The Misunderstood

Today’s guest on my blog is author Rae Stoltenkamp. Her books span the genres of fantasy, science fiction and magical realism. She is also a poet. In this article she talks about her experience teaching to a gifted child and how that influenced some of her books.

Before settling down to writing and self-publishing I used to be a full time teacher in an inner city London school. Regardless of the country you teach in, anyone will tell you this is a challenging environment. Very quickly into my teaching practice I realised I had a knack for communicating with children with Special Needs (SEN as it’s called here in the UK).

Most times when people think of Special Needs they latch onto the idea of a child with learning difficulties. Several times during my 13 year teaching stint I was reminded that while the majority of my students did indeed have these difficulties there were others whose behaviour marked them as SEN when in fact they were highly intelligent. Their lack of engagement with the average classroom content and insular or confrontational attitude masked their talent.

At the very start of my teaching career, an introductory lesson on Of Mice & Men to my SEN class brought a gifted student – let’s call her Andria - to my attention. Andria exhibited many of the traits identified with the gifted:

• Curiosity – endless questions
• Ignoring the teacher’s brief for assignments – going off piste and doing her own thing
• Advanced vocabulary – she regularly used 3 or 4 syllable words in appropriate context
• Lack of engagement with her peers – often got involved in conversations with support staff and myself while appearing to ignore fellow students
• Strong emotions – Andria often voiced her opinion on topics in a loud and seemingly abrasive manner
• Outside the box thinking

When I first understood this was the case with Andria, I confess to feeling intimidated. Andria’s breadth of knowledge on certain subjects was superior to mine. Her general knowledge and vocabulary was outstanding. She understood my subtle jokes which often went over the heads of some support staff and she was certainly not shy about telling me when she thought I had supplied the class with incorrect facts.

To teach Andria I had to take a different approach to the one I was using with the rest of my class. The first thing I did was give her a solo assignment on the Social & Historical background of the novel. Admittedly, I did this at the time as a way to keep her busy at the classroom computer so I could get the rest of the class settled.

10 minutes into the lesson, a quick glance over her shoulder told me she had the matter well in hand. So I decided to add some parameters to see if she could cope with them. I stipulated her research had to be on a Powerpoint presentation of 10 - 15 slides, include images and be in language her other classmates could easily understand. Then I also demanded a bibliography. Chewing on a thumb nail I waited for her reaction. After asking what a bibliography was and listening to my explanation, she then simply got on with the task.

Andria was engaged all lesson. I kept tabs on her and made suggestions as the Powerpoint developed. Looking over her printed slides later that day I realised I was out of my depth. So I headed for the library. Very old school – I know. This was in the days before the internet and search engines were at their peak. An hour later I was very deflated. I didn’t possibly have the skills to teach this child. Everything I read indicated she was in a class of her own.

It took a train and bus commute home to still my doubts. I reminded myself I got into teaching to facilitate, not to quit as soon as I hit my first hurdle. I also called my mother – she was the font of all wisdom. The first thing she told me was that I had to shelve my own intellectual insecurities and focus on Andria and her needs solely. I had to engage with my self-doubt and admit it was likely Andria would ask me questions I couldn’t answer. I would have to tackle this issue and deal with it. I would have to be resourceful in my approach.

Thus Andria led me on a journey of discovery where I began to understand that the gifted can be as neglected as those with learning difficulties. I resolved that this would never ever be the case in my classroom. Andria left my class after the next round of assessment. She moved to a top set. The next academic year the government introduced Mixed Ability teaching. Many more like Andria passed through my classroom before I gave up full time teaching.

I suspect Andria and the other gifted students I met during my teaching career are the reason gifted children often creep into my writing. They feature in both my SciFi novels and in my debut novel Six Dead Men, one of the dead men is a remarkable but ignored artist and another is linguistically gifted but excluded from school because of behaviour deemed aggressive and anti-social.

My latest book – Palindrome - the prequel novella to Six Dead Men is no different. At the heart of the story is an exceptional 12 year old boy called Robert Deed (the detective from Six Dead Men). The setting is Haddington, near Edinburgh – it’s 1975. Here change is a process slowed by tradition and the luxury of a certain distance from the swift progress of the rest of the world. Robert’s 13th birthday approaches. He is a teenager who looks beyond a thing and sees inside it. But this birthday brings more than a coming of age celebration for Robert. He will feel forced to solve the murder of his first crush, battle his grief, re-evaluate his relationship with his parents and exonerate a dear friend.

