WiDo Publishing LLC

Independent small press publishing a variety of genres, since 2007.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

That's a great title, regardless who wrote the book.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

In 1925, a woman who had never studied psychology, philosophy, or neuroscience wrote a 100-page book that described exactly how your thoughts construct your reality, decades before science had a name for any of it.

Her name is Florence Scovel Shinn, and almost nobody talks about her. She was not an academic. She was not a therapist. She was a commercial illustrator living in New York who began teaching small private groups after watching the same pattern destroy the same kinds of people over and over.

They were intelligent, they were hardworking, and their lives were not working. The book she eventually wrote from those sessions has never gone out of print in a hundred years.

Here is the framework inside it that I have not been able to stop thinking about.

Shinn argued that every human being is playing a game they do not know the rules to. The game is not business or relationships or money. The game is the relationship between what you think and what you get. And the core rule is one most people spend their entire lives violating without realizing it.

Your subconscious mind does not understand the difference between what you want and what you fear. It responds to the dominant image you hold, not the dominant wish.

Which means the person who constantly imagines failure while claiming to want success is not being unlucky. They are being precise. The subconscious is executing exactly what it was given.

She called this the law of karma, but stripped of any mysticism the mechanism is almost mechanical. Every thought is a cause.

Every condition in your life is an effect. Change the cause and the effect must change, because it cannot do anything else.

The insight that floored me was her argument about words. She believed spoken words carry a charge that most people waste entirely by speaking carelessly.

The person who constantly says "I never have enough" is not describing reality. They are issuing a standing order.

What neuroscience now calls self-fulfilling belief loops and cognitive priming, Shinn described in plain language a century ago with no laboratory and no funding.

She just watched people carefully enough to see what the researchers eventually proved.

The game was always the same. Most people just never learned they were playing it.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Peasant food rules the world.

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

Beef Bourguignon is the most celebrated stew in French cuisine. It appears on the menus of Michelin-starred restaurants, it was the dish Julia Child chose to open her very first television episode, and it has been written about more than almost any other French dish in history.

Burgundian peasants in the Middle Ages needed a way to make cheap, tough cuts of beef edible. They had no money for anything better so they slow-cooked the unwanted meat for hours in the one thing they had in abundance, cheap local wine, with whatever onions and roots were lying around. That was it. That was the whole recipe. The dish did not appear in any serious cookbook until 1903, when Auguste Escoffier served it at the Ritz in London and the aristocracy went wild for it, having apparently never encountered the peasant food of their own country.

The Italians did the same thing repeatedly and more aggressively. Ribollita, which translates literally to reboiled, is now one of the most beloved soups in Tuscany and served in restaurants across Florence. Its actual origin: medieval Tuscan peasants collected the bread used as plates at noble feasts, the bread that had soaked up sauces and been left behind, and boiled it together with leftover vegetables to make something that would last the whole week. Each time it was reheated it got thicker and more flavourful.

Pellegrino Artusi, the father of modern Italian cuisine, included it in his 1891 cookbook and described it as a peasant soup that he was convinced would be appreciated by everyone, even gentlemen. He was right. Panzanella was stale bread and water. Cacio e pepe was shepherd's food, carried by Roman shepherds on mountain drives because aged pecorino and dried pepper kept without refrigeration. Carbonara almost certainly emerged from simple wartime ingredients. Every single dish that defines what the world thinks of as Italian cuisine was invented by someone who had very little.

What keeps happening across history is that the wealthy ate elaborate food designed to show off money, food engineered for spectacle rather than pleasure, and it has mostly been forgotten. The poor ate food engineered to taste as good as possible with as little as possible, food that rewarded patience and technique and knowledge of ingredients, and that food is what survived.

The word for it in Italian is cucina povera, poor cooking. It is the greatest cooking tradition in the world, and almost none of it was designed by a chef.

It's poetic that some of the tastiest meals in history were made by those who had very little besides their crops and technique.

© Eats History

#archaeohistories

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

@stephenRB4 Everyone I know prefers audiobook, but I read books on Kindle. Even manuscripts under review for submissions.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Self-publishing? Our hybrid imprint makes it easy. Now accepting submissions. Check us out!

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Do this.

[Orson Scott Card @orsonscottcard]

“How can I get a quick start on writing a new book?”

Embrace cliches. You don't have time to develop your characters or milieu, or set yourself any challenges as a writer. Getting crap on paper is your primary goal. Still, try to do a good job of writing — snappy dialogue, quirky minor characters, a compelling dilemma (to which you already know the solution).

