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Book Review Behave by Robert M Sopolsky

For anyone who wants to understand all of the huge number of factors that influence human behavior, as well as counter overly pat, simple, or downright mythological explanations for it, I cannot recommend a book more highly than this one. Every page – and there are almost 700 of them - is just packed with enlightening information on the role of almost everything you can think of. 

These factors include genes, gene regulation, epigenetics, neurotransmitters, hormones, brain structures, neural networks, unconscious cuing and sensory triggers, stress responses and protective factors, neural plasticity, peers and social acceptance, attachment figures, brain development in childhood and adolescence, socioeconomic and hierarchical status, collectivist vs. individualistic cultures, gender, reactions to “them” vs. “us,” heritibility  vs. inheritance of traits, gene/environmental interactions,  population density, evolution (individual, kin, and group selection), reciprocal and pathological altruism, obedience vs. resistance, cooperation vs. competition, and empathy. And a whole lot more.

Can one book really be that encyclopedic?? Yes! I have no idea how he accomplished writing this. 

If you do not understand some of the scientific concepts that are under discussion, he conveniently includes three appendices in the book to help explain them. Not that the main body of the book is dry and overly technical. It is laced throughout with witty jokes, stories, and ironic observations that kept me thoroughly entertained.

Does he leave anything out? Well, yes, he does not seem to know about the effects of rapid cultural change on families which may create shared intrapsychic conflicts leading to parents giving mixed messages to their children which then trigger and reinforce their repetitive self destructive behavior. But I haven’t yet seen anyone else write about that besides me – at least not in the way I have conceptualized the process - so I wouldn’t expect that. He also doesn’t discuss the effects of chaos theory on the amazingly multi-factorial “causes” of behavior he goes into - a minor quibble.

Sopolsky shoots down behavioral and neuroscientific myths believed by health care professionals, some scientists, and the lay public alike (what mirror neurons actually do, for example) with the abandon of someone armed with an Uzi facing off against people armed with swords. Amazing.

Some of his important points: 

1.       Brains and cultures co-evolve.

2.       We haven’t evolved to be selfish or altruistic, but to behave in particular ways in particular settings. Context is everything.

3.       Genes are not about inevitabilities, but about potentials and vulnerabilities, and they do not determine any behavior on their own.

4.       Evolution has been most consequential when altering regulation of genes, not the genes themselves.

5.       Saying a biological system works well is not a value judgment – it can function equally well for those who do something wonderful or in those who do something horrific.

6.       Nothing seems to cause anything - everything just modulates something else within a specific environmental context. And changing one thing often changes ten other things as a byproduct.

7.       Any causative factor within any specified population of individuals within any specific environmental context has an average effect on behavior that may or may not apply to any given individual. There are always exceptions.

What an accomplishment.

Book Review David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

In my blog post of May 12, Are Scientists More Objective and Rational than the Rest of Us?, I related the stories of some scientists who somehow were able to “think outside the box,” to use the annoyingly well-worn cliché. They broke through the conventional wisdom, academic politics, and scientist groupthink and made radical changes to accepted scientific concepts and explanations for various phenomenon. 

I discussed Clare Patterson, who successfully took on a respected scientist who had became an oil industry lackey and who had pushed the idea that lead in gasoline was not dangerously polluting the environment. 

Then there was Elizabeth Gould, who took on neuroscience guru Pasko Rakic, who had set the field of neurobiology back a full decade by refusing to believe a lot of data coming out that disproved the prevailing notion that sophisticated animals are born with essentially every brain cell they would ever have, and that no new neurons develop during adulthood.

Another good example was German meteorologist Alfred Wegener, who first proposed – way back in 1915 - that South America and Africa had one time been joined. He was almost laughed out of academia. He even had fossil evidence for his proposition, but the geologists of his day not only mocked him but counter-proposed that there are (now sunken) land bridges to account for the fossils - without any evidence that this was in fact the case. Now all geologists accept the theory of plate tectonics.

So what makes some people able to do this? This is actually two questions, not one: First, why can some people think in novel ways while others seem stuck with the groupthink no matter how preposterous it starts to become? Second, why do some of these people succeed in creating – again pardon the second annoyingly well worn cliché – a paradigm shift in the scientific community, while others fail?

I was discussing these questions with a friend, and in response he gave me an interesting book called David and Goliath, Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell.