Palindrome is due for release on 27th July. To celebrate, Six Dead Men is currently available FREE exclusively through Instafreebie for e-readers.

Rae Stoltenkamp
Fantasy, science fiction and magical realism author
www.raestoltenkamp.com

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RAE STOLTENKAMP was born in South Africa and came to England in 1987 to visit family. She liked the weather so much she stayed. After a writing holiday in Greece she had an epiphany and realised she should be writing on a full time basis. It was probably heat stroke since she hadn’t had sun in a while. She then studied writing at City Lit with the poet Caroline Natzler and is now a self-published writer, blogger and English tutor living in South London. Rae currently works for a local charity (Young Women’s Hub) teaching English and also runs creative writing workshops and after school clubs with www.inkhead.co.uk. Her published work includes poetry in Prole, Fantasy for children, Science Fiction for young adults and Magic Realism for adults. As well as her writing, Rae has a passion for Lindy Hop and Argentine Tango. When she’s not chained to her desk and laptop, you can often see her tripping the light fantastic with her dancing friends.

Additional books by Rae Stoltenkamp include: Where Rainbows Hide, Six Degrees and When Rainbows Cry.

Visit Rae’s website: https://raestoltenkamp.com/

You can also follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Are you subscribed to Scribd or Oyster? So you can go to Mars for free!

Scribd is an ebook retailer that allows you to choose between buying an ebook or subscribing to their monthly plan and read all their ebooks for a flat rate of $8.99.

Oyster works similarly but it only includes a monthly subscription of $9.95.

Both services offers over 500,000 titles, including both traditional published and self-published books, and one month trial for free during which you can read as many books as you like (or you are able to).

Scribd and Oyster can be used on your PC or via an app on your tablet or smartphone.

All my books are on both services, including the first book from the Red Desert series, “Red Desert - Point of No Return”.

If you are already subscribed to Scribd or Oyster you can read it for free now, and start your journey on Mars.

If you are not, you can use the free trial period.

Moreover the second book in the series, “Red Desert - People of Mars”, will be out on 1 September, so you can read both books in one month within your trial period.

And if you read in Italian, you can also find all my other books there.

Here are the links for “Red Desert - Point of No Return” on Scribd and Oyster.

Moreover by click on my name there, you can access all my books in Italian.

Are you an author and would you like to offer your books on these services? You can do it for free via Smashwords!

“Red Desert - Point of No Return” is also available on Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, Barnes & Noble (also Nook UK), Google Play, and Smashwords starting from only $0.99.

Science fiction and spirituality: post-physical life, part #3

And here is the last post dedicated to the representation of post-physical life in science fiction. In the first post I introduced the topic and gave a few examples of the so-called soft and intermediate approaches (click here to read the post), in the second post I focused on the hard approach and in particular on cyberpunk (read post here), in this third post, instead, I present two books in which, in different ways, there is also the return of the digitized consciousness seen in the hard approach towards a physical life.

The examples that I’m offering aren’t famous novels, but two books by self-publishers.

The Alpha Centauri Project (Thinking Worlds) by Marco Santini is a novel available as e-book (free). It describes a future where there is a conflict between a type of humanity in the flesh and another one which lives in the net, i.e. derived from the digitization of the consciousness of the dead. The two humanities are able to interact with each other both through the virtual reality and the physical world. The digitized, in fact, may temporarily download into androids and experience once again a physical life. This gives to the latter a greater freedom, except for the fact that they depend on the existence of a physical unit that makes the net work.

The future imagined by Santini is very intriguing and sometimes disturbing. In this regard, I invite you to read my review of the book.

Amantarra (book 1 of the trilogy entitled The Ascension of Valheel) by Richard J. Galloway is a novel that deals with the subject of the digitization of consciousness from a completely different point of view: that of an alien race.

The Bruwnan existed for half the age of the universe and, after reaching the maximum possible evolution in the physical form, decide to leave their bodies back and go to a post-physical life. Their digitized consciousness lives for billions of years in a virtual city, Valheel, built inside a sphere. The process of digital copying causes the simultaneous death of the body. But Valheel is not in our space-time, it exists in a sort of alternate reality and in order to remain active it draws energy from biomass which is located in the planets where the Bruwnan have instilled life.

