Tara Maya's Tales

 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...

  Growing up I always wished there were more Fantasy movies. Lately, I've ammended the wish: what I want is more GOOD Fantasy movies. There have been some truly awful Fantasy movies lately, which made the world a worse place. I don't review those because I prefer to focus on what's done right than what's done wrong. Having been burned, I was cautious about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I could see it was "irreverent and witty" but sometimes that translates into "mocking the fans and not taking the story seriously." I'm happy to say that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was funny, yet still took the source material seriously. My sons and I watched the movie at home so we could pour over our D&D manuals as we watched, finding the character types and monster types and spells referenced in the movie. There were plenty--this was fan service done right.  You can still enjoy this even if you are a D&D fan! Given all the...

  My previous post on the Birthgap focused on (potential) mothers, but these issues bother (potential) fathers as well.  I think this post, " Invisible Hands: The Anxiety of the Childless," captures the conflict between the urge to wait until things are "stable" before having children, and the creeping anxiety that you could wait... until it's too late. In the dark and heat of the present moment, all of this might seem obscure. But take a breath, and it becomes quite clear. To put it simply, for some years now, I believe I have been suffering from the anxiety that I might never have children. Of course, this anxiety is not the brute, biological force of the female. Rather, it is the nervous and blithering practical rationalism of the male. Which for me, a nervous and blithering poetical songwriter, is often expressed in lyrical thoughts. If I were to put an image to this feeling, the first that comes to mind is apposite but crude: it is the image of a baby, st...