Malcolm Gladwell

It’s mostly about the individual and group factors that lead some people to think apart from prevailing wisdom, rather than about which of these people succeed in making a mark and which do not, but I thought it was a very interesting read.

Now of course Mr. Gladwell is a journalist and not a neuroscientist or psychologist, and his work has garnered a lot of public criticism from professionals in those fields, particularly Steven Pinker and Chris Chabris. Gladwell is above all a storyteller, but he goes on to make some interesting hypotheses about the psychology – and to a lesser extent the sociology – of the people at the center of his stories. He then speculates further about what these hypotheses could mean more generally.

Chabris accused him of “telling just-so stories and cherry-picking science to back them up,” and “presenting as proven laws what are just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behaviour.”

Fair enough, although I'm not sure I would agree that Gladwell is saying his ideas are proven. On the other hand, the belief of some psychologists in the sanctity of statistics and so-called empirical studies in the social sciences is also grossly overestimated. There are some inherent limitations in our current ability to explain and predict things, particularly in psychology. In the words of the neurobiologist Steve Rose, "It is in the nature of living things to be radically indeterminate."

I discussed the issue of “anecdotal” evidence versus inductive conclusions in a prior post. But an even bigger problem is the obvious difficulty in precisely mapping out the interactions between genes and environment, when there are literally thousands of environmental variables and a trillion constantly changing synaptic connections between brain cells, all of which interact at constantly changing frequencies over decades. No one can even come close to controlling for all of these variables in a lab experiment. This is the definition of chaos.

Sometimes the best way to eventually understand a psychological question of this sort – and one can only talk about increased or decreased probabilities of certain results given certain pre-conditions, never about anything approaching absolute certainty – is by looking at all the details in the stories of a variety of individuals. With all of the variables at work, only individual stories can provide some of these necessary details. With psychology, details matter. 

And sometimes it is the exceptions to the conventional wisdom that prove or disprove a perceived “rule.”

So with this in mind, reading Gladwell’s stories does bring up some intriguing possibilities. His major premise is that the experience of certain types of adversities can make someone stronger and far more resolute than he or she might be otherwise. Gladwell brings up, for example, the strength of the population of London during the rocket and bombing attacks by the Germans in World War II. The fact that so many people experienced what he calls a “near miss” – surviving a bombing in which your neighbors did not - can strengthen people's resolve to carry on.

He also discusses how some people with dyslexia had to ingeniously develop alternate ways of accomplishing certain tasks in order to overcome their limitations, which later helped them to be wildly successful. Again, I do not think the author is arguing that dyslexia is a good thing, or that for most people it does not impair or even destroy their attempts at success. So other variables are obviously involved.  

But that doesn’t necessarily negate the premise that sometimes weaknesses can be turned into strengths – as David did in the story of David and Goliath. Goliath was only prepared to fight someone who fought just like him, which left him vulnerable to a projectile from a slingshot.

Then there was the story of Emil “Jay” Freireich, a doctor who was a major player in the vast improvement in the treatment of childhood leukemia. The good doctor lost his father when he was quite young to a probable suicide after the stock market crash of 1929. The family was left destitute, and the mother was frequently absent in order to work, leaving him to fend for himself.

To oversimplify just a bit, Freireich realized that children were dying because individual drugs, which were causing horrific side effects, did not work fast enough. The leukemia killed the children before the drugs really had time to work. The drugs were just not killing enough cancer cells quickly enough. He knew that this meant that the children needed more aggressive treatment, and that drug “cocktails” were probably called for. But this meant that the children would suffer even more horrible side effects as the cocktails were given to them, and the medical establishment recoiled in horror at such a thought.

But Freireich had learned to persist in the face of adversity, and would not be deterred. Of course, the places in which he worked could have easily fired him for his activities, so a lot of luck was also involved. He had to be surrounded by at least some people who recognized the possibility that he might just be right. Fortunately, that was the case. Today’s cure rate for the type of cancer he fought stands at about 90%.

As Gladwell points out, “Does this mean that Freireich should be glad he had the kind of childhood he had? The answer is plainly no. What he went through as a child was something no child should have to endure…the right question is whether we as a society needpeople who have emerged from some kind of trauma – and the answer is that we plainly do.”

As an aside, Gladwell also brings up sort of in passing something that I wanted to mention because it puts an additional, very interesting new spin on the problem of some African Americans internalizing the racist, negative attitudes of Whites toward Blacks, so that they end up treating each other just like Whites used to treat them. I discussed this in my post of 8/14/2010 called The N-word. 

