Happy birthday, Day 7: Guest post and giveaway with Dean Murray

Wow! Day 7, can you believe it´s been a week already? Lots of giveaways and awesome guest posts and interviews! We don´t want this week to end and that is why we have decided to to add two more days with giveaways to this awesome bitrhday week! But now on to today's post.

Today we Have Dean Murray with us, who have written an great guest post for us. But that is not all, he is also so very kind to give away three packages with three E-books in each, to three lucky winners! And this is awesome because his books are great! So this is something you do not want to miss out on! You can find the form for this international giveaway at the end of this post!

Guest post by Dean Murray

Reading Builds Muscles

I'm probably dating myself a bit here, but long before I had a smartphone, I had a PDA (an old Sony Clie), and I used to read and re-read e-books on it. I was in college at the time, and the ability to stick six or seven books on it and have them wherever I went was incredibly convenient. Bus rides, doctor appointments, anything of the sort was much less of a pain because I could instantly lose myself in another world.

As primitive as those old PDA's were compared to today's smart phones, there was one essential constraint that hasn't really changed between then and now.

Once you get the data into them, you're pretty much good to go. It's always there, ready for use. The difficulty is getting the data in there. There's always ways to shortcut that particular challenge of course. You could type up whatever it was you wanted on your PC and then transfer it over through the synching process, or you could buy one of those portable keyboards and use that to input data. Mostly though, I found myself putting stuff into my PDA on letter at a time off of the touch screen.

I spent the idle moment or two thinking about other inventions that could help bypass the problem, but I think the biggest benefit out of all of that came when I realized that some of those same constraints are present in our own minds.

Once you get a particular bit of information in your head, it's always there, waiting to be recalled, ready to serve as the foundation for a new bit of learning. The difficulty lies in getting the information in there.

Back in the day, all learning was essentially passed directly from person to person, which meant it was perishable and relatively expensive (due to the time involved) to pass along.

The advent of the written word changed all of that. For the first time, knowledge could endure, relatively unchanged for centuries. Even better, once the printing press arrived it still required more effort to 'write' something down than it did to just demonstrate it to someone, but once you 'wrote' it down, you could teach multiple people with almost no incremental cost.

I've probably ranged further afield than everyone was probably expecting, but as technology has advanced, and especially with the advent of the internet, information is now essentially free for the taking. That is especially exciting to me as an author because reading is still the best way to unlock all of that knowledge.

Of course, I don't write anything particularly informative as a general rule, but reading is just like any other skill. The more you do it, the easier it becomes, and nearly everyone who becomes truly good at reading does so because they spent their formative years enjoying stories in some form or another.

If I had one piece of advice for youth, be they grade-schoolers or teenagers, it would be to develop a love of reading. The more you read, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the easier access you will have to all of the knowledge that will help you pursue your dreams.

Sometimes we genre authors get looked down on by the literary types, but every time I see someone with one of the Harry Potter books, or Twilight, or pretty much any book, it brings a smile to my face. As long as people keep finding compelling stories to write, others of us will read them; thereby building our ability to get data into our 'PDA's'.

Now On to today´s giveaway!

Like I said, we have three packages to give away. Each package include an E-book of: Broken, Torn, Scent of tears and Handoff. 

 

Enter this giveaway