Mental Pain Control Techniques, and Writing.

Old memories. (Billy Hathorn, Wiki.)

Louis Shalako

No one likes going to the dentist. 

When I was growing up, the old air-powered drill had a speed of about 750 rpm and the doctor wasn’t shy with the novocaine because you really had to pedal to get it going that fast.

It was painful, and it seemed to take forever when he put the eighth-inch grinding stone on there and had a bash at the old tooth.

When I was a certain age, the doctor was drilling away, and it was sheer hell. I hadn’t slept the night before, and the fact is that I was afraid of the dentist. For whatever reason, I liked a certain kind of car. I had just been driving along a winding road in autumn in my little Austin Mini. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you are young, and you have just gotten your license, it is a new and unique experience. The car had a free-flow exhaust tip on the back end and it sounded all right to a seventeen year-old.

It made an impression—and the other car I had been driving recently was an M.G.B that I borrowed from a local used car lot at the corner of East and Ontario streets. It was maroon, the engine was tuned nicely and there was a light mist falling. I let the clutch out a bit hard and it spun wheels and fishtailed when I turned at an intersection. She snapped back with a bit of opposite lock. It was easy enough to control. It was autumn. I took the car around a few blocks and brought it back, telling them I would try and save up some more money, and then I probably tried out an Opel GT or something. 

They were asking about thirteen hundred for that one. That car was metallic blue, had a white racing stripe up the hood, and was shod in Cragar rims and big meats, 50 and 60-series tires on aluminum rims. It had a very small padded steering wheel with thick foam on the rim. It handled like one might expect, but I eventually went on to buy an MG.

Somehow, to take my mind off the pain and the amount of time it was taking, I did my best to visualize myself in an open sports car, driving down a curving road in hilly country. I tried to recreate the burbling note of the engine and exhaust, to feel the wheel in my hand, and to see the leaves falling through beams of sunlight, coming in on a low angle through the branches overhead on a warm and gentle fall day in southern Ontario.

The funny thing is that it worked. It worked well enough, that at some point the doctor stopped drilling. He put the drill on the tray and started messing around with some kind of paste, metal or whatever, it was all amalgam back then. In later years the stuff falls out or people have it taken out and replaced with more modern materials. I think I impressed myself that day.

It worked well enough that I remembered that experience. That must be at least thirty years ago.

Much stronger and much more advanced techniques are probably taught in certain schools, but subjects under torture for any length of time probably break down fairly quickly. All they have to do is start drilling a tooth and most of us would probably tell them anything they wanted to know…we’d sing like canaries, wouldn’t we?

The M.G.B. had good steering, it sat low to the ground. The gear shift lever has been described as somewhat like the bolt on a good sporting rifle. The brakes were good enough for their time and price, one would say. It’s a lot of fun to drive. But the real lesson is one of endurance—the endurance of pain, possibly even the lessening of pain. This is technically feasible, it’s not all just anecdotal evidence from guys like me, either.

Here is some information on EFT for Physical pain.

From time to time I suffer from depression. Yesterday, I had a bad hour or so, for no real reason other than the fact that it’s winter. There’s not much to do when you’re single and you’re broke except work, really. My work is solitary, perhaps even isolated, which is where social media is a real blessing sometimes.

Ah, but this is the thing: I was done one story and hadn’t started another. I had sixteen or seventeen hours of the day to kill before I could go to bed again—this is typical depressive thinking, one might observe with whatever editorial detachment one might have.

And then I started into another story. When working on a story, we can escape into that world, in fact the more thoroughly we engage with it, the more convincing it will be.

The first person a salesman has to convince is him or herself. It’s kind of a no-brainer, but if you don’t have some regard for the product you are selling, you will have great difficulty selling that product.

Sales is personality-based. You have to love the customer, and you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else. You need some sincerity, or you really are a snake-oil rep, totally cynical and hard-hearted.

Once you as a writer are convinced—and my new story, set in a fishing camp up around Espanola, Ontario, has me convinced to some extent—then it takes on a life of its own. It is a place to escape to in the very same way that M.G. was a place of refuge when the doctor was drilling into that nasty old molar.

One might think that in a few days, I will have another story done and then I will be looking for some new place to escape to. I have a few more short story ideas to keep me going for a while.

Hopefully by March or April, possibly in May, I really need to head off to Paris, (mentally), so that I can research and write another sort of story. I sort of plan those because it’s a major commitment of time, effort and focus to write a longer work. Short stories will help to make it through the winter.

What is your dream vacation?

Sure beats that nasty old dentist chair.

I don’t know about you guys, but a little love, a little romance, or maybe even just a good old fling holds a certain appeal. Someplace warm would be nice, but inside of the mind, it can be any season I want. Right?

