AN EMOTIVE WRITER

Every writer worries about being liked. And as a writer I confess to this psychological problem. Nobody wants to be hated, do they? But perhaps they should. Perhaps writers should forget about sentiment and aim for an audience that would hate them.
This seems a ridiculous proposition, but think about it a moment. The job of a writer is to entertain and inform. But it is also to create controversy. After all, if you’re not noticed no one will read you and you can neither entertain nor inform.
There is a mantra that all publicity is good publicity, and this is very true. There is nothing worse than no publicity at all, for you have not reached an audience, and this is usually because you have not aroused emotion.
This is the key to good writing. There is nothing worse than not causing emotion. Indifference, you see, is death. And there is one way you know you’ve made it – when people declare they hate you. Because for everyone who hates your work, there is another who loves it.

© Anthony North, April 2007

Writing Blog

A LITTLE EXTRA

Morality – Like love, it takes two. One to do and another to judge. After all, does anyone worry about flatulence in an empty room?

(c) Anthony North, Apr 07 – Find more little extras on pages of North’s Review.

THE BORING BIT

This is a post from Anthony North’s ‘alternative network.’ Current affairs posts almost daily on North’s Review and Eye on the World (this includes politics and links). North’s Review also has fiction, writers’ resources and TV reviews. For deeper issues, including paranormal, crime, environment and much more, Beyond the Blog is for you.

PSYCHO-KINESIS

Psychokinesis, or PK, is the supposed ability of the mind to affect matter. Best known through the spoon bending antics of Uri Geller, a spontaneous form of PK is believed, by some, to be behind the poltergeist phenomenon.
For research purposes the phenomenon is split into micro and macro PK. Micro research began proper with the help of random number generators, devised in the 1960 by physicist Helmut Schmidt. Here the subject attempted to affect the random nature of the process. Since then, a whole range of similar tests have been devised by scientist Robert Jahn at Princeton.
Research into PK began with J B Rhine and his dice throwing experiments in the 1930s. He attempted to get subjects to affect the statistical rate of the dice landing on particular numbers.
Macro PK research attempts to affect matter on the scale above the statistical. Since the 1960s, groups of people have gathered regularly to produce phenomena in ‘mini-labs’, hermetically sealed glass boxes containing objects, first devised by William Cox. Previously, a team of enthusiasts known as SORRAT had attempted to use concentration to levitate tables and other objects.
Occasionally movement of objects has been recorded in such boxes. A further macro PK test was the Philip Experiment, where researchers met to produce a fictional entity to levitate a table. They claimed success. But in the main, results from both micro and macro PK have been disappointing. This means the ability does not exist, or is so slight as to be of little use.

© Anthony North, November 2006

This is a post from Anthony North’s ‘alternative network.’ Current affairs posts almost daily on North’s Review and Eye on the World (this includes politics and links). North’s Review also has fiction, writers’ resources and TV reviews. For deeper issues, including paranormal, crime, environment and much more, Beyond the Blog is for you.

BOSTON STRANGLER

On 14 June 1962 the body of Anna Slesers was found in her Boston home. She was the first of 13 women of varying ages to be found dead in their homes, naked, raped and strangled with a stocking, their bodies left in obscene poses. This was the beginning of the Boston Strangler. The reign of terror ended in October 1964 when a man entered a house and assaulted a woman before saying sorry and leaving.
The description of the assailant fitted the Measuring Man, a sexual pervert who had assaulted dozens of women. Soon, handyman Albert Desalvo was arrested, and in the Bridgewater Mental Institute he confessed to being the killer. Through plea bargaining, he received life for lesser crimes and was stabbed to death in prison in 1973.
What kind of man was Desalvo? His mother gave him little affection and his father was brutal, one day breaking his wife’s fingers one by one. Soon becoming a housebreaker, Desalvo joined the US Army in Germany, marrying a local girl who divorced him for serial adultery and a high sexual urge.
Indeed, Desalvo claimed to always have an erection – the answer to his previous crime spree as the Measuring Man, so called because he’d con women into thinking he could make them into models, his advances beginning with measuring them up. It is believed he may have committed 300 rapes before finally turning to murder.

(c) Anthony North, April 2007

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This is a post from Anthony North’s ‘alternative network.’ Current affairs posts almost daily on North’s Review and Eye on the World (this includes politics and links). North’s Review also has fiction, writers’ resources and TV reviews. For deeper issues, including paranormal, crime, environment and much more, Beyond the Blog is for you.