Jody Gerbig held a book signing yesterday at Art Access in Columbus, OH. She did a reading and talked about her background and the narrative choices she made when writing Unmasked. The event was reported a success.

Today I came across an article in The Guardian that discussed a debate at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The topic under consideration was whether British biblio-couple Richard & Judy should be pushing good literature rather than pablum.

My interest in that particular debate is very slight (I’ve never seen the show after all), but a statement made by novelist Andrew O’Hagen caught my attention.

‘When you speak to students, if you teach on a creative writing course, often what you find is that they are not interested in life at the level of the sentence,’ he said. ‘When you try to activate some interest, they find that slightly distracting. What they want to talk about is what it would be like to be a famous novelist.’

The problem is, if, as an author, you don’t value life at the level of the sentence, you’ll never be a famous, or even successful, novelist. As an editor, I see the results all the time of the apathy O’Hagan speaks of. A kind of carelessness toward the words that are the materials of the craft—a disregard for euphony, syntax, and even clarity. The whole universe of the story is contained in each and every sentence. The sentence is where the characters live and breathe. If you want to be a novelist that’s where you have to be.

According to the results of an experiment by three neuroscientists, the region (called the IFO) of the brain active when actually experiencing disgust, delight, or pain is also stimulated when observing someone who is experiencing those feelings or when reading about such an experience:

The team found that the IFO was activated in all three tasks. They say that this similarity between first-hand experience and imagination helps to explain why fiction can be so compelling. “This is why books and movies work – they stimulate the area of the brain which is involved in what it really feels like to be disgusted,” says Christian Keysers, a member of Jabbi’s team. – from New Scientist magazine