Some superficial similarities to Close to the Knives, but pre-AIDS so somewhat different. It's not unlike a series of character studies in segments tied together into an over-arching narrative of the narrator's own journey. Lots of very real, very lonely and insecure people. A very powerful piece of writing.

>“It’s strange that we should have to force ourselves not to love—or share, if you dont like that other word—even force ourselves not to acknowledge that love is possible. And so we make the world even more rotten than it was when we discovered its rot; justifying ourselves by saying it’s the only way: Get tough. Or be swallowed by it. And we further that original alienation. . . . And by ‘rot’ I mean only all the things that repress and forbid—the rot created by people in order to keep themselves from facing the real horror—within themselves—the coldness, the lack of understanding—. . .”

Someone lent me their copy of this, recommending it.
Nope. Nopenopenope. Empty calories for the brain. An immensely dislikeable Gary Stu protagonist in a fedora and the friend zone. Fuck this book and fuck Patrick Rothfuss.

Everything is a copy of a copy and the copy is the reality. This is really dense to read and takes a lot of digesting, even though it's not saying much that couldn't be more easily summed up by someone who just accepted the presupposition and wasn't trying to argue it. If you define everything as a copy, doesn't that render the distinction between copy and reality, and from there the entire thesis, meaningless? I think postmodernism is quite possibly little more than crypto schizophrenia. Deleuze and Guattari don't even bother with the crypto part. Still, it's interesting and they make me feel funny when I read them.

I can't say I got anything out of this or really understood anything more than the general idea. This is touted as "theory fiction" which means it's a knowingly false psychoanalysis of war for oil through some sort of Mesopotamian religious lens. It's not even a headfuck, just a barrage of invented Theosophy and Numerology. The Middle-East as egregore. I think Borges was right to write reviews of fictional books instead of writing the books themselves; some ideas are neat but don't need to be fully realised like this. Postmodernism a shit.

I don't know what to say other than that this was quite beautiful.

>>6588

Who do I call if I have Djinn problem? Is there a halal equivalent of Ghostbusters?

Immunology is a complex topic. Unless you took A-levels in chemistry and biology fairly recently, you're unlikely to learn much from a typical undergraduate immunology textbook. An introductory course in biology from Coursera or Khan Academy might be a good start; if you're really keen, you could do A-levels or an Access to HE course at your local FE college.

>>6588

Oh do piss off you idiot.

>>6587
Immunology looks fascinating and incredibly complex. As the previous poster pointed out, if you have no formal training you're probably going to be reading gibberish. Hell, I have a Chemistry A-level and a degree in Physics (he wrote smugly) and I doubt I'd get much of what I was reading, at least at the level where I wasn't just repeating things by rote.

If you really want to study immunology, which is a highly admirable ambition, I'd recommend first studying chemistry at an adult education college then seeing what mature student courses are available. From what I understand mature students are sought after since they're genuinely pursuing a dream as opposed to wandering into x subject since they assume uni is what they should do at that age.

Either way I wish you all the best m7.

>>6587
I'd recommend "Biology: The Science of Life" by Robert A. Wallace, if you can find it. It's just a general biology textbook, but well written and a good introduction.

After that, I have no idea. I used this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Immunology-Fifth-Richard-Goldsby/dp/0716749475/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1492093607&sr=8-3

It will be rough going no matter what. You basically have to memorize an alphabet soup of enzymes and ligands. Worse, everything is unintuitively named because it was discovered by accident or for some reason unrelated to its function. For example, the enzyme "XP" is named after the disease it causes, Xeroderma Pigmentosa, rather than its function (DNA repair).

t. used to work in the immunology department at MIT.

>>6569
Gina? Vaginas did not discover America. I meant to say China, fucking autocorrect.

>>6569

Except it is utter bollocks. But thank you for trying to help, I do appreciate it.

>>6571
Which part of the book did you find to be falsifiable or far fetched?

>>6573

Well, if I am thinking about the same book, the fact that the thing is utter Chinese propaganda bullshit?

>>6570
<Insert obligatory joke about Columbus being a massive fanny here.>

You're an odd woman.

I hope you're well Emily.

>>6528
I've been spending the past few months listening through the works of Robert A. Heinlein.

It's definitely worth trying at least a few, even if you don't think that science fiction from the 50s and 60s is your cup of tea.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Oshl5XsmxU

I've been enjoying Lincoln by Gore Vidal recently. Also, I've been told The Things They Carried, narrated by Brian Cranston, is a good listen.

>>6530
This talk of science fiction reminded me that I've had Flowers for Algernon on my reading list for some time. There is a torrent floating online for it.