Mentally, anyways.

As for vacations, I can’t afford anything else!

END

A Rambling Discourse On Method.

Louis Shalako

Publishing is not rocket science.

When my old computer was dying, and I knew I had to get a new one, it was obvious that there would be a transition, some kind of learning curve, if and when I got a new one.

Everything worthwhile in life has some kind of learning curve. For example, my brand new program has metric for the margins and page sizes, headers and footers. I’m used to measurements in the old English system. In the short term, I fiddle with the measurements when making a print on demand paperback. When I find something that works, I jot it down, even though the measurements for a 250-page POD are irrelevant for a 440-page POD. With my new program, I have published a handful of ebook titles and one or two PODs.

The thing is quick. When I perform an operation, there is no waiting around, no going into the kitchen and setting some eggs on to boil for egg salad sandwiches.

It’s a learning curve, and over time, looking at it often enough, it will become as natural as breathing. 

I won’t even be able to explain it.

My new program wanted me to work in the cloud. The interface was tiny. I was so pissed-off when I saw that, it practically made me sick to my stomach. I was throwing hissy-fits, I kid you not. I was spitting mad. With a remote session with my tech guy, I can now create a document on the desktop and keep it there where the interface is similar but cleaner than the old XP version.

(In a bit of a side-bar, going blind is not a fucking joke.)

It used to take my old machine anything up to thirty seconds or more to open an email.

It took a second to see what it was, and then thirty more seconds to delete it and open up the next one….

Life’s a lot easier, even though there was a bit of a panic session when I went to print something and discovered the machine didn’t want to do it. When I hooked up my printer, the thing went directly online and downloaded the program, so I thought that was it. The disc is in a box somewhere, and it took quite a long time to load on the old machine. But the fact was, I had to hack around a bit to learn that the thing won’t print until ‘OneNote’ (another cloud aspect of this program) had been opened at least once.

You have to sign into your Microsoft account, but then I did that to activate and validate the new software anyways. Short story made longer, now we can print.

And the whole game is like that. You pay as you go and learn as you go, and you can push it as far as you want.

***

As the reader knows, we like conducting experiments. Recently we went on Smashwords and opted out of Kobo distribution for five pen names and something like a hundred titles.

Then we went to Kobo and opened an account. We uploaded the exact same titles to Kobo. We don’t give a shit so much about the royalty rate. But in the entire year last year, we sold a grand total of three books by using the Kobo distribution channel through SW. If you’re not selling any books the royalty rate is irrelevant.

What is important is thinking clearly.

We’ve sold three books this year, in about two weeks. What’s really different is that we can see free books being downloaded. This Kobo channel information is unavailable from SW. It would be nice to know which titles are going for free on Kobo. This way we would know what sort of material to produce more of.

They have to see your book before they can take it for free. For all we knew there was no one looking at our books on the Kobo site—judging by the data provided by SW. Yet we know that’s not true now.

As to whether that was true or not, we simply don’t know based upon zero information, however, we can safely say that we have distributed 480 + free titles through Kobo since the experiment began just a couple of short months ago.

***

Later today, we will take our half-dozen latest titles down from SW on the Kobo distribution channel. The fact that we left them up when publishing simply made our day simpler. We’ll stick them up directly through Kobo. This means that our titles will pop out on the just released page twice, and we will now have more control over prices on each individual platform. We can set a book for free on Kobo, and it won’t affect the price on Barnes & Noble, iTunes, etc.

At some point in the future, if we get bored enough or disappointed enough, we’ll sign up for iTunes, go through the whole ITIN/tax withholding rigmarole, and upload directly to them for greater control over pricing and availability. It is irritating to upload a fresh cover and then on some site or other, discover that they’re still using something from three years ago.

It would be interesting to see what sort of metrics and analytics we can get off that site, and it would also be interesting to fiddle with the site and see if we can move a few more books.

This is no big reflection or criticism of Smashwords, but it is a logical extension of our knowledge and our capabilities.

Other than that, things are going along about as well as expected. At some point in the future, for example when I get the new machine paid down a bit, we can purchase Adobe Photoshop and learn how to use that too.

It’s all part of the constant learning curve that is modern digital publishing.

That is our basic method and our most useful tool: a willingness to experiment, and one would think a willingness to learn the job and to do the work.

END

Psi-Ops

Louis Shalako

It was a hazy memory, but it was there nevertheless.

.............U.S. Army Classified Document

In the modern context warfare is no longer constrained to the battlefield or geographic locations. Psi-ops shall be considered to be any extension of battlefield operations conducted by alternate means. Psychic ops are an important adjunct to conventional weapons. Wars are still won by boots on the ground. That victory will be prepared and sustained by psi-ops. Victory will be assured by the proper use of psychic operations. Psi-ops personnel will be highly-trained and fully utilize unusual senses or attributes of the brain involving projection of thoughts and the dominance of enemy and other minds, as well as the use of technologies and systems associated with psi-ops.

