticed.  This is not so much an r or K strategy of reproduction as a strategy for extinction.

Having said all this, apparently the whole idea of r/K selection theory has been replaced by the something called a life history paradigm, about which I know very little but am about to learn more.

So anyway, please buy my book!  Is that pushy?  I have no idea.

Hypergraphia

I think I've been here before.  If so, here I am again.

One of the big, influential things which has happened in my life is when a close family friend began to acquire and become fixated on what I am fond of referring to as "unpopular beliefs".  Most people would say she was suffering from paranoia.  For some reason unknown to me, we're not supposed to call it paranoia any more, but "delusional disorder", which to my ears sounds annoyingly non-specific.

Our friend was clearly suffering terribly.  She was constantly stressed, constantly afraid and there was also a tendency for her to return to a state where she would start believing things which most people would be sceptical of when she discontinued her medication.  When this happened, each time she was convinced it was true this time even though she was then convinced that previously she had been mistaken and that it was part of a mental illness.

We tried to get help for her but found that every group of people you might expect to be able to turn to considered it to be someone else's problem, and when we went to somebody else, they considered it to be somebody else's again, and so forth.

It was awful for her, totally unbearable, and it's horrible to think of how she must have lived in constant fear and stress.  I also feel a bit disloyal setting this down here because it was her own private hell, but circumstances mean I need to mention this situation and I think the people who knew about the situation will know who I'm talking about and will be thinking of her sympathetically as they read this.  I mean no disrespect to anyone.

Due to her being passed around between various professionals, all of whom claimed it was not their remit to help, it fell to us and her other friends to try to help given limited resources and experience (and a lot of prayer for some of us).  One of the things which emerged as helpful, and I can't remember how we stumbled upon this, was that none of us should say or do anything likely to confirm the beliefs which were frightening her.  This was difficult but I hope we managed it.  It would only make it worse for someone who was so afraid to have the people around her to agree with her, and the beliefs would become more entrenched.

Someone who is paranoid, if our friend is at all typical, has painted themselves into a mental corner through jumping to conclusions, but is crucially not hugely different from anyone else in the way they think.  What seems to have happened, at least with her, is that she became more attached to a feeling of certainty than one of happiness, and very attached, like the rest of us, to her views of how her life situation  was.  In fact, if she stopped believing what she believed, it would be very threatening because she would not then be taking steps to avoid the impending disaster and danger to herself and everyone she loved.  Given that situation, well, why the heck would you stop believing all those things?  If it's going to get you killed if you stop believing them, well, you're just going to carry on.

You may have noticed that I've now written over five hundred words without making my main point, and that these five hundred-odd words could easily have been winnowed down to a hundred or so without losing anything except verbosity.  These aren't words which go together well.  More of that in a bit, probably a very long bit.

That attachment is the problem.  Very often in mental illness, and I am open to various interpretations of abnormal behaviour but let's just call it that for the sake of much needed brevity, the problem is the "overvalued idea".  In other words, one could be said to have become addicted to an idea.  Doing something to confirm a paranoid's belief is like handing an alcoholic a glass of vodka.  It's similar in some ways to an addiction.

Some addiction is of course self-medication, but it would be better to remove the cause of the problem which has led the person to self-medicate in that way than simply to give them a syringe, ultimately.  That said, it is very hard to be cruel enough to be kind and they will often draw you into their world and do anything to get their fix.  My only substance abuse is caffeine though, so I don't know this from the inside so much as some other people might.  I don't generally feel driven to make my life more bearable with recreational substances because I'm not particularly keen on it being bearable in the first place.

To get back to the fact that I'm going on and on, this is what I do and it's a problem.  Some people feel the need to check whether they've turned the gas off or locked the door over and over again, and that happens with me and some of my patients - I feel the need to reassure myself they haven't got a brain tumour or something when all they have is a tension headache, but usually I manage to restrain myself from intruding too much.  Obsession of that nature isn't that big a problem for me.

No, my problem is hypergraphia.  I write too much and can't stop myself from writing, or rather, I find it difficult to stop myself from writing, in the same way as some people find it difficult to stop picking their noses, pulling hairs out or biting their nails.  It's a sign of a temporal lobe lesion along with some other things I do, the most important of which went away when I did the thing which is the subject of the other blog, which in a way is unfortunate.

A lot of hypergraphia looks something like this:

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Mine has occasionally looked exactly like that, but I was only about seventeen at the time and nowadays it looks more like coherent sentences.  I say, it "looks like" coherent sentences.  In fact it isn't at all.  Like many other people nowadays, I'm afflicted by the ability to say nothing very much in thousands of words.