The first person reporting writing style lends itself well to audiobook format and it works well as a story too. By and large what happens has been spoiled by references in pop-culture but its still enjoyable and on some level I relate to the main character because we've all been the dippy lad at work in our teens.

I used to write in journals daily for a couple of years but then binned the lot after re reading years later.

Like most people that grow up and realise that they were a clueless naive stupid fucker, I didn't want writings to remind me that I was a clueless naive stupid fucker.

I kept a diary of all my nightly dreams for six months when I was 17. Sadly long since left at the parental house and chucked out. You had to write the dream down fast before it disappears or was forgotten and I remember doing that straight away every morning. It was an interesting discipline to try.

>>6521

Taking notes, self-improvement in general, life as a whole?

>>6524

Pretty much.

>>6520
That sounds exactly like my current notebook. There's more shopping lists and WiFi passwords in it than there are memories, so perhaps I'll carry on using it as such. Summarising books you've read sounds tedious to me, but perhaps I should try to reflect on what I read more; I eat my way through fiction and treat books as more of an escape than any way to challenge myself though, so perhaps it's not really translatable.

>>6522
I'm writing them in the knowledge that I'll grow up and find myself naive and pretentious. I'm alright with it, though it is rather cringe-inducing to read how I wrote even 5 years ago. But that's life, mate.

>>6502

The bible became codified at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

So no, only the interpretation and 'translation' has been changed (parts conveniently ignored and amended to reinforce an interpretation). Weirdly the Torah didn't become codified until the 11th century which makes the Christian account more accurate. The dead sea scrolls are far enough away from either in their content to undermine any concept of divine truth contained within though.

>>6500
The proper way to respond to them is to point out that God also hates figs.

>>6505
No. The Da Vinci Code is not historically accurate. The Council Of Nicea did not decide which books would go in the Bible, that was decided a century before by a document called the Muratorian Canon. A fragment of it was found and it had a list of books very similar to the New Testament. Furthermore, a search of what the Church men were saying in the second and third century show that they did not mention any extra books that were then removed by the Council.

>>6502
Purely from a historical perspective, the Quran is the most valid Abrahamic religious text because it was created late enough to have sources from other societies such as the Byzantine and Persian empire comment on it. It was written within one century whereas the Bible is a mish mash of books spanning over five centuries. A lack of independent scrutiny from other civilisations also make the Bible particularly iffy compared to the Quran as we didn't get the account of the Israelites from the Assyrians for example. This is in stark contrast to Islam which faced the wrath of Saint John of Damascus pretty early on.

http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/stjohn_islam.aspx

Furthermore, the archaeological evidence from the various sites mentioned in the Bible do not add up to the historical account. To be fair though, the Quran mentions flying horses and genies and men who were 12 feet tall, so perhaps it's all hogwash.

To GCHQlad: I have a passing interest in theology, this does not make me a radical nor does this deserve being logged

>>6507
>The Council Of Nicea did not decide which books would go in the Bible, that was decided a century before by a document called the Muratorian Canon

I stand corrected, I wouldn't touch the 'Da Vinci Code', my source is various public educational institutions which evidently have been telling everyone the wrong thing (it seems to be a common enough misconception the Wikipedia page even mentions it).

>>6507
>this does not make me a radical nor does this deserve being logged

If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear lad. I'll mark the file for you.

>>6491

I know this isn't that relevant, but as I say, I don't know any writers, and I wanted to share what I've discovered as I've tried to become a competent writer. I'm at the stage of writing short stories and bits and pieces of this novel. I think that I would self-publish, if I was able to put a bit of money away and maybe pay for some marketing. I don't have any hopes for making money by selling what I've written, I'm just hugely passionate about it. But there's also websites that will publish books in a better-than-amateur quality for you, like www.lulu.com

>>6489
That's not particularly helpful for my situation as I'm shooting myself in the foot by refusing to approach it from a social media angle, but well done. I have a small writer's circle on a nom-de-plume facebook account who, while they're generally more complimentary about my work than anyone else's, aren't really what I'd call fans or an audience.

>>6492
Personally I'd avoid self-publishing at all. It seems like a shortcut that means you don't get the real validation of beating the literary gate-keepers of publishing, regardless of how much you make from it.

>>6490
I have had sex with four attractive women a lot younger than me as a direct result of my extremely modest literary success. It sort of helped that I became single at the same time as the book was coming out. But actually it is also really nice getting feedback from random readers in far-off countries I've never met and probably never will - makes me feel like a more useful human being.

