During the Awesome Indies Magical Mystery Tour, September 27-30, you’ll have chances to pick up special offers at the blogs participating in the tour and win an awesome prize. At each blog you’ll find one scene in a mystery story, and one playing card. You’ll need to take the full tour to read the whole story and find out which card is missing from the suite. After taking the tour, return to the beginning and use the name of the missing card (e.g., Jack, King, Ace, or seventh) to enter the drawing for an Amazon gift card. (First prize is a $25 card, second prize is $15, and third prize is a $10 card.)
The drawing ends at midnight PDT on September 30, giving you 4 days to take the tour. All you have to do is follow the links from blog to blog, read the story, note the playing card -- and while you’re there, pick up the host’s special offer.
Every purchase gives you another entry into the Giveaway.
When you’ve finished, ask yourself which card is missing from the suite? The answer is the key to enter the drawing.
To get started, read on.
Here's a "Health & Science" news brief from the 9/2/11 THE WEEK magazine that I found fascinating:
Mysteries without mystery
Have you ever been tempted to flip to the end of a mystery novel? Go ahead. Suspense, a new study has found, is irrelevant to our enjoyment of a story. In fact, say researchers at the University of California at San Diego, most people like stories more if they know in advance how they end--even with plots that hinge on a mystery or a twist. The researchers set up different versions of 12 short stories written by authors such as Agatha Christie, Raymond Carver, and Anton Chekhov. One came with an introduction that spoiled the ending; one had a spoiler embedded in the middle of the text; and a third appeared just as its author had written it. Surprisingly, readers who learned the endings of their stories up front reported liking them much more on a scale of one to 10 than did readers of the other two versions. Why? The pleasure readers get from a good story, researcher Jonathan Leavitt tells BBCNews.com, has far more to do with the quality of the writing and character development than with a nail-biting plot. Once a reader knows how a story turns out, Leavitt says, he or she "can focus on a deeper understanding of the story."
Interesting! That was my experience with the final Harry Potter book. I enjoyed reading it a second time far more than I liked the first time. On the reread, I knew how it would turn out, so instead of worrying about the fate of Harry, Hermione, Ron, or Hagrid, I could just focus on the writing and the interactions between the characters.
The UC-San Diego study seems to contradict what so many New York editors say they want: a "high-concept" (i.e., gimmicky) plot. What readers really want may be good writing. But many times I have witnessed the NY crowd treating the quality of the writing as irrelevant, while looking for nothing in a story except a tricky or "commercial" plot or gimmick.
Food for thought!
The complete article at BBC News:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14521627
