Very concerned by language in the #CassReport that could lead to further marginalisation & withholding of support for #Trans children here in the #UK. #GenderMinorities are already treated very unfairly here, through even “well-meaning” measures like pathologising trans identities. Handing transphobes further “scientific” justification for their hate is dangerous.
Have set up a monthly donation to #Mermaids. If you’d like to donate too, click below #TransRights
This is the last week re: the discount across ebook platforms for WATERMYTH (ends 29 FEBRUARY 2024), although I am participating in #smashword's promotion period in March so you can wait till then if you were wanting to grab a copy via smashwords.
Short description: Regya has been set a task: to take the potentially deadly Mermaid Storytelling Exam. She has been placed in Yrejveree, the mythical island of exiles to which many Amors have brought their Psyches. Can a mermaid armed with the powers bestowed by her storytelling craft, her Javanese engineer housemate and her mermaid landlady defeat these beings intent on conquest?
Do you like slow-burn epic fantasy mashed up with domestic fantasy? Ever read an epic fantasy that started in a kitchen and thought, "Damn, I wish there was more of that!"
Well, so did I and that is what I took into writing this series!
Think kitchens, a Kitchen Witch, lots of loving descriptions of food amidst byzantine conflict, political machinations and wars between merkingdoms. Plus, mermaids and faeries in a postcolonial portal fantasy universe. That's the Cantata of the Fourfold Realms, and Watermyth is the first novel.
I also talk about #WatermaidensDay, which will be next week . It shares a date with #Valentine because uh, one of the influences for Watermaidens and Watermyth in general was the fate of poor Ophelia. I always felt she deserved a better life and so I wrote a whole army of watermaidens into my stories. I guess that should be another blog post, huh.
In 1996, I wrote a 17-19 page* poem revisiting the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of a Psyche who never found her Cupid again. A year later, I created a hypertext project about the island upon which my Psyche found herself. In 2009, I began the project that would become the Cantata of the Fourfold Realms, around the premise of "What if instead of ONE Cupid, there was an entire civilization of them?"
Watermyth, the first book of my slow domestic fantasy takes over epic fantasy with mermaids, sirens, faeries, weremaidens and a whole lot of myth and history,
What’s with these latest opinion polls on ghosts and cryptids?
This past week, two sets of survey results came out in regard to belief in questionable, and scientifically undetermined, entities. Both opinion polls appear to show high rates of belief in ghosts, the devil, aliens, and several cryptids. Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening here.
RealClear poll is not perfectly clear
The opinion research organization RealClear Opinion Research published results of a poll of 1000 Americans, where the pollsters asked about religious views. You can see the breakdown here. It was a fair poll, but note that the context framing was “religion”. I suspect people are more generous in expressing their religious beliefs than belief in the paranormal (though the stigma is much less now). Here are some general results:
In response to the question, “Please indicate for each one if you believe in it or not.”
None of the results are very surprising, even though they might concern critical thinkers, scientists, and atheists. I’ve been tracking ghost belief since surveys of 2003. The results fluctuate from year to year, almost certainly due to cultural factors, including what’s disseminated in the news and popular media offerings. This is the highest ghost belief result I’ve seen in a representative poll. But note that 2008 was the next highest at 57% followed by a low in 2009 (18-33%). I don’t think this means a lot and you’ll see why in a bit.
There is no shortage of supposedly nonfictional depictions of ghosts and demons in visual media. And, aliens have been all the rage for a few years now. That topic exploded in popularity after it appeared to be dying out around 2017. You just never know what is going to suddenly surge in pop culture.
That brings me to the next set of results that relate to cryptids.
Cryptid communication poll
This survey came out in a paper published in the International Journal of Communication 18(2024) titled “Cryptid Communication: Media Messages and Public Beliefs about Cryptozoology” by Dawson, Brewer, and Cuddy. The research goal of this paper was to examine some of the effects of media messaging on belief in cryptids, which is a highly complex situation that may not ever be well understood.
What is “belief”? Each person has different stages of, criteria for, and reasons for “belief”. Because of those reason, these opinion surveys results are squishy and not very useful.
Feel free to read the entire study for yourself – it has other issues that make it a bit weak. But, I’m just going to focus on the survey results they published as part of their experiments.
Belief in cryptids was measured by asking respondents whether they strongly believed, believed, disbelieved, or strongly disbelieved the following statements:
“Bigfoot is a real creature” (12% strongly believed, 34% believed, 35% disbelieved, and 20% strongly disbelieved),
“Mermaids are real” (11%, 22%, 42%, and 25%, respectively),
“The Yeti, also known as the abominable snowman, is real” (12%, 29%, 39%, and 20%, respectively), and “The Loch Ness Monster is a real creature” (10%, 31%, 39%, and 20%, respectively).