In some cases, apparently African slaves actually pretended to act out White stereotypes - in order to passive-aggressively harm their slaveholders! Gladwell quotes historian Lawrence Lavine about the phenomenon of the "trickster hero": 

"...a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their master's property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves."

So, when African Americans makes themselves look like a parody of a White stereotype, are they doing this on purpose to be a trickster, or subconsciously out of fears - originally concerning retribution - passed down unknowingly from one generation to the next? Actually, any given case could be either one - or even both. That the behavior can be this ambiguous shows the power of what I call the actor's paradox.

Book Review Madness and Memory by Stanley B Prusiner M D

I thought I'd take a short break from the main themes of this blog to focus on another subject on which I have been working (getting together an edited volume by multiple contributors): How scientists may block important, transformative ideas from gaining prominence because of group biases and prejudices. 

I will review the book Madness and Memory, which is an amazing first-person account of the trials and tribulations of one scientist who somehow managed to keep getting his research funded, and who continuously did very careful studies despite mass skepticism about his discoveries from other scientists as well as from the lay press.

Strangely enough, the skepticism from infectious disease doctors, particularly those who specialize in viruses, continued even after the scientist, author Stanley Prusiner, was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work!

In this case, I do understand the reasons for the skepticism. Dr. P. discovered an entirely new form of seemingly self-reproducing infectious agent that did not contain either DNA or RNA. These nucleic acids were reasonably thought by almost all biologists to be required for any biological agent to reproduce itself. The new agents are called prions (pree-ons), and consist entirely of proteins. 

They are the definite cause of some obscure neurological degenerative diseases such as Kuru, Scrapie, and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. (In medical school I knew it as Jakob-Creutzfeld disease - the name reversal has a rather silly story which the author relates in his book. Despite the ramblings of memory "expert" Elizabeth Lofton, my memory that the name had been different when I was in medical school 45 years ago was entirely accurate).

You may also have heard of another important prion-caused entity, dubbed by the press as "mad cow disease." People could get it from eating meat from infected cattle.

Most importantly, prions are quite likely the cause of the more common types of neurodegenerative disorders: Parkinson's Disease, Lewy Body Demetia, and Alzheimer's.

As best as I can understand prions from the descriptions in the book, they are once-normal proteins that had been encoded, as one might expect, by chromosomal DNA in various organisms, but which somehow later changed shape and became almost more of a toxin than an infectious agent. The altered proteins then somehow lead to a chain reaction in which other normal proteins of the same chemical makeup change shape as well, and therefore seem to multiply. 

Tissue with the prions can then be transferred to another organism and then start to destroy the nervous systems in the new beast over extended periods of time. The time before animals become symptomatic can be years. (Before it was found that prions contained no DNA or RNA, these diseases were assumed to be caused by a "slow virus"). It is this property, I surmise, that makes them "infectious."

The fact that Prusiner did not get discouraged when he was being attacked by all sides is very impressive. His networking skills must have been substantial, as every time someone threw a road block in the way of his research, he was able to find someone else who could provide him with an alternative. 

He would literally call up the editors of the most prestigious journals like Cell and Science and discuss his research results before even submitting an article for publication. (When I was an academic, I had no idea that you could even do that! And I probably wouldn't have gotten away with it anyway). He was also able to manage to find help from academics in several seemingly unrelated disciplines who would be key in his discoveries.

At least he didn't have to worry about the privacy rights of his rats and hamsters. Psychiatrists like me who work with subtle and pretext-laden human interactions have to be concerned about that.

The pressures he faced were enormous. In academia, if you don't get enough publications, you don't get tenure, and if you don't get tenure, you no longer have a job. You also live in constant fear that some other scientist somewhere else will beat you to a confirming experiment and publish it before you do, or that someone else will make a discovery that will bring your ideas into question ("A few pages in a reputable journal can render another scientist's years of toil virtually worthless"). 

You get feedback from "peer reviewers" of your submitted work than can be absolutely vicious. Dr. P. had to suddenly find new places to house his rodents due to concerns about animal rights activists who were more concerned with rats than people. The press, always looking for a sexy story, quoted his critics to publicly attack him.

I am envious of anyone like Dr. Pruisner who was so skillful at negotiating academic politics, because I was not. I unfortunately had minimal guidance from those around me. I found it impossible to get funding for researching the phenomena that I was witnessing first hand every day in my practice with my patients with personality disorders and their families, and which only one other author was even writing about. 