I have no idea what you're all talking about but couldn't you sell short stories as radio programs?

>>6495
You'd need to find a buyer. Here that basically means the BBC. You'd need to find the right commissioning editor during the right commissioning round, not to mention an idea of who might read some of the parts in your play for voices.

>>6469
"Shoulder to cry one" covers a lot of things. From the biddies who just want a chat but can't just come out and say that they are lonely and are dying for a human contact, to the drunkards who rattle on about their "problems," while you listen and repeat their shite to them.

A real suicidal person doesn't look at suicide as an issue. Freedom is a good thing, not something bad that you have to get talked out of.

>>6468
It is better to have the option of not feeling pain and enjoyment, rather than feeling pain and seeking out enjoyment for some 80 odd years.

>>6472
>I'd been told that a friend of a friend was suicidal and the circumstances involved, and wanted to know what I should do about it. The woman didn't really seem prepared to answer my questions - her answer was basically 'get them to phone us' - but who else am I supposed to call?
I don't know. I will say that with many callers it would become clear that "a friend" was being used as a pseudonym for the caller themselves. So if the woman you were talking to seemed to be avoiding the question, it may have been that she was trying to find out the nature of the question, because a lot of people (older blokes especially) have a hard time saying to a stranger that they have problems and that they're feeling like topping themselves. A lot of calls that started innocuously, on a surface level, about others, or about relatively trivial issues, went on to deeply personal and serious matters. This is a process that can take a long time. People want to know that they're actually being heard before they open up.

Also, Samaritans aren't trained to be therapists, or a citizens advice service. They're trained to listen to and discuss people's problems, not offer solutions. The nature of the service offered - that of being passive listeners, not problem solvers - is something that came up in a lot of calls. If you said that the Samaritans don't really make that clear, well, you'd be right. The argument goes that it's better that way; would you call a suicide line if you didn't think they had the answer? I can't say whether it's the right approach. Within the remit of the Samaritans as an organisation, though, "get them to call us" is the textbook correct answer once you've eliminated the possible needs of the person calling.

Alternatively, you might just have got a shit one on the phone. It happens. The Samaritans also offer an SMS and email service, and you could go back through conversation threads and see a lot of hopelessly tonedeaf advice that some Samaritans had dished out, when they had no business doing so in the first place. I had serious misgivings about both of these services, frankly. The phone lines were generally helpful, as far as I could tell from the branch I worked at, but phonecalls tend to have a definite beginning, middle, and end, and socially we're all more or less familiar with this construct. SMS exchanges do not necessarily follow such a pattern, and it was obvious that a lot of them (if you took the time to read back through the conversation history, and consider how many messages and responses were occurring per day) were perpetuating a daily cycle of misery rather than helping the individuals involved work through their issues. In particular, there were a lot of teenage girls who were texting upwards of 30 times a day, getting a response from a different Samaritan each time, some of whom clearly did not take the time to read through the previous exchanges and were consequently (albeit inadvertently) asking the same questions over and over. Practically, this meant that these girls were being asked if they felt suicidal once every day or so. I don't think that's healthy, or productive. The email service, having no national restrictions, seemed mainly to attract Americans with strong opinions about gun laws, the Illuminati and so on, and whilst in each case you have to consider that such talk may initially be venting, to "sound out" the service before discussing more personal issues, as far as I could tell email exchanges never really went anywhere. Perhaps email is too impersonal, or we consider it too permanent, but whatever the case people did not seem to want to discuss their feelings and problems over it. Both services were rumoured to be due for an overhaul when I was volunteering, back around 2010 (the most pressing being the matching of the same Samaritans to individual service users over time - more systemically complex an issue than it might seem, due to the voluntary nature of the organisation's workforce, and the potential importance of immediacy of response). I hope that occurred, because as it stood I felt they were sometimes doing more harm than good.

>I'm angry that so many people call a toll free number to try and have a hand shandy but somehow not surprised.
It was a surprise to me. Or at least, the volume of it. There was no system in place to flag offenders. They'd only just got around to blacklisting a few dozen numbers that accounted for something staggering like a quarter of all the calls received, and that was seen as an absolute last resort. And with good reason - the guy who's yelling about coming over your whore face one day might well need to talk to someone about their (very real and deep-seated) problems the next.

>Having volunteered for them, would you say charitable donations to them are a good use of any money someone puts aside for philanthropic use? I'm poor as shit but I feel I should give something back.
Despite the reservations above, I think the service as a whole is of great public benefit. If you can't afford a donation they're always looking for volunteers. That doesn't mean being on the phones, my lot were always short on people to go around collecting change in a bucket at public events and that sort of thing.