This includes electronic intelligence gathering, data-mining, surveillance of human resources friendly and otherwise, psi-hacking and counter psi-hacking, and significant other forms of psychological and psychic operations.

#

Bancroft Emerald allowed the suspect to sleep. Much of the training was murky, necessarily so. The average recruit would go mad at the deeper implications of policy if taken to their logical extension. 

Even so, he was pleased. It was one step closer to success. The lean features of the figure on the bed mirrored his own. The fellow was a slightly-shorter, lighter version of himself of just a few years ago. 

The red hair and blue eyes were uncomfortable reminders of his own humanity.

This one was relatively well-trained, but in the end, weakness prevailed. This wasn’t unusual, what was unusual was for Bancroft to have a moment of conscience, an introspective mood that had hit him as soon as he woke up this morning. Perhaps the dankness in the bleak little flat in the three-floor battleship grey painted brick house overlooking the projects by the river had something to do with it. 

Perhaps drab rations and bad air also had something to do with it. Loneliness and isolation had much to do with it.

He felt a twinge of something. It was strong, but he shrugged it off. He had been engaged in a background battle with something, with someone or other, all week long. He was convinced this was the case. It had to be it—it was a feeling like no other. It only stood to reason, that having made great progress in the use of practical psychic warfare, their enemy was bound to respond.

They could only hold a secret so long. All competitive edges became dulled over time. The signs were there, ambushes, timely reinforcement by the enemy of key sectors vulnerable to attack, new technologies arising to defeat new weapon systems thought to have been developed in great secrecy…

Sooner or later, someone was bound to get caught. Someone had been captured, interrogated, just as he was doing with Henry ‘Hank’ Maloney, and sooner or later someone would have talked, not so much to save their own skin, although that was always a consideration. Prisoners would be exchanged from time to time, if only to prove their existence. But more likely they would talk to earn a quick and easy execution. Bancroft knew the feeling. He’d been there, but only once, and having been liberated in the nick of time, ensured the execution of those operatives involved in his breaking. 

For surely that was what they had done. He was suspect now, and would always be relegated to lesser duties. Even so, he hadn’t taken it personally. It was standard operating procedure. It was war. It worked both ways. The opposition knew that very well.

But the enemy was making progress.

It was only a matter of time before they caught up, or made a breakthrough in another area, one where perhaps the Conglomerate had a weakness. Maybe they just got lucky one day and bred a super-psychic warrior that would dominate the battlefield. Every so often he acknowledged that presence, as enemies do from one trench to another, just as they had for millennia. He sensed its caress, as it sought him out and explored him in a cautious reconnaissance, and at the same time tried to disguise its presence by the equivalent of smoke and mirrors. It, whoever it was, still thought he was stupid…he had a kind of contempt for the clumsy thing.

This was the equivalent of heavy shelling just over the horizon in the conventional sense. It was annoying, and of course it would go on all night. It really wasn’t much of a threat.

The fellow sleeping across from him had been trained by the U.S. Army, but that meant nothing. He was a shell, one who had his own thoughts and his own identity, but he was one who had somehow submitted a little too deeply to the indoctrination. Once that indoctrination had been broken down and overcome, at least three other agencies had made use of him. He was a lost soul.

He would be shot if the Army ever caught up with him again, and perhaps that was merciful. It wasn’t so much his guilt, for he was surely a casualty as much as any man. He was a hazard—he could no longer be trusted with useful work. He was a threat and an embarrassment to those who had created him.

While the dreams could be so helpful, it was the nightmares that marked him out as special, although actual sympathy for the damned was somehow foreign to him. Bancroft had been very well trained, when you got right down to the facts.

The problem was what to do with Hank. Would he be useful, albeit expendable against the higher-value targets?

He burrowed more deeply into the sleeping man’s head, now that the subject was no longer in a position to resist, although many actually helped their examiners by compensating for perceived insecurities.

What he saw next didn’t shock him, exactly. He had seen it all before. It was a common element in all of their stories.

Children of the labs, is what they were called unofficially. Hank had been afraid of something under the bed, a discovery which brought a faint smile of humanity to Bancroft’s placid features. Youthful dreams had a consistency which often surprised the outside observer. All children were created equal.

He felt himself slipping, and then, stunned by a spike of pain that impaled him from the top of his skull down through his rectum, he flew up into the flames, smoke and darkness of a whole new phase of reality. His guts lurched when he realized that he had stumbled into a trap, and in a sense of complete comfort had left himself wide open to attack.

He just had time to know what hit him.

END