Prusiner quotes someone named Maurice Maeterlinck about this type of problem: "At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, tradition has placed, against each of us, then thousand men to guard the past."

He also quotes Hilary Koprowski on the "Four stages of adopting a new idea:"

1. "It's impossible, it's nonsense, don't waste my time."

2. "Maybe it's possible, but it's week and uninteresting. It's clearly not  important."

3. "It's true and I told you so. I always said it was a good idea.

4. "I thought of it first."

For anyone interested in understanding what doing science is really like, and what scientists can be up against, I recommend this book.

Book Review Transcending the Personalty Disordered Parent Psychological and Spiritual Tactics

Self-help books for the adult offspring of highly dysfunctional, personality-disordered parents are in woefully short supply. Children raised in such households often grow up to have high emotional vulnerability,  a poor self image, and a high degree of confusion about what kind of people they are supposed to be or what they should expect from their relationships.  Worse yet, they sometimes become just like their parents in some way, even if they try to do things in an exactly opposite way.

If they do not have access to a therapist for whatever reason, is there anything they can do in order to better understand what has happened to them, and how to think about the problems that have resulted from their bewildering and traumatic upbringing? 

In a new book, academic psychiatrist Randy Sansone and academic psychologist Michael Wiederman attempt in ordinary language to help such individuals recognize the dysfunctional parenting styles they had been subjected to, and to understand a little bit about what makes their parents act the way they do. 

They describe in detail how such parents may do any or all of the following, among other things:  

• ·     They act like monsters with their family members, but are liked and highly-respected outside of the home - creating an almost Jeckyl and Hyde situation. 
• 
  
• ·     They seem to think that their children should be taking care of them - but undermine any effort the children make to actually try and do so.
• 
  
• ·     They seem to see children a big burden, yet won’t them go.
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• ·     They pit one of their children against another, creating even more widespread family discord.
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• ·     They accuse their children of the very negative traits that they themselves display in spades.
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• ·     They seem to over-react to seemingly minor transgressions made by family members, and in response become abusive and bullying.
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• ·     They seem to be in a constant state of denial about past misdeeds.  Or are they maybe just lying about it?
• 
  
• ·     They oscillate between intruding on the lives of their children when they don't need help, and neglecting them when they do.

The authors go on to suggest ways in which readers who have grown up with parents like these can conceptualize and think about their family experiences. 

Although they do not cite her by name, many of their recommendations seem to stem from the concepts of “mindfulness” and "radical acceptance" that come from the work of Marsha Linehan with personality disordered patients.  These ideas involve the adult children giving up trying to completely make sense of their dysfunctional parents, completely accepting their situation as it is, stopping efforts to make their parents change, and viewing their experiences as an opportunity for growth rather than as an obstacle to it.

As I mentioned, there is a serious need for a book like this, and I applaud the authors for their efforts. I also think many of their suggestions are indeed helpful, especially for those who are not seeing a family-systems oriented psychotherapist for whatever reason.

I do, however, have some quibbles with their explanations for the personality disordered parents, and I frankly strongly disagree with a couple of their recommendations.

The authors do try to be somewhat empathic with the plight of the dysfunctional parents, but their descriptions of them, understandably, veer away from that. The authors could benefit from an understanding of family systems theory. They come ever so close to Murray Bowen’s three generational understanding of the origins of self-destructive behavior, but just miss it.

For example, they discuss how the reader may have been given what Transactional Analysts call a “script” by their parents – in which the recipients of the script act out in ways that seem to be for the benefit of their parents at the expense of their own happiness. The authors do not mention, however, that perhaps the dysfunctional parent is also the unfortunate recipient of such a script from the grandparents.

In the same vein, the authors, like Marsha Linehan herself, mix up the personality disordered parent’s true self with his or her false self or persona. Is the exemplary behavior seen by outsiders the "true" nature of their personalities, or is it within their hidden-from-view dysfunctional family behavior?  This issue is somewhat analogous to my problem with Linehan’s idea of apparent competence – that somehow people can demonstrate through performance an ability they do not in fact have. How is that possible?

One father who they describe was a physician who was loved and idealized by his patients, but treated his children like crap. The authors seem to assume that the father’s “real” personality was the one he exhibited at home, while the one he exhibited at work was a fraud. Could it not be in fact the other way around?