Combining the two “yes” categories and the two “no” categories (ignore rounding errors), we have this:
Topic
Belief %
Nonbelief %
Bigfoot
46
55
Mermaids
33
67
Yeti
41
59
Loch Ness Monster
41
59
Does this fairly translate to: “Look how many people believe in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster!”. I would not go that far. The “strong belief” is only 10-12% for each cryptid. This correlates to previous surveys about belief in Bigfoot as “real” that ranged from 16-20% and likely reflects the portion of the population who deeply believes in these concepts.
Perhaps the moderate “belief” value (of around 30%) is reflective of people casually playing around with the idea, those who want it to be true, or those just having fun with it without any consideration of evidence.
There are countless other factors that influence how respondents might answer the question about “belief” and reality. One example is that mermaids are very much a cultural belief in other countries, where they are magical creatures. Another example may be if a person had an experience that they interpreted as a Bigfoot. It could have been a bear, but witnesses may be very much affected by the idea they encountered Bigfoot, and it bolsters their belief.
This study also included a second part that brought Mothman and megalodon into the discussion.
Belief in cryptids was measured by asking respondents whether they believed Bigfoot (42% yes), “the Mothman creature” (13% yes), and “the megalodon shark” (45% yes) “may currently exist.”
Megalodon is a long-extinct, super-sized shark. While many people claim it still lives in our oceans, it most certainly does not. But the fact that it was a genuine, real animal means that it feels more likely it still could be out there. (Most people don’t have any sense of the timescale when they lived and died out.) Again, we may be dealing with an effect from the availability heuristic – people have a good idea of what a giant shark would be like in modern times because we’ve seen so many real and realistic depictions of sharks.
Mothman is by far the most unrealistic of all these cryptids in the study. It doesn’t resemble any known zoological animal and, from its origin, has supernatural connotations. Even though it’s a popular cryptid, it’s not a realistic one. That mothman has the lowest level of belief is unsurprising.
Belief opinion surveys are so messy. Even if the questions are phrased precisely so that every respondent is clear about how to respond, people’s opinions are messy, culture changes across area and time, and we use our own conceptions of the world to make personal sense of it. This is all reflected in each person’s individual response. We also don’t know how truthfully they responded, or if they might change their answer tomorrow. Finally, it’s a huge mistake to infer that a high rate of “belief” means a greater likelihood that the cryptid is “real”. That’s a serious logical error we should all be careful we don’t make.
Is the US population slipping into greater acceptance of magical thinking because a poll showed high results? These are strange times, but society is way more complicated than that. In fact, beware of all opinion surveys.
Update of my 🎙 Author #introduction since my debut novel was finally published on the 7th of January, 2024.
Hi, I'm Anita. I used to be published as Nin Harris and under that name I have had fiction and poetry published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine etc. I write baroque planetary romances, dark fiction, Gothic fantasy, #domesticfantasy with #mermaids and #darkacademia settings. I have just published my debut novel, #Watermyth and am working on its sequel, #Rosemirror. I am also a literary academic, a musician and a composer. I have a great deal of imposter syndrome about all of the above, particularly about calling myself a musician and composer given I'm only getting a formal education for most of my musical needs in the past four years (apart from #classicalguitar for which I've had classes off and on since 1995). But I have been making music/composing my whole life.
@bookstodon Just a note that my first newsletter that some of you have signed up for will be coming out by the second week of January. However, owing to the fact that tinyletter is going to be shutting down, I'm porting everyone over to the announcement list I've set up on my hosted account. You'll be (if you're one of the subscribers) be getting an email with a link you need to click for consent.
Lucy Mason has a new FF fantasy mermaid romance out: The Endless Sea Between Us.
Five years ago, Faeryn Moss lost her family and home to a plague that swept her village. As the sole survivor, she was rumored to be a witch—a rumor she never denied because it was the truth...
QSFer Arthur Griffin's new MM fantasy romance Jake Monroe and the Case of the Missing Mermaid:
In a world where the public knows about the existence of supernatural creatures, hardened human private eye Jake Monroe makes a living cracking cases with a paranormal element. A resident...
In #JapaneseFolklore mermaids are known as ningyo. Unlike European mermaids, they look more like fish than humans and are considered far more monstrous than beautiful. In some cases they are believed to foretell the future. Their flesh is said to give eternal life, but most people won't take the risk as ningyo can put powerful curses on those who try to catch or kill them. To be safe, it is best to do whatever you can to avoid any encounters with ningyo. #folklore#mythology#mermaids@folklore
It’s still in early stages but I’m loving how this is coming out - I’ve always stayed away from drawing people but #mermaids are somehow less intimidating 😂
It's #mermay! I've got several projects on my drawing board, so I won't be able to join in the fun much this time around. I'll share some of my previous years' favorites.