Books for the Blind

'Meevo': Another proof-read.  Still finding typos and other sundry errors.  Happily, I have a hyper-critical editor-proofreader who will tolerate no second rate writing.

Tried to have a critical look at the story.  Maybe 'tighten it up' a bit?  Hard to be objective over something that exists in your head so brightly and yet, somehow, seems a little duller when it is put down in words.

In your mind's eye it is possible to see, with great clarity and in precise detail, things like thunder and lightning; great storms rolling across the surface of a planet.  No matter, though, how many words that are precisely fitting you use, it never reads back quite how it is in your head.

That got me thinking.

Yes, an idea sprite.

Blind people.  

If someone has been blind since birth they have never seen anything to make pictures of in their minds.  How would such a person describe, for example, a volcano?

If they read braille what are they 'seeing' in their minds?

A little while ago someone asked me if I dream in colour.  They asked me because I have monochromatic vision (B&W only - well, and greys, of course!).  I said "How would I know?"

There are some references to blind people who dream in sounds and emotions but no images.  There are also references where there is a hypothesis that blind people don't see 'darkness' because they have never seen 'light'.  Since darkness is the absence of light they also wouldn't know.

Of course, these thoughts are contingent upon the person in question being blind since birth  -  congenital blindness, in fact.

Why is this important to me, as an author?

Because I have had 'audio books' for the blind mentioned.  Audio books for long distance lorry drivers are fine but for blind people?

The point, for me, of a book is that it is an attempt to describe images, situations and emotions in words.  In setting the scene, particularly in science fiction where the 'scene' may be very alien, precise words are needed to convey the image in the writer's mind into the mind of the reader.  There is an effort here to avoid ambiguity.  This is a difficult enough task to perform for people who have visual references but how do we do that for blind people who have no images at all?

Does this mean that books for the blind must rely on sound and emotions only?  How does that limit the range of scenes and activities within the story?

It is always possible that my own life experiences are limited by not seeing colours but, at least, I can view shapes and textures so my descriptives are accurate in that respect.

I just have to avoid taking 'Blue Grass' too literally

'Crater'

http://amzn.to/gQjy71

First contact
First Aliens
Now there is war.
They came here by accident but their purpose is lethal.
They are 'immortal'
We breed.
There can only be one winner.
They want us  -  dead.
We want them  -  dead.



Science Fiction that will keep you enthralled.

Available on Amazon at 0.99c [0.71p]

THE KEEBLEAR HORROR by Glenn G. Thater

http://simurl.com/zinfew

Well.

There.

What to say?

I do try to avoid commenting on other people's work but there is something about this that is ringing bells in my head.

No, I have not become Quasimodo although I do have a hunch....

On my 'Blog' "The Write Stuff", I have commented on different apporoaches to writing.  One thing I do stress is that, for me, doing a writing course is a bad idea.  This is, primarily, because the reader wants to see what is in your head and in your imagination.  An amalgam of other people's ideas tends to come out 'bitty', disjointed and unconvincing.

Perhaps if you are doing specialised writing like training notes for technical courses, manuals or, even journalism (do journalists do courses?  They, or many of them, seem not to do courses in English.... but that's a tale for another day) then, perhaps, a course is in order.  But for fiction?  No.  Whatever your genre, write what you want to write in your own way.

Clearly, there should be some common reference point.  Learning about punctuation, grammar, comprehension, spelling and syntax is important in order to avoid those elephant traps that many fall into.

All the great people who write wonderful stories have not done writing courses.  Writing courses are designed for people to make money out of people who think that they might want to write but need moral support or convincing.

It is not necessary to be a journalist, a Ph.D or even a highly qualified expert in some field or other to write a great story.  You do not even have to be old although life experience is invaluable when telling tales of people and situations.  There are many young authors out there who, like old-timers, vary between incompetent to exciting.  Some are successful but, possibly, most are not.  Again, I have written about that previously.  You can have  great story, well told, but still not 'make it'.  On the other hand you can have a mediochre story fairly painfully told and get a contract with a publishing house.  That's life.  Live with it.

There are people out there who are intellectual giants.  Enormously clever people who excel in their field of work and whose grasp of the language, whatever it is, far surpasses the average person in the street.  Again, I have written previously about the pitfalls of overusing words.

Now I come to the short story, above.