I disagree with the authors recommendation that children of dysfunctional parents give up the idea of ever truly understanding their parents' behavior. I believe that through the use of three generational family histories called genograms that it is indeed possible to understand parental misbehavior (which, BTW, does not entail approving of it).

The authors also seem to be saying that nothing will ever change in their relationship with their parents, and that there is nothing the child can do about it. Those who read this blog know that I believe that, while adults (not children) are indeed powerless to change their parents, they  certainly do have the power to change their relationship with those parents.

The authors provide an example (p.187) purportedly showing the futility of getting personality-disordered parents to even admit that they did anything wrong in the past:  

“A patient was on the telephone with her highly dysfunctional mother. The mother was intoxicated with prescription analgesics, which was typical for her. The patient broached the issue of a babysitter who molested her and her sister for an entire year during their childhoods. At the time, both girls had told their mother about the molestation by the female sitter, but the mother continued to employ the sitter anyway. During the telephone conversation, the mother defensively stated in a slurred voice, “She only molested you girls a few weeks,” as if this nullified the injustice. Understandably, the patient exploded and proceeded to call her mother a number of obscenities.”

The authors concluded that the mother lacked the ability to validate her daughters feelings. The daughter therefore would never be able to get this validation, for which she longed.

I completely disagree. Let’s look at what happened in more detail. First of all, the daughter called the mother when the mother was intoxicated. I understand that it might be difficult to find a time to call when she was sober, but that fact alone guaranteed that the daughter would fail in her efforts to obtain validation. Second, I suspect that the way that the daughter brought up the molestation made it obvious to the mother that the daughter was highly critical of the mother’s lack of responsibility - as obvious as that lack of responsibility was. To the both of them, I might add. 

When anyone is attacked, they tend to respond with defensiveness, flight, or a returned attack. This is especially true in this case since I would wager that the mother really did, covertly, feel terrible about what she had done, and believed that the daughter was right to hate her for it.  Furthermore, I find that such parents feel they deserve hatred, and that their children are really better off without them.  

Mother therefore responded in a very hateful manner, which very helpfully gave the daughter more righteous justification for her hatred, and pushed her away to a place in which the mother viewed the daughter as safe from the mother’s pernicious influence.

If this daughter really wanted validation, she went about asking for it in exactly the wrong way, and the horrific response was entirely predictable.

Not that the right way is something easy to devise or to do, or that the complicated techniques that do in fact work are obvious. And this problem is further complicated by the fact that the right approach is different in every family and must be customized to each family member's sensitivities. Generic assertiveness skills are often useless.

Confronting maladaptive family patterns may in fact be extremely dangerous if done poorly. It almost always requires the coaching of a therapist who does this sort of work. As I have said repeatedly in this blog, finding such a therapist is well worth the effort.

Book Review Self Help for Your Nerves by Dr Claire Weekes

I started this blog in 2008 to share the story of my recovery from severe depression, in the hope that what I write may give practical advice, hope, and spiritual comfort to those suffering from depression, in the hope of helping them to cope with depression and speed them on the path to recovery.

In my enthusiasm to share my story, twelve months ago I joined a depression forum on a social networking site. One member asked others to share what practical things had helped them to recover from depression, so I gave a short list of some of the things that had helped me. This included advice from a friend (also dealing with depression) to find things that interested me and pursue them, learning that my world view had become distorted, regular physical exercise, seeing a doctor and being put on anti-depressant medication, Christian counselling, retraining my thought processes, and putting into practice the techniques presented in the book, "Self Help for your Nerves" by Dr Claire Weekes.





Another forum member attacked my post and concluded with the comment, "and burn the self-help book!" I then saw another post in the same forum titled, "Self help books, what are they good for?" Every comment on that post criticised self help books, with the general consensus being that they were only fit to be used as kindling.

Now with the glut of self-help books on the market today, I have no doubt that some of them deserve this fate. (Such as a self-published self help book on depression I saw on Amazon the other day…)

The fact is that I am indebited to "Self Help for your Nerves" for the very major role it played in my recovery from depression. Only after I read it did I truly understand what was wrong with me and how I had gotten into such a state. Only after I put into practice the amazing, practical advice shared in this book, written by someone who had been there herself, did hope re-enter my life as I began making great leaps forward in my recovery.

