[February 22nd ] Weird Wednesday, Project Hiatus & Blogging Changes

I hope this sets the tone nicely

There’s been no Weird Wednesday for awhile. Oh, you noticed? How nice! I feel special and cuddly just by thinking about you guys. First, there were exams. Then, there was fatigue and chronic lack of sleep. Now, a very nasty back pain is responsible for the delays in updates in the Weird Wednesday feature.

Well, since we have gone down this thorny road, why not get with the program and expect to see something [anything really] by the mid-goddamn-summer. Cause guess what? Weird Wednesday is going in a wee bit of a hiatus, until after June. Why, you might ask?

The question is a rather simple one to answer. Because my university runs on a campaign of complete misinformation, I had to receive primary information through the rumor mill about what I as a student had to do in order to apply to work on a thesis. Mind you, I already knew what I would be writing about and have it all worked out.

However, the university set the bar higher for those, who want to apply, from 4.50 overall grade to 5.25. Of course, I’m not a straight A [6.00 in Bulgaria] student, but a firm B student [meaning my overall grade sits at 5.00 firmly]. This means that I’m not qualified to apply for thesis, which is the considerably easier way to go about graduating. The rumor mill had been going Charlie Sheen crazy about what the new qualifications were going to be. The university conveniently leaked no information about any of the guidelines for thesis, which should be so high on their priority list. The consensus among everyone is that the new head appointed in our department wants to read a lot less than previous years. It suits him to give out as less as possible information and ruin it even for those, who are eligible to apply.   

Anyway, I finally had to check for myself, whether the rumor mill was correct and honestly, since I’ve found no official information on the website, I hoped that it was all nonsense. Well, it wasn’t. So now, I’m going to be one of the misfortunate ones revising material from two years ago. I have confirmed nine disciplines I’ll have to freshen up on and five, which I’m not that sure of.

So you see why I can’t really continue with my regular, big projects, but instead of complete hiatus and going off the grid, I will just blog shorter. More snippy, snappy comments and less snore-fests of posts.

Well, dearies. Let the torturous study begin.        

[Tuesday 21st February] Asa - "The Way I Feel"

I've had a long day at work and I've been on around for hours of sleep, so my brain's capable only of browsing naughty words and processing pretty moving images. Fortunately, I have the latest of "RuPaul's Drag Race" and "Smash" to get me through the night.

Because I love you, here is the wonderful Asa with "The Way I Feel". Have a Happy Pancake Day to all in the UK.

[Monday February 20th] 8 Things I Learned About Deadlines

Who wins now? EH!

It’s been a month and I’ve nearly forgotten how to blog, which is funny, cause these days you can’t make me shut up. Work has been a bit crazy and my fingers ache from the constant tap, tap, tapping on the keyboard. Then I had to bounce around doctors for awhile, which further added unnecessary stress [nothing too serious with me] and then came news from the frontier to the West, where mother is working right now. In between all of this I’ve been pretty silent, because I’ve been chasing deadlines.

What advice about deadlines will tell is that you have to stick to them. What advice neglects to say is that you have to be extremely realistic about the number of deadlines or at least I’ve missed the guidebook to deadlines some way along the way. If there is a copy somewhere that no one needs, my e-mail is in my bio [just saying]. The gist of this post right now is that I’ve been an incredibly naughty boy and expected unrealistic things from myself.

As you might suspect already, I want to be on top of everything and it’s not been happening as planned. I edit for Tales to Terrify, I write and I review [though I thought I had stopped for good] and then I have several other big as hell blog initiatives, which more or less have fallen in the background. Top that with a full time job and university and you have yourself a basic recipe for chasing deadlines all the time. Here are the lessons I learned chasing deadlines and failing some times:

1] Write down everything connected to your project and deadlines. Most of the time, you will work in tiny bites of time. Managing fiction for a podcast has taught me that a big project is a clockwork robot rather than a brontosaurus, meaning that it’s a ticking organism with so many parts that take minutes separately, but letting them slip through the cracks of your mind will come back to bite you. This can easily apply to writing, which I learned after forgetting a few stunningly beautiful ways I could have employed in my latest story.

2] Newsflash: Life’s unpredictable, so you’d better learn to predict situations that will suck your time and be beyond your mortal control. Although doing what you love may offset the depression of having a job that suffocates you or [insert anything unpleasant you have to deal with every goddamn day], you have a real life with real people and other real things. Real life doesn’t like to be ignored. Hell to the no, girlfriend. Real life’s like a kitty cat, a bad kitty of imminent doom that poops on your head for no good reason.

If I hadn’t spent two weeks with intense pain, because of a bad back, I’d probably be on time with most of my deadlines. Plans mean nothing, when you are an unwilling component of this sick algorithm that is life. It’s a crucial skill to know how many projects you can undertake, which you are sure you will bring to fruition even if your life crashes in pretty painted flames of devastation.

