Clever Hans and the Tarot Deck
Jul 09, 2021 8:31 pm
Where do these stories come from, anyway?
You'd make me very happy if you wrote a review.
Clever Hans was a horse in the early 1900s who was supposedly able to do math problems. Turns out, the horse wasn’t really doing math, but was reading the reactions of the crowd and his owner. People felt betrayed by this. This kind of baffles me, because being able to read the crowd and read a person’s body language enough to know when you were close to the right answer is harder and more impressive than being able to add five and three.
I do tarot readings for people sometimes, and I’m quite good at it. I’m not 100% accurate, but more accurate than random chance would allow. The skeptical side of me says that the most logical reason is that people will find patterns anywhere. The second option (my favorite theory) is that I’ve taught myself to cold read people, like Clever Hans did.
The third possibility is that I’m genuinely psychic. This is hard for me to believe. However, there have been times when I freak myself out. I have written a person and had them show up in real life, (a story I relayed on a podcast once). Last week on a podcast, a woman told a Mexican folktale about witches who could turn into owls. Honestly, it kind of unnerved me. I had never heard that folktale/legend before I wrote Mulberry Wands. I thought I was making stuff up, not writing about something other people had apparently seen and believed to be true.
Which brings it around to the question, where do these stories come from? Sometimes it doesn’t feel like I’m creating a story, but that I’m discovering it. IT's really a fascinating process. What's gonna happen? I don't know! I'm 70K words into figuring out what happens in Kit Melbourne #10. With any luck, y'all should get it before the end of the year. That means you have plenty of time to read books #8 Warlock's Blood and #9 Vampire's Pawn in case you're behind on the series.
Andrea Green might work for one of the most secret organisations in the world, but fighting the forces of evil comes mostly in the form of endless paperwork and mundane office banter. When a routine inspection yields unexpected results, the fallout reveals a shattering secret. (Free download.)
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