My mother had borrowed the book from the public library to lend to one of her friends, but I chanced upon the book before she passed it on. I was hooked from the first page, which said, ‘It will not be difficult for you to read this book: it is about you and your nerves, and for this reason you will read it with interest, whereas to read an ordinary book or newspaper may seem an impossibility, or, should you succeed, may leave you more distressed than when you first began.” (1)

This is the diary entry I wrote after reading the book, after struggling for eight months in a black pit from which I could see no escape:

28th July 1990 -
This book goes on to…describe EVERY single thing I have been suffering from for the past eight months, and even back for the five or so months prior to that. I had no idea all of the strange things in my mind, body, and emotions, were ALL interlinked and caused by the same thing! And it even says how I've been sitting and wondering what happened to me, and wondering if I’ll ever be the same again? The book explains everything, right down to obsessive thoughts, and that people who've developed this thing have probably been stuck with it for weeks, months - one guy even had it for ten years.
And for the last 8 months, as always, I've reacted to it in the same way. I have been scared of it, and feared all the many side effects and things that were going wrong with my mind, body, and emotions. And my other reaction has been to fight it. And now I have learned from this book that these two reactions are the wrong reactions, because they both only make it worse. Basically, my nerves have fallen apart, and have been manufacturing too much adrenalin. I have feared and fought, and this has produced more adrenalin, which made me fear or fight more, and it just got worse and worse and worse. It’s a catch 22 situation, a merry go round.
So this book has taught me how to react so that the merry go round will be stopped. And it’s teaching me how to react whenever it strikes again in the future.

If you pop over to Amazon.co.uk (just click the book's image above) and read the reviews on this book, and you will see that dozens of people have left 5-star reviews as they share with great delight how this book helped to overcome the grip anxiety had on their lives.

"Self Help for your Nerves" provides a comprehensive list of the symptoms that can be caused by anxiety, explains how they are caused, stresses the importance of seeing a doctor. It explains how to break the fear-adrenalin-fear cycle, discusses guilt, how to get a new point of view on obsessive fearful thoughts, being yourself again, do's and don'ts, and much more. And although this book was written some time ago, it's message is just as relevant today. Some messages, regardless of when they are written, contain wisdom that endures throughout all generations - like the most important timeless classic every written, the Bible.

And on that topic, even as I read "Self Help for your Nerves," I recognised immediately that it provided practical ways to put into practice Bible verses such as John 14:1, James 1:2-4, Philippians 4:12-13, 1 Thessalonians 5:18, 2 Corinthians 12:9-10.

Please note that this book is readily available from many public libraries, and can be purchased from Amazon.co.uk.


(1) ‘Self Help for Your Nerves,’ Doctor Claire Weekes, Angus & Robertston Publishers, 1989, p1.

YA Book Giveaway Cassandra Clare Collectors First Edition

Dear friends old and new,

It's been a wee bit silent here at the home o' the pony, and for that I apologize. I've decided to devote my evenings to completing my current work-in-progress, querying a second, and readying a third novel for publication. In the process, I am learning all about the power of self-publishing. If you're considering it, an excellent resource is Guy Kawasaki's Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, which I discovered at Social Media Marketing World 2013 in San Diego. It's a very empowering read that demonstrates the advantages of controlling one's own destiny as an author, and that sometimes the grass is browner on the other (traditional publishing) side.

There's a quote in the Kawasaki book that I particularly liked, by G.K. Chesterton: "I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder."

In the spirit of feeling deep gratitude for my fellow writer friends (online and off), I'm giving away this hardcover Cassandra Clare collector's first edition of Clockwork Princess (Book Three of The Infernal Devices), published in March of 2013. (Value: $19.99)

It's easy to enter: Just follow my blog, add a comment below (make sure I know how to contact you), and Tweet about and/or link to the giveaway (shouting from your rooftop is also encouraged!) I'm @feralpony so be sure to @ me if you're on Twitter.

The giveaway will end next Friday, May 3, 2013, at 8 p.m. EST. Good luck! I'll plan on more exciting giveaways soon, so stay tuned. I have a teetering pile of YA books including some juicy-looking ARCs.

While you're here, linger over some of my older posts. (Warning: Other followers have suggested that you must not eat rice pilaf or drink milk whilst reading.) The posts under MANY DREADFUL THINGS HAVE OCCURRED HERE are particularly dangerous.

And let me know what YOU'D like to see here on this blog. What can I share that might change your day or make you laugh? You just might inspire me to reinvigorate the blog...at least a little bit.

Have a thoroughly wonderful week!