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Apparently this is what happens when a small branch falls on a power line.

Interesting information about coffee and caffeine

Infographic: income levels of America’s major religious groups

This was surely an expensive Inception wedding reception.

The new FDA anti-smoking warnings are graphic.

Lego my car.

This woman is reading the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act–ALOUD.

This is Betty White holding a giant snake with Slash.

How McDonalds cuts 9 million pounds of fries a day

First film footage of the “new” Amazon tribe.

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I took my son to see the last big-screen-IMAX viewing of Inception last week (he's got 2 years of pop-culture to catch up on!)  Being that it was my second time seeing it, I was more able to pay attention to the amazing soundtrack - the most moving of which is the finale climactic piece, "Time":


It's worth the 4 minutes and 42 seconds of listening time....

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I liked the topic of Kristi's post so much yesterday that I thought I would do my own post on the things that push me to be a better writer.

The most recent experience I've had with this feeling isn't from a book at all. It's from THE BEST MOVIE EVA!!! a movie.

I saw Inception last week, and I left the theater with one thought in my head:
I can do better.

The level of ingenuity and depth of emotion in the storytelling of the film blew my mind. It really just sort of stopped me in my tracks and I thought about the plot issues I was having with my current (and what feels like, the millionth) revision and it all seemed so small and silly. I realized not just that I needed to up my game, but HOW MUCH I needed to up it. Somehow I'd slipped into playing it safe, and safe = boring and seen it before. So I took a step back and started really ripping my tiny little impersonation of a book apart and all of a sudden I was excited about revising it again!

There are other books I keep in mind when writing as touchstones. Books that when I'm in a good mood, inspire me to attempt to reach some of their greatness and on a bad day thrust me into the pit of despair as I think I will NEVER write anything that good!

Some of those books are:

The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling - because Jo Rowling's world-building and heart blow my mind every time I read one of the books.


The Hunger Games & Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins - again, the world-building! The action! The emotion! Even now I get teary-eyed when I think about Rue!


Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater - I love how poetic the writing is, the emotion, the sense of place, and the way she made two narrators such complete unique characters that you always know who's talking.


Stolen by Lucy Christopher - This story is so emotionally complex and moving, it still haunts me. And the detail to setting is so good that every time I think about it, I feel like I'm in the desert of the Austrailian Outback. I can completely see a place I've never been or even seen photos of.


Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver - I love the way she makes the ordinary beautiful in this book. The actual prose is beautiful and very poetic but it's also the way Sam observes things. I also love that she made very real, three-dimensional characters who could be unlikeable at times and made me care about them.

All of these books (and SO MANY more) do things that I hope to do in my own stories and they remind me that it IS possible to do if I just keep my focus on the goal. Also, I've just realized that all of these books have made me cry! I guess that's what sticks with me. And that's what I want to do, tell stories that stick with you.

What are some books that inspire you?

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Was the plot of Christopher Nolan’s Inception inspired by a Don Rosa Uncle Scrooge comic book story? In the story, created for the European market in 2002 and published in the US in the May 2004 issue of Uncle Scrooge (#329), Scrooge’s totem is a 25-pound bar of solid gold. His “limbo” is an endless desert where each grain of sand is actually a microscopic gold coin. Both stories have characters use a machine to enter someone’s dream – and entering someone’s dream to steal a secret. The similarities don’t end there. You can read the full comic here.

(Thanks, Joe Dante, via IWatchStuff)

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Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

It starts with a simple question: Did the totem fall? And then turns into a mind warping exercise of  “who incepted who whom?” and “how much was a dream? Am I dreaming?” Christopher Nolan’s Inception has given us hypothesizing hemophilia, for the moment at least. But for some people our real, sans IMAX dreams are enough to sustain a lifetime of “what ifs.”

Dr. Rosalind Cartwright has dedicated her entire career’s work to studying sleep, and in her new book The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives she proposes a new theory on the confluence of our dreaming and waking selves. Here Cartwright reveals the scientific truths behind Inception and why, once we resolve Leo’s unconscious self, we should start tending to our own.

1.) In Inception, Ellen Page plays a “dream architect.” Can we actually influence what people dream about?

That answer is: A little. If I drip water on you while you are in REM sleep (when most dreaming happens), you may tell me you dreamt it was raining. You would already have a dream story of your own creation going on but the water can be added to that dream as “Suddenly as I was trying to escape from this guy it started raining.” If I play a tape with the name of the love of your life over and over, you may begin to dream of that person. But what you dream of that person is what your unconscious needs to express about them. Dreams have an imperative of their own and resist our meddling.

2.) In the film, dream death automatically brings the dreamer back to consciousness. I’ve heard that we always have to wake up before that moment of death in a dream. Is that true, can we not “die” in our dreams?

Death is not a common theme in dreams—unless you are elderly or very ill when death is a topic on your waking mind—and we do not often dream our death occurs even when we are falling from a height. We typically wake ourselves up before we hit the ground because our unconscious memory bank has no helpful images stored to handle the emotion in the dream. But others do dream of their own funeral or see themselves dead in the hospital. These dreams are rehearsals in fantasy for what is to come.

3.) The Inception crew can only escape from a multi-layered dream (dream within a dream, within a dream…) through a carefully engineered “kick” or that leg jerk that wakes us up when we are dream free falling. Why is the “kick” so common an experience in sleep?

This is very common especially as we are falling asleep and the muscles relax. We often experience the need to resist that falling sensation and “save ourselves” by abruptly tightening the muscles again. This is called the hypnic jerk. It is a normal response and benign, except that we have to start over to fall asleep again and another hypnic jerk may happen again.

4.) Through a special machine the crew can enter one subject’s unconscious together. Is this something that people actually think could be possible? Has there ever been any record of people sharing dreams?

Very occasionally identical twins who share so much common experience will have dreams that are very similar. Also people who share their waking experiences and tell each other about how they feel about it will have similar dreams on the same night. The next day one can finish the dream story the other is telling because they have had the same dream. None of this is magic or even science. We can know WHEN y

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