Tara Maya's Tales

It's not unreasonable to assume that anything which has taken too long already will never be completed at all. This is certainly the point of view of my children regarding my progress on my main series The Unfinished Song. I can see their point of view; after all, I've been working on this story for longer than they've been alive. They have cheerfully told me that they expect the completion of my epic around the same year we establish a colony on Mars. A colleague of mine also used me as an example of what NOT to do as a writer. She explained that I'd taken so long to finish my series, that although I'd had an audience once, it had frittered away and no one was interested any more. Despite that, the greatest journey is finished only step after step, whether the steps are slow or not, and whether or not the traveller becomes frequently lost or lodged for a long time elsewhere. So although I've also started (and yes, even completed) other series since I started Th...

Have we become a morass of ignorant, illiterate morons?  For most people this question would be a no-brainer (forgive the pun),  Book reading overall is supposedly in decline, but does that mean? Less than half of US adults read even a book a year (48% in 2022 rather than 54% in 2012), according to one survey, reported in Publisher’s Weekly. (Link:  https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/newsbrief/index.html?record=4377  ) But, weirdly, that  isn’t necessarily because fewer people are reading at all. The raw number of those who read at all seems to be stable. The problem is that Whales have become Less Whaley. What I mean is that among readers, some are Whales and some are Minnows. If you read one piddling book a year, sorry, Minnows. If you read 15, you’re a Whale. If you read a book a week, I love you. The Whales getting less Whaley means that fewer people read more than 10 books per year, dropping from 35% in 2016 to 27% in 2021 . Americans read an average of 12...

 My publisher Misque Press has a new website.  Although I don’t have time for blogging much, I’m going to leave this blog up (oddly, it gets a fair amount of traffic) but I’m like to direct anyone interested in my books over to Misque Press .

  Have you heard the latest meme going around, in which girlfriends and wives ask their romantic partners how often they think about Rome... and are shocked by the answers! Bizarrely, a lot of guys think about Rome once or twice a month, or a week, or even multiple times in a day! Which is weird, because I thought only fantasy novelists like me did that! Yeah, I do think about Rome quite often. Not so much the Roman Empire, but the Roman Republic. Why did it fall into tyranny? Are there analogies to our current situation? When did the first tyrant appear in the Roman Republic and how did his example make it easier for Caesar to take over as a permanent dictator eighty years later? (Whoops, I gave away the answer there.) And sometimes I do think about the Roman Empire too, particularly when I'm researching history's worst and craziest dictators, like Nero and Caligula, to see if I can find models for villains in my stories. And when I'm researching battle, of course, I alw...

  Last week, I discussed some fascinating questions regarding Empathy, Fiction and Imagination .  Those essays were theoretical, not empirical. I thought it would be interesting to see if there is any empirical evidence that reading fiction increases one's empathy or kindness. (What the lab shrinks like to call "prosocial behavior," as opposed to "anti-social behavior.")  I found a plethora of evidence that it does. Am I surprised? Not at all. I could have guessed as much based on the reading habits (or lack) of people I know. But of course, anecdotes aren't scientific, even if they do provide for pretty good "rules of thumb." Science reported in 2013 on a study done by Kidd and Castano that reading fiction increases one's ability to " comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one's own beliefs and desires." In other words, reading fiction improves your "theory of mind": your i...

  Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Where does empathy come from? How did empathy evolve? Why can we "feel" for fictional characters? These are some of the questions explored in a collection of papers on Empathy, Fiction, and Imagination . Many people associate empathy with being social, yet it can't be that simple. Ants, bees, and termites are so social we had to coin a special term for it: eusocial . Yet it is not empathy that drives their sociality, but pheromones, castes, and a simple set of rules that each ant follows depending on its birth order and age in the colony. Nonetheless, most "theories of mind" to explain empathy assume that we evolved the ability to model each other's minds because we need to understand each other. We have "mirror" neurons which enable us to copy each other.  In most models of empathy, it is assumed that empathy evolved to facilitate reciprocal altruism. Direct Perception Theor...