What on earth is the 'Sunk Costs Fallacy'?

Don't you just love it when something you didn't know had a name... has a name?

I've been reading an intriguing book called Think Like a Freak: Secrets of the Rogue Economist from those Superfreakonomics chaps and of the many interesting points I picked up, the one that pleased me most was finding out about the 'sunk cost fallacy'. Sunk costs are the amount of time, energy and resources you have invested in an enterprise. The danger, or the fallacy, is that because you have spent these costs you must continue even if you are flogging a dead horse* by doing so. You don't want to end up losing all that money and effort over nothing, do you? 

Good examples of this are ordering too much food and feeling you have to eat it to 'get your money's worth' or keeping things you don't want or need because they were expensive.

I, and a small circle of friends, have been referring to this as 'the queue at the Blue John Mines' after a 1990's bank holiday trip spent in a long line whilst disputing whether to stay because we'd already invested hours in the trip or abandon the whole idea and recoup what was left of the day. The trouble with 'the queue at the Blue John Mines' is that it means nothing to everyone else in the world. (They weren't even mines, it turns out, but a cavern, but we didn't wait to find out as it happens.)

The other things in the book that really struck me include: the importance of admitting you don't know, defining the problem properly before trying to solve it, and the importance of premortems - imagining your plans going wrong and asking what would have been most likely to cause it. Also - and this is where the sunk costs fallacy comes in - the importance of quitting before you waste more time and energy going down a wrong path. 

There's a much longer piece about the sunk cost fallacy on You're Not so Smart... we all do it all the time!

* No dead horses were hurt in the making of this blog

Proof, if proof be needed

So one of the important things to do when putting a collection together, or presumably any publication, is to proof it carefully.

If you're anything like me (prone to a lack of attention to detail, and very easily distra.... oh look, a sparrow!) you might want this to be somebody other than you. If you're lucky you could send your work to someone like David Bateman* for a quick comment on the generality of it and get back 3 pages of typos, spellos, syntactical errors and punctuational faux pas.

I just thought I'd share a couple of the things he picked up on in the first version of The Silence Museum:

untidy bottom of “previously published” paragraph

two different styles of ellipsis on same line

inconsistent capitalization of line-starts

'a lone parenthetic comma'    and    'rogue hyphens'

"For “Flambe” the “é” you need is in the Insert menu.(“Menu”! I made a funny! Ha ha ha ha etc.)"

"Almost unbelievably, this line definitely needs another comma.  Insert it bravely!"

I thought it would be nice to thank him in the front of the book. 'Thanks to David Bateman, who taught me everything I know about ellipses'**  Then I decided to include an additional short poem about him in the collection, but I didn't send it for re-checking because it really was very short, and mentions how he taught me everything I know about ellipses. You know what's coming here, don't you? I spelled ellipses with just one 'l'.

Dho!... I mean Doh!

What's the worst typo or similar you've missed until it was too late?

* David Bateman is an excellent 'silly and serious at the same time' poet, by the way. There's not much of his stuff on the web, but check out the link for his classic 'World's Greatest Impressionist' poem

** There's only ever three dots in an ellipsis

Book Launched! Woo hoo!

My 'pin drop' cover wasn't high res
enough so I had to change it.

Such fun!  I had my first proper book launch in the library on Tuesday night and it was such a nice event (if I say so myself!).

I hadn't expected big numbers, but it sort of grew so I ended up in the exhibition room upstairs with a lovely audience of 50 people!!

I was really nervous because of the people I knew were coming - old school friends, ex colleagues,  poets, the parents, library folk, friends and acquaintances, many of whom hadn't seen me perform before. There was a decent number of borrowers too, who'll look at me in a different light now!... and the Boss of All Libraries (not her real title) who was hugely supportive.

I'm often asked if I have a book and, with 99 poems published and 24 placed in competitions, it was time bring some of these together as a collection. I know I should have touted it around 'proper' poetry publishers but I grew impatient to get something out, so published it myself. The themes emerged as 'silences' - our unspoken feelings, yearnings and secrets... with some humorous pieces for light relief.

The 75-page collection is available HERE for £7.99 + post and will eventually be on Amazon (but if you email me at clare [at] clarekirwan [dot] co [dot] uk I'll send you one for £6 + post).

Is any of this real?

Sadly there's no date on this picture - any clues?

For all my talk of notebooks the other day, we are firmly en-meshed in the digital world, are we not?

What a strange world it is:

• I have written a 'virtual' book (Tales from a Broken Biro: There Will Be Ink) on my computer and published it online.
• People can buy it on (and read off) a screen.
• I am promoting it using Twitter to friends I've only met in the ether, and they to their wider networks
• I have already sold (and given away in yesterday's promotion) a total of 100 copies, including more than 20 in America

In the first 48 hours it even reached the top ten Amazon Kindle Bestsellers in the free short story category, alongside (okay, a bit under) names I see every day at work - Carole Matthews and Stephen Leather.

Is any of this real?  (Answers on a virtual postcard)

When page layouts go bad

Two stories that shouldn't share a page.
More headline & pic combos at Funny or Die.

Having worked on a newspaper and edited a good few newsletters (and, ok a bad few too), I aim to pay attention re what's next to what in a layout.

I've gathered for your delectation some examples of what happens when you don't - here are my favourite headline faux pas.

Unfortunate choice of pic from www.happyplace.com

Awkward placing of an advert

Awkward placing of advert #2

Shorts

I'm packing my shorts for a week in Mallorca, but they're not the shorts that I mean. It's International Short Story Day and I've had a couple of short pieces accepted recently, which is always nice after a run of rejections.

My story 'Neighbours' was on 330 Words last week - a Manchester-based site which wants stories of around that length inspired by a picture. Anyone who was reading my blog a year or so ago won't be surprised at the picture or the content of the story, which I promise is only true up to a certain point!

Even more excitingly, I have two short pieces - a poem and a nano story in the latest issue of Short, Fast and Deadly - Body wRites. SF&D is  a US-based "eLit Mag where brevity reigns and the loquacious are sent to contemplate their sins in the rejection bin."  (These are the same people behind textual mash-up project  rIgor mort.US where they invite people to submit previously published works they retain the rights to, and other people to come along and reinvent them as startling new artwork, poetry and short prose.)

(Incidentally, looking for an image to go with a piece about tiny stories, I came across this lovely miniature book of tiny stories on hitRECord - where I got the image above from. Spookily, this also turns out to be a collaborative project of art and words... and music and film... hosted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt who we loved  in Third Rock From the Sun.  I may have a play with all of this - watch this space!)

Meanwhile... you can read my pieces, and the rest of SF&D below. I'm on pages 8 & 12 (although, oddly, vi and x in numerals)

Open publication - Free publishing - More and deadly

Also, I'm reading poem and short stories as part of Midsummer Night's Read at Wallasey Village Library (i.e not my branch, the diddy one on St Georges Road) this very night at 6pm -come along!