Hey there. Enjoy these Author Notes from the third book in my Psychic Guardian Angel Series, Flying Objects.
I was engaged in a conversation with my sister-in-law, Suzanne Oliver, about the capabilities of the human mind. She asked me, “If you could train my brain to do one thing, what would it be?”
Without hesitation, I answered, “Train it to move objects.”
Suzy laughed and explained she meant training your brain to do things like remember names. The normal things we all struggle with.
I do well at remembering faces, especially in similar contexts. Sometimes, I remember faces out of context. After I remember the context, sometimes I can remember their names as well.
Remembering names has always been difficult. Maybe Suzy was on to something.
My memory has always been pretty good, especially on potentially worthless tidbits of information categorized as trivia. I should probably join a team and compete while I’m still able.
How is your memory?
What would you train your brain to do better?
Do you have a trivia specialty? Mine is probably music, movies, and TV. But I’ve never been tested on my knowledge of TV shows based on the paranormal.
A recent trivia exchange between some writing friends was based on the products we use every day that were actually a failed attempt at creating a different product. I guess they would be happy accidents. That conversation happened long after this book found its way into an electronic file. But it is reflected in this story.
The fact that many of our favorite consumables used to contain controlled substances feeds into Flying Objects. Thanks to Dawn Kennedy, one of my instructors at Anoka-Hennepin Community College for insights here. As does our desire to help and how wrong that can sometimes go.
Is every product we create a good thing until we learn the adverse reactions, the side effects, the long-term liabilities? Then it becomes retroactively bad? Should we slow down the pace of our creation until we know what can happen? Or are these creations so needed by our society that we should use them until we can collect enough evidence to know their true value? Or danger?
Jurassic Park had something to say about science. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. I think of it often and in many applications.
Should our desire to grow and create be restrained by a larger degree of caution? Or should we just stumble forward?
As I mentioned in First Casualty and prove here again, I have many questions and few answers. But I have stories to help search for answers. I know you, the readers of these words, are engaged in the same search. You have your stories to illustrate your questions, reveal the answers you have discovered, and share wisdom we all need to hear. I hope you will find a way to get those stories to the world. We all need answers.
If nothing else, we need to know we are not alone in our lack of knowledge.
Hang in there. Stay hopeful. Keep questing. And questioning. Thank you.
– A. W. Powers