Are we not men...or cavemen?
Mario here:
We'll start with the pimpage. Shout out to
Colette Duke, who gives us sensual science fiction romance. Here's her giveaway to celebrate
Emerald 3 hitting #1 Science Fiction Romance Short Story:
"
Emerald 3 is my entree into the science fiction romance world. A short story, just to get my feet wet in the genre. I was tickled enough when it was #1 in an incredibly obscure category of Amazon's bestseller lists. March 23 the category wasn't so obscure.
Emerald 3 hit the #1 spot for 'science fiction romance short story' on Amazon. Holy moly.
To celebrate, I'm giving away a free copy of the full story (yep, including the nocturnal goings-on of Fioran and Alohxi) to the first five people who leave a comment on this post
and send me their contact information via my
Contact page. You'll need to specify which format you prefer. I can send HTML, EPUB, and PDF.
Thank you for celebrating with me, and I hope you enjoy meeting Fioran, Alohxi, and the tree people of Emerald 3."
And now...To be a novelist you must be a student of human nature. Makes sense. We write stories about people and to be credible, our characters must act like real people. But our stories have to be interesting so we put the emotional screws to our characters and watch them react. So how should they react?
What fascinates me is that while we like to pretend that we're open-minded, rational, and sophisticated, the truth is that we're pretty identical to our caveman ancestors. In fact, for most of the 200,000 years that homo sapiens have been around, people much like us wandered naked in the wilderness, hunting and gathering, building fires, and no doubt trying to scramble up the food chain. Coping behavior was encoded into that inherited part of human consciousness responsible for survival--aka, the lizard brain. It could be little things. We like bling because shiny baubles remind us of water, a necessity for survival. We eat sweets because in nature, sweet foods gave us nutrients missing in woolly mammoth meat.
Outsiders were rivals and today, we're wary of anyone who doesn't look or act like us. Sex? Think about it, our ancestors had to get their freak on regardless of plague or ruin, otherwise that would've been the end of us as a species. They even had
prehistoric sex toys and porn. Considering that soap wasn't invented until Roman times (or maybe it was the Babylonians), our boinking caveman forebears must've been some rank motherfuckers.
Having said that, we're not animals, meaning we understand in the abstract the consequences of what we do. Success as a writer may be ingrained in our desire for greater esteem within our tribe, but the discipline of writing requires that we muffle our lizard brain, sit our ass down at the keyboard and work. The caveman inside us can never be used as an excuse for our individual failings.
Andddddd...more pimpage...Our blessed Kat Richardson shares a
gooey enchilada with her thoughts on the ongoing e-publishing ruckus. Trust me, she is as brainy as she is easy on the eyes.
And BFF to the Biting-Edge,
J.A. Kazimer continues her contest. It's free swag, people!
Labels: caveman, Colette Duke, J. A. Kazimer, Kat Richardson, prehistoric sex toys