Thank you to Joseph Carrabis and RoundTable 360°

March 28th, I was invited to participate in a Roundtable 360° discussion about creativity and the imagination. Joseph Carrabis and other creative personalities from music, art, theater, and writing wanted to answer the question have you ever wondered what makes creative people creative? 

Each participant in the round had their own perspective about what makes creative people creative. 

Summary

Being with a group of talented people - regardless of their chosen media - and listening to them discuss their work, how their work choice has shaped their lives, their goals for their work, et cetera, has been a dream of mine since my college years.

Now that dream has a name and place - RoundTable 360°. We get together the last Thursday of each month, share how our disciplines have shaped and changed us, and explore how one discipline can inform another. For example: What can authors learn about setting scenes from photographers? What can dancers learn from painters about expression?

What do you think? Is everyone creative in their own special way? Left brain or right brain, it doesn't really make a difference? Architects are creative with specs and drawings of a building. Biologists are creative in developing new methods to research cells and diseases. Artists are creative in how they use color and geometry to create paintings. 

Humanity sets itself apart from the animal kingdom by being creative for entertainment and developing a culture.

Creative people have to learn to shut off the outside world and cultivate their inner stirrings. The present moment is the time that supports the creative function. 

It was a nice talk. I enjoyed the informal debate and dialogue between the Roundtable members. I even got to throw in my two cents worth. 

If you would like to be a participant, then please contact Joseph Carrabis. 

Thank you for inviting me!

Have a great and creative day. 

 

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Being Mangled is Just the Beginning of the Artificial Intelligence, Cybernetic Discourse

Thank you to Joseph Carrabis for publishing my article: Being Mangled is Just the Beginning on his blog for the Midnight Roost horror anthology.

Mangled is a sci-fi, horror short story about life, death, and technology, but more importantly, it is a story about Sarah Mitchell, a Specialist in the armed forces:

The only survivor of a roadside bomb, Specialist Sarah Mitchell lives most people's nightmare. Her entire squad is killed. In the bustle of a busy emergency triage center, she is forgotten.

When she survives until morning, others come to claim her. One by the use of technology and the other by energetic consciousness, but both manipulate the quantum singularity. In an experiment to merge human consciousness with machine, which will consume Sarah, what will she do? 

Will she continue to serve her country in another capacity? Or, will she choose the unknown and walk into eternity with a complete stranger?

No matter what Sarah decides: living forever has its consequences. 

This short story is an important dialogue starter about the potential harnessing of human consciousness into cybernetic technologies. 

If you would like to read the article, visit Joseph Carrabis' site: Being Mangled is Just the Beginning. 

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From the author of the cutting-edge science fiction classic, The Reality Hackers, DL Mullan has brought readers a new type of horror: eternal slavery through technology. 

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WordCrafter Blog Tour: Joseph Carrabis's Marianne for Visions Anthology

Summary

This short story is about the final stages of life. It's not a coming of age story; it's a coming to the end story.

How do you envision your last days? Marianne answers this question by how her mind starts to slip into fantasies. Marianne tries to balance her mental decline, her other medical issues, and her daughter's concerns with an analytical perspective, sarcasm, and defensiveness. All modes to deflect and shield her from others imposing their will upon her as she withers away.

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Review

The short story Marianne by Joseph Carrabis addresses the fears that each human endures as they draw closer to the end of their lives. The elderly Marianne is confined to a wheelchair, knowing that her prognosis is grim, yet her mind is sharp. She sharpens her wit by foiling the plans of her daughter, Rose, and when that is not enough to satiate her suspicions, she antagonizes the younger woman with airplane tickets to euthanasia-friendly Oregon... to visit her sister, of course.

What Marianne does not see is the perspective of Rose. Her daughter is witnessing her mother's mental decline and is helpless to do anything about it. She is pushed away and treated like a gold digger.

In converse, the daughter is more wrapped up in her stress of being a caretaker than to enjoy the last days with her mother. Rose’s relationship is complicated by her mother’s disgruntled attitude, finances, medical and legal appointments. Rose appears to have little power and is reminded of her insignificance, to the point where Rose visits her mother only once per day.

The narrative asks the reader: which view of the situation is correct? Each character sees the other as a hostile combatant, instead of as family. A true-to-life situation as the older and the younger women become at odds, both afraid to address the real issues of their relationship and what Marianne’s death would mean to them both. As these circumstances often yield two struggling individuals, who are unable to communicate with each other, because their emotions are dominated by ego instead of compassion.  

The story, Marianne, shows how a situation can lead people down the path of ungratefulness. Ungrateful to have a caring daughter who takes care of Marianne. Ungrateful for the time Rose has left with her mother.

The reader is not only taken on a journey of this complicated relationship, but also navigates its audience through the collapsing mind of Marianne herself. A good read that asks many hard questions. In the end, the reader is to decide what it all meant. If being at odds with a failing loved one has meaning at all.

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Purchase 

To read, Marianne, purchase Visions anthology here: https://books2read.com/u/49Lk28.

 

Giveaway 

Five digital copies will be given away in a random drawing at the end of the tour. Each stop visited earns an entry. Let me know you were there by leaving a comment.     

To Enter the Giveaway... go to Writing to be Read and leave a Comment.

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Joseph Carrabis told stories to anyone who would listen, starting in childhood, wrote his first stories in grade school and started getting paid for his writing in 1978. He's been everything from a long-haul trucker to a Chief Research Scientist and holds patents covering mathematics, anthropology, neuroscience, and linguistics. After patenting a technology which he created in his basement and creating an international company, he retired from corporate life and now he spends his time writing fiction based on his experiences. His work appears regularly in several anthologies and his own published novels. You can learn more about him at https://josephcarrabis.com and find much of his work at http://nlb.pub/amazon.