Author Archives: Kirsten

The power of negative thinking?

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In the last few pages of Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, she mentions the work of Gabriele Oettinger, who — via 20 years’ worth of research — determined that people who imagine obstacles to achieving their goals are more likely to succeed than people who imagine purely positive outcomes.

Apparently Oetthinger proposes that if you consider obstacles, you become energized to overcome them.

Duke goes on to talk about how being open to the possibility of failure is effective in groups (corporate teams, for example) because it removes the stigma associated with being overly negative. Or seeming to be overly negative. Which gives the group flexibility to think more broadly and prepare for potential setbacks.

But I wonder whether there’s something else at play, also. Perhaps positive thinking — if it is forced or artificial — can function as a kind of denialism or denialist behavior that sublimates doubts/uncertainties/fears and thereby empowers them.

I believe I’ve observed that dynamic, personally. Have you?

The “other” Faust

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Faust seducing Gretchen. This part of the story: easy to follow.

I struggled to understand the “other” part of Goethe’s Faust. The part after Gretchen’s death. Have you ever read it? Crazy.

Then I came across a bit mentioning that the play is an alchemical allegory. Really good piece on that, here. The Alchemical Drama of Goerthe’s Faust, by Adam McLean.

It all makes sense, now. In a cosmic allegorical kind of way.

Countdown to Launch: The French Emerald

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The French Emerald, by Kirsten Mortensen

It’s a mystery! It’s a romance! It’s a … serial novel? =O

I have written a serial novel.

I have written a serial novel. I’ll be publishing on my site, one chapter per week.

The first chapter debuts March 4.

I’ll post more about the how’s and why’s at some point.

But for now, please click here for the teaser copy and how you can play along :)

UPDATE: All 43 chapters are now online and free to read! Click here to start with Week 1.

Going full Keto

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After 6 weeks of Keto, we’ve made our decision.

We’ll keep going. We feel too good.

Personally, I can’t believe the level of mental energy I have. My brain is lit up. Not in a frenetic way. It’s a nice, steady, “always on” thing — from when I jump out of bed in the morning til I start feeling sleepy at night.

Maybe this won’t last. I’ve heard tell that people burn out. But for as long as I feel like this, I am All In.

Famous neighbors: Scott Adams

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A is Oxford, B is Windham.

A is Oxford, B is Windham.

I blogged a few years back about how Camille Paglia lived, for a time, in my hometown of Oxford, NY.

Turns out I had another someday-would-be-famous neighbor — not quite so close as in the same town, but I’m still counting it :-)

Scott Adams, who is three or four years older than me, grew up in Windham, NY.

Windham is about an hour and forty five minute’s drive from Oxford. That sounds like a lot except that the driving consists of winding through 2-lane mountain roads. I speak from experience. Delhi, NY, about halfway between the two towns, was (is?) one of the schools in the same sports section and division as Oxford; anyone who played or spectated Oxford sports was in Delhi several times a year during high school. I remember it as being the looooooong bus ride :-)

And Route 23, the main road into Windham, is well known to Oxfordians. It’s one of the main highways out of Norwich, the Chenango County seat.

As Upstate NY towns go, I don’t need to see Windham to know it has a lot in common with Oxford, although it’s probably a bit smaller (Adams writes in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life that he had 40 people in his graduating class).

In his book, Adams tells a story of how his car broke down once between home and Syracuse on a “newly constructed highway through a sparsely populated valley in the Catskill Mountains.” I have to think that’s Route I-88, right?

Here’s a WaPo article by Adams — one of several that have appeared lately that are excerpted from his book. I read it today, because of course I want to be happy, and which reminded me that How to Fail… was on my TBR pile.

Highly recommend the book if you’re looking for some New Year’s encouragement :-)

On Resolutions

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finger lakes from planeI’ve been thinking a lot about resolutions over the past couple of weeks.

I like to set resolutions. I know some people don’t. But my thinking is very much along the lines of Sarah Hoyt’s, as she blogs about it here. Humans, she writes, “live by ritual and symbols as much as by concrete things . . . I use the rituals and the dates and the symbolic turning points as a fixed point off which to rappel and change my direction.”

[T]here is a dreadful weight of inertia to human life.  Things-as-you’ve-always-done them become established in your mind and you end up doing them the exact same way over and over again, even if you hate it.  It’s kind of like trying to swim in a soaked overcoat.  And in this case, the habits formed during this year are the kind that, like that soaked overcoat, will be the end of me, if I don’t change them.

Exactly. Which is why resolutions can feel good. They can imbue your life with a sense of “getting somewhere,” of having some measure of control or at least influence on your destiny.

Only if you are kind to yourself about them, however. As Dean Wesley Smith notes in this post about setting writing goals, when it comes to goals, it’s important to be flexible about how we define “success.” If you set an “extreme” goal, he advises, “have fall-back success levels.” Understand that missing a goal doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve failed.

new years resolutions

Er … no.

Seven of my eight 2013 resolutions were writing goals, and guess what: they were all extreme. I didn’t meet any of them. But I made substantial progress on three. So out of kindness to myself, I hereby christen 2013 a success :-)

And also out of kindness to myself, I’m going to be careful about my 2014 resolutions.

I realize, in retrospect, that the resolutions I made last year set me up to fail not only because they were extreme, but because meeting them depended too much on things outside my control.

Without going into too many personal details: the daily claims on my attention are real. I’m a mother. I have bills to pay. Etc.

The time and energy I can devote to writing fiction are limited. That’s a fact. And if my resolutions don’t accommodate that fact, I’m doomed to miss them. So:

Lesson #1. Don’t set goals/resolutions that are too vulnerable to factors I can’t control.

So how do you get to goals/resolutions that are within your control? Continue reading →

Into the body of the protagonist

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Via Futurity, researchers  at Emory University’s Center for Neuropolicy are exploring what happens to your brain when you read a novel.

It’s a small study, but intriguing — and reinforces my sense that what we experience internally is, in some respects, indistinguishable from what we experience in the 3D world:

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” Berns says. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

Read a book, and the protag becomes your avatar :-)