Does This Make Me a Scientist?

Some marketing rather than editorial news this time. I can’t remember where I came across the publication, but there’s a journal in the UK called Paranormal Review. I don’t know how seriously it’s taken, but I gather it’s as close to one of those very high minded, peer reviewed, scientific journals run and read by academics (rather than consumer magazines) as the field of ghosts and the supernatural has.

Anyway, it seemed the perfect place to talk about Falling in some way, so I had to have something to offer them. A haiku or series of sonnets probably wouldn’t cut it – I needed something more seriously scientific.

Luckily I already had that in Falling’s extras, in the essay The Science of the Paranormal. It’s where I laid out my entire thesis about how hauntings might work in relation to the bioelectrical signals in our brain and electromagnetic fields in the universe, especially here on Earth (on land and at sea level where we all live, anyway).

I love science but I’m a bit like Socrates – the more I learn the more I realise how little I know, and any proper trained scientist would read the essay and undoubtedly eviscerate it as deluded fiction and plain bad science in no time. But I enjoyed putting the use case of it all together, even with my limited knowledge of biology and physics.

Anyway, I offered the editor an article based on the idea, figuring I could mention the website for Falling in the bio for a bit of publicity or something. Who might be more interested in reading a rollicking ghost story than people with a serious interest in the scientific approach to paranormal phenomena, after all?

To my surprise, he agreed.

So as we speak I’m in the midst of either expanding or condensing it. His only editorial comment was that in its current form it’s too short for a four spread article and too long for a two spread article.

I spent half a day just this week trying to expand it and to be honest I haven’t been very successful so far. The version I sent him didn’t have any of the information from the book version about how the brace is the receptor and the biomass of Dale’s body acts as a resistor, because a lot of that is specific to what happens in the book and the brace – something that obviously doesn’t exist.

Instead, I tried to be more general about how electronic devices near or in our body (from mobile phones to cochlear implants) might serve the same purpose the brace does, as well as how the body itself might be a resistance medium. But there just wasn’t enough there to increase it to the number of words I needed.

The likely next step is to take that stuff out and just cut the version I sent him to make the two spread word limit. It’d be easier but it’ll also be kind of a shame because I feel like I’m only telling half the story. In Falling the brace is the catalysing object that kicks off the whole plot, and it’s as much a part of the scientific jigsaw as the rest.

But the self-satisfaction and bragging rights are certainly nothing to sniff at – I’m getting an article published in a scientific journal based on a principle I made up in an area I’m fascinated about.

And regardless of the final content it contains, it’ll be accompanied by a bio of me that includes links to Falling’s website, so all I have to do then is sit back and wait for the results. Based on my marketing efforts so far that means a flood of absolutely no sales and a torrent of absolutely no attention.