NaNoWriMo is an annual project where you write a 50 000 word first draft of a novella in a month.  It would be really nice if it was hard for me to do this, but what would be hard for me to do would be NaNONoWriMo - to reduce my output by fifty thousand words in a month.  There unfortunately doesn't seem to be anything out there like that.  Not a problem for many people, but for me it's a major one.

It may be very unclear to people why I hate the fact that I write a lot.  The reason would be clearer to you when you realise that I frequently find it hard to scrape together enough money to buy a tin of baked beans to feed our son because instead of trying to find a job I've been writing all day, or not bothering to listen to Sarada because I can't stop myself from incessant scribbling about Sumerian cuneiform or some such irrelevant nonsense.

This is why when 'Here Be Dragons' arrived in the post a couple of days ago I reacted with such despair.  This is not a triumph.  It's three hundred and fifty pages of stuff which represents my failure to engage with real life, provide for my family or prevent us all from being chucked out on the streets.  For those of you who have congratulated me on its completion, I don't want to appear ungrateful, but I could be working in a pizza place or stacking shelves by now, i.e. earning enough money to prevent starvation and homelessness for the three of us, if I'd been able to tear myself free of this compulsion for long enough to do something worthwhile with my time instead.  What you don't seem to appreciate is that you are feeding this, and that's one reason I can't feed my family.

It was very difficult to  sit there with my psychotic friend and know what to say which wouldn't confirm her beliefs and I probably didn't manage all the time, but some of the time I hope I did manage to minimise the damage I was doing to her mental well-being.  Yes, it was hard, a lot of the time it didn't feel like I was helping to do that, and it's difficult to stand firm in this kind of situation, just as it would be to resist the pleadings, and even more so the rationalisations, of an addict, but it was what I owed her.

Therefore, whereas you may think you would be helping me earn an honest crust by buying the book, you would in fact be doing the opposite.  We're really close to disaster now, and we need people to stop providing the smack or we're going to be in deep doodoo.  I understand you're well-intentioned, but for God's sake please just stop.  It isn't helping anyone.  Do not buy my book.  It's a manifestation of serious mental illness and that mustn't be fed.

OK?

Here Be Dragons Actually Here

I feel like I've gone back in time:

Right, this is an unboxing video.  I'll just stick the blurb in from the vid:


Have you ever wondered how dragons fly and breathe fire, what life is like in Atlantis or who designed aliens? Answers to all these questions and many more can be found in this book, which seeks to help you learn real-world science through mythical animals and urban legends. Readers are invited to add their own illustrations to the ones already present.

Order it here.

The idea behind it is considerably different from how it started out.  The initial aim was to produce a book with home edded children about mythical beasts which enabled us all to learn through the process, in a multi-disciplinary way.  For instance, as well as the angles of mythology and science there's history, geography and drawing, and the process of publishing a book and making it look good.

It didn't quite go according to plan because it was unusual for children to turn up to the sessions on a regular basis and so I ended up doing almost all of it on my own, which was fine because of my control-freakery.  It also meant that since my time as a home edding parent was coming to an end, I was able to channel my energy into something else which was worthwhile.

However, I was also concerned at motivation and bad energy, so I set myself a deadline of 30th November 2012, after which I would no longer be adding to it and I would just shelve the project.  I also wanted people to illustrate and proofread it, in return for which they would receive free copies of the book.  I couldn't afford to pay anyone of course, since that would involve the assumption that the book would be bought.  Anyway, this didn't happen for some reason, so instead of including lots of illustrations I decided merely to include a few and a lot of places where people could add their own.  Since it was a home ed-oriented book aimed at children, this seemed to make sense to me.

It came unstuck when I missed the deadline.  I decided that in order to motivate myself to finish other projects, I would have to make missing it devastating, so I resolved not to publish when that happened.  It was like the nuclear option which would persuade me to get on with things.

A couple of years passed, during which the catastrophe ensued.  Then, a few weeks ago I realised my NaNoWriMo freebie book publishing thing for my novella 'Unspeakable' was about to run out, so I joined Create Space to submit it there, only to find that the code they offered for a free book was invalid, so that remains unpublished.  By then, I'd chugged through the IRS thing - they expect you to pay tax in the US on books you publish there, which had previously put me off - so I thought I might as well submit it too.

So here it is:

...and this is me "reading" it:

Four years is a long time in home ed due to childhood being so short, so I'm not sure who's still involved who was at the time, but if they are, they might be gratified to know it came to fruition in the end, even if nobody ends up buying it.  It was worthwhile doing it in itself, but then what isn't?