The author is, clearly, extraordinarily gifted mentally.  He is head and shoulders above most people in the 'brains' department.  He has taken it upon himself to write stories.  Good.

This particular story is the sort of 'competition length' story that is very difficult, in the normal course of events, to write.  To get the characters, the atmosphere, the surroundings and the action into less than 2,000 words is very tricky if you want it be seem 'real'.  This story is about 1800, I guess (without actually counting them up).

First, the bad news.  I found the language a little difficult.  Using mediaeval forms, like Tolkien, is highly specialised and inserting modern ideas into it is extremely difficult to achieve successfully.  This story nearly does that.

Secondly, the good news.  It is a wonderful idea.  It has a good start, a reasonable development phase and an excellent ending.

Thirdly, the observation.  Please rewrite it longer.  Give yourself more room for the approach to the end. This could be made even better if it was around 5000 words.  It all felt a bit rushed.  'Laze' it up a little to give the reader time to think and absorb what is going on and put more into it so that we know what is happening.

Did I enjoy it?  Immensely.  It IS good as it stands.  These opinions are just my ideas to give it more.... how can I say?  'Oomph'!

I shall read more of your stories now even though that particular genre is not in my normal reading slot.

Thank you, Glenn.

Isaac Asimov: A Note

Please observe that 'Forward the Foundation' was written earlier than 1992.  Isaac Asimov completed it shortly before his death in 1992.  It was published in 1993.

I apologise for any confusion.

Tangents + Ideas = Opposite x Hypotheticals

Isaac Asimov, my greatest hero, was a scientist.  He dealt in practical things.  Physics, chemistry, astronomy and, above all, mathematics.

His was a life devoted to the precision and care associated with getting things right.  No guessing.  Intuitive leaps, perhaps, based on carefully composed ideas but the final result always rested on the analysis of the calculations.

Many of my other heroes, Arthur C Clarke, Carl Sagan have that in common.  They all thought scientifically.  They all had that cold logical rationalization of their ideas.

And yet.

Read their stories.

Not the factual documentaries that they wrote so as to fascinate us readers and draw us, beguilingly, into their world of numbers and facts, but the stories.  The fiction.

See how it flows.

Consider the ‘Foundation’ series. ‘Prelude to Foundation’, ‘Forward the Foundation’, ‘Foundation’, ‘Foundation and Empire’, ‘Second Foundation’, ‘Foundation's Edge’, and ‘Foundation and Earth’.  This is not the sequence they were written in.

‘Foundation’ was originally a series of eight short stories published (in ‘Astounding Magazine’) between May 1942 and January 1950.  It was based, loosely, upon Edward Gibbons’ ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’.

In 1993 Asimov wrote the final book, ‘Forward the Foundation’.  In this story he raveled together all the threads of his other series—including ‘I, Robot’ to bring them all together into one singularity.

He could not have foreseen this in 1942 in his conversations with John W. Campbell, his editor.

Where does this lead us?

In reading his books, and those of other authors in similar vein—Robert A. Heinlein springs to mind, you will see that, in spite of his training, there has been no pre-planning.

When he, Asimov, wrote the first ‘Foundation’ story he could have had no idea that, eventually, there would be more and that they would all tie together with his other stories.  Pre-planning is an impossibility.

In similar manner, Robert Heinlein certainly would not have considered that writing about water beds in his stories, with fairly complete descriptions, would prevent an applicant, thirty years later, from getting a patent on the idea through prior art.

If we now contract this idea into the writing of one book we can get back to the concept of ‘idea’ sprites.  I have mentioned these before in another ‘Blog’.

These sprites are the things that come into your head while you are writing or ironing or welding something to a car chassis.  They try to convince you that there is something else you should be doing instead, something more important.  You can, they will insist, always come back to this idea later.  But you cannot.  You will, invariably, forget.  The notion of ‘picking up the thread’ afterwards is a false one.  At best you will have only a vague memory of something that you were doing or thinking but, in essence, the meat of it will be gone.

Asimov, et al, had ‘idea’ sprites.  You can see them working their threads through the stories.

The difference with these great authors is that they used the sprites.  They seized them by the scruff of the neck, used the idea, and then incorporated that into their story so that the story led back into its original stream.

Really great authors with genius running through their mental veins do it over a period of fifty years.  Through seven volumes.

Hard to top that.

That’s why he is my Number One Hero.