(Sorry for the derail, OP.)

>>6475

Fuck you. What the fuck is wrong with you?

>>6475
>A real suicidal person doesn't look at suicide as an issue. Freedom is a good thing, not something bad that you have to get talked out of.
And suicidal people reach the conclusion that suicide is a good thing through contemplation, during which they have doubts and can be convinced that their issues can be overcome.

So far as I can see you're either positing that:

A) every suicidal person goes from 0 to 1 on the suicidal scale overnight, and justifies it to themselves on a wholly rational basis (which isn't supported by any literature I'm aware of: research that supports the idea of a sudden impulse in suicide emphasises the emotional aspects, and doesn't use so broad a brush as to say that that covers all cases of suicide)

or

B) You're making a really tedious semantic argument about how someone considering suicide and who may take their own life without intervention isn't "suicidal" because you've decided that we all must use your personal definition includes only people who are wholly convinced of the merits of suicide.

Neither of which is particularly well considered.

>>6478
Or, if I may interject to add, of any fucking use at all to man nor beast.

Inside UFO 54-40 is a slightly special one but explaining why would be a spoiler and it's for more meta reasons than any quality of the text.

>>6385

Paranormal romance is very lucrative, but your grammar is appalling and your writing style won't appeal to the middle-aged women who read that sort of thing. Oversexed male students don't buy romance novels, they watch Brazzers.

Change Chuck and Sam into a timid librarian called Mary or Kimberly. Swap the hippy sex party and the ancient scepter for a chance discovery in the occult books archive. Instead of banging on a sweet boat, Mary is seduced by an oil tycoon in a doomed love affair.

Sort your grammar out, get a sexually frustrated aunt to preview it, have your manuscript professionally proofread and launch it via Kindle Direct Publishing. Give away a few dozen copies on a suitable forum in exchange for reviews. Do a 5 day free promotion, then slowly increase the price from 99¢. With a bit of luck, you'll net several thousand dollars for a few weeks of work.

I wouldn't, no.

Writing shitty erotica is a well-known way of prostituting yourself for a cheap buck in the literary world but the market is quite well saturated and you're definitely overthinking the plot if that's the aim. Nobody reads erotica for the plot.
Here are some good books about sex:
Erotica
In Praise of Older Women (Vizinczey)
Emmanuelle (Arsan)
House of Incest (Nin)
The Story of O (Reage)
Delta of Venus (Nin)
Little Birds (Nin)
Tropic/s of Cancer/Capricorn (Miller)
Juliette (de Sade)
Lost Girls (Moore, Gibbe)
Colette (Holmes)

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>6386

> Change Chuck and Sam into a timid librarian called Mary or Kimberly.

It's time to update this trope and get with the times, we've had librarians and secretaries; now is the to start writing literotica about girls called Becky who work doing something in media and who really, really like Netflix, pizza, beaches and their besties. The sort of girl who is so utterly basic that she had a gap year in Asia, an entire "beret phase" during her A-levels, and thinks Paulo Coelho is the height of literature.

This will be your new erotic literature buying demographic once the tinder dreams come tumbling down after their twenty-fifth birthday.

>>6400
>once the tinder dreams come tumbling down after their twenty-fifth birthday.

Fuck me, that's brutal.

>>6400

You have a gift.

>used books

Hedges.

>>6390
Depends on the content. I spent years looking in hedges for a copy of Enjoy Your Pigeons but all I ever found was porn.

>>6389

Donate your books to charity shops in university towns/cities, or find some book shops in said towns/cities and ask if they'll be interested in buying your old books. You'd normally get pretty good prices. Students love to read after all apparently.

The big charities tend to deal with book donations centrally. Anything with significant resale value will be warehoused and listed on Amazon Marketplace and Abe. Books with limited value but broad appeal (Grisham, Mills & Boon etc) will get sent back to the shops, the rest will get pulped.

>>6344
They are more or less the same thing.

>>6344

Yes, using the common speech can be a sign of healthy populism, but in the case of, say, Fox News, it's a celebration of ignorance and of struggling to be the biggest idiot in the room to prove your loyalty.

>>6355
No, they really aren't at all.

>>6355
"The big problem with Fox News is their accents" said no sane person who has ever watched Fox News.

>>6344
Is it just me or do news channels (particular BBC News) make a special effort to recruit newscasters from Ireland, Wales and (to a lesser degree) Scotland? The proportion of strong regional accents seems higher than the actual proportion of people in the UK with those accents.

>>6357
There has been a drive to increase "regional" representation in the past decade.