Writing better takes a little longer. Invent more deeply. Complicate your storyline. Disguise your use of commonplace tropes. Your goal was to start quickly — but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to create a positive reading experience.

As for the topic? Choose a character who suffers greatly, undergoes great challenges, and doesn't die. Set her in a milieu that you know well enough to write without much research. Create a few characters who do not just exist for your convenience, but have agendas of their own. Give your main character a reason to keep going despite all dangers and risks. Give your main character a job. Even if she hates her job, we need to see her working.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

It's like I tell authors, if you only write one or two books, don't count on anyone knowing your name. If Rembrandt had stopped at one work, he would be this guy.

[𝒮𝒪𝒩𝒩𝒴 𝒮𝐸𝐻𝑅𝒜 ੴ @sonnysehra]

in 1646, a mysterious austrian man named johannes gumpp created this self-portrait and then disappeared from history. he painted himself from behind while looking in the mirror, creating 3 different perspectives on a single canvas. it was his only work; nothing is known about him

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Nero Wolfe is not really that fat. Rex Stout wrote the Nero Wolfe books during a time when Americans were not fat. By those standards, A 5'11" middle-aged man weighing 260 lbs. was huge, and everyone noticed. In today's America, it's practically a norm.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

@mattvanswol @CynicalPublius Yes, do it

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

@Urgent_RussiaTV This is the most handsome Japanese man I've ever seen

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

This is true

[ruth o. @therutholarrie]

Yeah, write it first, edit later! ✨📚
#WritingCommunity #writers #booktwt #books

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Don't we all

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Interesting back story

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

In 1953, the American food company Swanson found itself facing an unexpected problem after Thanksgiving. The company had misjudged demand and was left with an enormous surplus of frozen turkey, estimated at about 260 tons. Warehouses were filled with unsold birds, and the company needed a creative way to prevent the costly stockpile from going to waste.

A Swanson salesman named Gerry Thomas proposed an idea inspired by airline meals that were served in small aluminum trays. Instead of selling whole turkeys, the leftover meat could be sliced and packaged into individual portions alongside side dishes like cornbread stuffing, peas, and sweet potatoes. Each meal would be placed in a divided aluminum tray, allowing people to heat it in the oven and eat directly from the container.

The result was the “TV Dinner,” a product designed for the growing number of American households that were spending evenings gathered around their television sets. Marketed as the Swanson TV Dinner, the meal quickly became a sensation. In its first year alone, Swanson sold more than 10 million trays. What began as a desperate attempt to deal with excess turkey ended up launching one of the most influential convenience foods of the 20th century.

#drthehistories

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Sounds like fun

[Hamilton 🇺🇸 @Watchman_motto]

Never organize book shelves in some trendy visual way. (Spines facing in, grouped by color).

Always organize alphabetically, into sections that make sense. Fiction by author, non-fiction by subject. Poetry, biography, reference.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Back when publishers and bookstores sold the books

[Lauren Lee Smith @lololeereverie]

Woke up and realized it’s a lovely day to crash out about how authors are expected to be so performative nowadays and I wish I was born when writers just smoked and drank all day and were comfortably mentally ill and didn’t have to be jesters on social media

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

The best part of this post are the comments

[Historyland @HistorylandHQ]

The author of Psycho, Robert Bloch, writes at his desk in the 1950s.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Unfollowing authors who stuff their timelines with book ads. Can't tolerate it.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

Our new submissions editor has been busy

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

@stephenRB4 What the hell

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

People used to be cleverly funny here during the word limit days. I miss those days.

[WiDo Publishing LLC @widopublishing]

As an editor and publisher, I disagree with all these shoulds and should nots. Pure nonsense.

[Dakota J. Miller @MillerDakotaJ]

I have been informed that I should not write anything that is true if it sounds untrue because a reader can't handle it.

For example: There is a legitimate medical condition where if you sever your spinal cord, you could have an erection. However, I am being told an author should not have the legitimate medical fact in their book because it would confuse a reader unaware of it and break their suspension of disbelief.

Now, I'm not British, but the word "bollocks" comes to mind. If a reader doesn't know something, they can look it up.

I have also been told I should not use Spanish Moss in my book because not everyone is familiar with what it is and therefore would ruin the story.

Would really love your opinions because I feel like I'm going crazy with treating my reader, and expecting authors to treat me, with intelligence.