Some of them, Amantarra and her father Artullus, realise that for millions of years the population of Valheel is decreasing, which shouldn’t happen because the digitized consciousness does not die. Something that dwells in the virtual reality is deleting them. The search for a solution takes Amantarra to Earth at the time of primitive men, through the centuries, until the 70s of the twentieth century, where she interacts with some boys at a high school in England. Also in this story you can see the return from post-physical to physical life with the ability to download the consciousness into a living shell or into a real human being with special abilities (a kind of hybrid).

You can read my review of this book as well.

"Amantarra" is available in e-book for just 99 cents on Amazon and other retailers.

In general, post-physical life always involves a transition from living/organic matter to something that is non-material (the ascended spirit, the ghost of the Jedi, and so on) or that dwells in inorganic matter (server). Even if the digitized consciousness is a software and therefore immaterial, however, it is always something measurable and requires external energy to survive.

Speaking, however, about metaphors of the immortality of the soul, in the context of science fiction there is room for its representation without the passage above. This is observed in all those stories where consciousness moves, by means of more or less scientific methods, from living matter to other living matter, which may also be different, by means of an organic/biological process or with a digital intermediary but in which that consciousness is not active (it is only a means of transmission). In this context, you can note similarities to the spiritual/religious concept of reincarnation, but it would deserve a separate analysis.

Finally, it can be frequently seen in the stories narrating the transition from living matter to other living matter that this is shown without providing an explanation, as in a lot of science fiction concerning cloning. Each clone, like magic, seems to have all or part of the background of the original, although cloning is to all intents and purposes a copy of the body from its genome but not of the consciousness that lived in it (or memories that defined the consciousness as such) and therefore has nothing to do with the subject of the immortality of the soul. Sometimes, when they want the individual to believe to be the original, the presence of such knowledge is desired (I don’t offer examples to avoid spoilers). In other cases, however, it is even an error in the process of cloning causing troubles for those who wanted to make use of these clones for their own purposes. Oops!

Persuasion - Jane Austen

***** The novel of maturity

That’s how “Persuasion” is usually defined, which is one of two posthumous novels of Jane Austen. The settings and situations are always the usual ones, which are also found in the other five books, but the maturity factor (let’s call it like that) makes it different from the other works of this great author. 

 First of all I must say that I’ve read the book while listening to the audiobook. It was an enjoyable and instructive experience, thanks to the skill of the reader (I’ve downloaded the audiobook from LibriVox.org). Listen to an audiobook in English with a text in front helps to better savour the words and improve your pronunciation.

 Beyond that, I was greatly impressed by the novel where all the characters really are so well defined as to have the impression of having them before your eyes. The love story of the main character remains in the background for most of the book, while a series of events is shown, filtered by the impact that these have on Anne. Her character is a docile at first, but as the story takes hold one realizes how she has learned through experience, given by the maturity , to get by in the most diverse situations without doing harm to no one and without exposing herself too much to others.

 The narrative is divided between long dialogues and long tales of past and present events. In some passages I admit that I would rather know the exact words of the characters, rather than the summary of the author, but she seems to want to focus only on certain aspects of the story.

 In this sense, the end is almost precipitous, but the twist that precedes it is spectacular, especially if you consider that you know from the beginning that there can be only one conclusion. Nevertheless, I was open-mouthed in front of the manner in which the author has decided to play her cards and this is where you see the maturity of Austen, no longer a young girl, but a woman who looks at the world with eyes that are a little less carefree than ever before.

Persuasion (Kindle, paperback, audiobook, DVD) on Amazon.com.

Loving... Them! - Y. Correa (short review)

***** Amusing

This free, ultra-short story (five pages only) really amused me. The author does a roundup of Odette's love disasters, narrated by the same character. More than a story this is a quick humorous report, but it describes situations in which many of us can relate to. In the end the topic is the search for the right person, often done in the wrong way, with results that are far from good. Odette won't find the man of her life yet, maybe she'll become wiser and will have learned from her mistakes, but in spite of all she won't lose heart and continue to seek.

Recommended to spend about ten minutes in joy and to know a good independent author.

Loving... Them! is free on Smashwords.