“Wonder if Shane Black would’ve sold for $4 mil if that’s how he wrote the action? This is bad advice, gang. If you envision a two minute fight to the death, you’d better take two pages to…

Dear Scott:

Here is the outline for my proposed new novel. A SCANNER DARKLY, which I told you about. It’s a good long outline, running well over sixty pages. I guess you can’t sell it to any publisher until I write a bunch of sample chapters, but anyhow this is what I’ll be working on for quite some time.

If you’d like to show it —for example to Doubleday— that would of course be fine with me. Otherwise, hang onto this outline while I continue from my carbon. 

Let me know what you think of it, and meanwhile I’ll keep you posted as to how I’m coming with the novel itself. 

Cordially, 

Philip K. Dick
3028 Quartz Ln #3
Fullerton
Calif 92631

P.S. I swear, Scott, this is shaping up to be the greatest novel ever written. Or at least the greatest novel I’ve ever written, anyhow.

“I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.” — Jamie Oliver

According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops…

Time travel may in fact be possible, but it wouldn’t work like in Back to the Future. (For one thing, you don’t have worry about your parents failing to create you—you already exist.)

Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. […]
It isn’t just visual cues that have this sort of effect. Matthew McGlone, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has found that auditory cues can shape people’s perception of truth. McGlone did a study in which he presented subjects with a series of unfamiliar aphorisms either in rhyming or nonrhyming form: “Woes unite foes,” for example, versus “Woes unite enemies.” He found that people tended to see the rhyming ones as more accurate than the nonrhyming ones, despite the fact that, substantively, the two were identical. Phrases that are easier on the ear aren’t just catchy and easy to remember, McGlone argues, they also feel inherently truer. He calls it “the rhyme-as-reason effect.”

This article is so, so good. Its applicable to everything - from writing to filmmaking to interface design to music to relationships.