3] You are not a time table. As much as I’d want to conquer the Internet and have hot men throw their jockstraps at me, I discovered that I can’t do everything. This is the basic mistake that I do time and time again. I assume that just because I have a free slot in my schedule and yes, I do have a schedule, I can put something in there.

So what happens, when you realize that your schedule has tasks that have you type and read for what feels like eternity and your brain says, enough is enough. Naturally, you crave some sort of outlet, be it skimpy books in pink covers [I stopped reading those, when I discovered that the skimpy pink books came only in female fantasy editions rather than gay fantasy ones] or reality TV [either classy and/or campy for me, please] coupled with as many TV series as I can watch. Maybe you are one of those weird people that go outside and talk to people, fleshy bits to fleshy bits. In translation, work will not be done. Work that needs to be done and you can’t complete, because you are exhausted. Plan activities that will allow you to recharge your batteries or I tell you that you’ve got a first class ticket to Burnout Land. PS: It will not be pretty. It never is and it’s the fastest way to hate something with burning passion.

4] You are responsible for your guilt. If you assign yourself too many deadlines, you don’t meet, because you sought to take a rest, you get your high and then what. Guilt that is what. The wrist-slitting guilt that has you all tossing and turning at night, accusing you that your careless ways are what will always separate you from those that have succeeded in their career. So unless you want to flirt with a sharp set of razor blades and set yourself for low self-esteem and failure, why not cut yourself some slack and what you are realistically able to complete as projects.

5] A deadline does not mean waiting for the last possible moment. The Internet is full of memes, where students consider their teacher’s deadline a challenge to see how late they can start with their paper. Don’t be that douche that purposefully starts at the last minute possible. I’ve done this stunt a couple of times and I’m far from proud with myself. Plus, apart from the inevitable guilt you will generate, your work will be sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. So do yourself a favor and start as early as possible.  

6] Don’t expect people you’ve put on a deadline to remember their deadline. Through my work at Tales to Terrify, I learned the hard way that delegating tasks and expecting them to be done isn’t as innocent as it seems. I did that. I trusted the powers that be that everything will be honky-dory and forgot about the deadline. Guess what. This came back to bite me, cause shit happens to the people you collaborate with. They get sick. They get involved in some sort of life conspiracy and the last thing on your collaborator’s mind is your deadline.

7] Talk with your collaborators about updates. If you want to avoid feeling like an idiot, negotiate with your collaborator how you as the one with the request will proceed in regards to the deadline. Set a few check point dates that will ensure that you get all the updates needed without coming off as a panicked, desperate ninny. You also get the bonus of psychologically engaging your collaborator so that even if suddenly something comes up that will cause delays, your collaborator is way more likely to warn you, even though in the greater scale of things your deadline matters. Of course, I’m referring to all the projects that run on good will rather than money. When money is involved, people tend to be a lot more organized.

8] Content first, publication later. To continue my thread, I’ve always started projects even before my involvement with Tales to Terrify, where I relied on people’s content. A normal person would be cautious enough to arrange the deadlines for the contributors long before they are needed. It’s way easier to schedule something that you have rather than something that you have promised to have. I, on the other hand, assume that everything runs on fairy magic, so I had a few close calls, but lesson has been learned. Everything can happen and a good deadline chaser knows that time is a stretchy, gooey thing that runs through the fingers.

   

[February 1st, Weird Wednesday] “The Screaming Skull” by F. Marion Crawford

As with Alfred Kubin, I have no prior experience with the author other than seeing Crawford and “The Screaming Skull” pop up in some conversations on Twitter. I think the premise to be interesting, though the execution is peculiar enough to interrupt my reading and throw me out of the story. Therefore, I’m left with a bittersweet aftertaste.

“The Screaming Skull” is at its core a very simple story, perhaps unsettling at best, though far removed from horror. Retired captain Charles Braddock has inherited the estate of his late and dear cousin Luke and his wife, Mrs. Pratt. However, Braddock learns of a rather unusual and quite vocal resident, a smooth human skull, which engages in nightly screaming sessions. The story encapsules Braddock’s coexistence with this screaming skull to an unidentified friend of the captain, starting from the early signs of habitation and catching up to now.  

Crawford presents this story of denied habitation [for Braddock vehemently rejects the idea of ghosts and vengeful spirits] as a one-sided dialogue. As soon as I got through the first page it was evident that Braddock conversed with someone, though I had access to Braddock’s words only. Although Crawford is a silver-tongued storyteller and I enjoyed Braddock’s voice as a narrator and a person, I encountered several difficulties as I read “The Screaming Skull”. The shifts from first person point of view to second person and back demanded I shift gears as to how I perceived the world inside the story. Was I to act as Braddock’s collocutor or was I to hide in his head and hear his thoughts?

At times, Braddock steers the narration off course to recount stories connected to his servants or his past as a captain. I think it’s clever how Crawford used the story-within-the-story to add substance to the world of “The Screaming Skull”. Braddock and his wordy descriptions also help flesh out the surrounding, adding texture to a monologue, which borders on a stream of consciousness narrative style. This narrative technique’s main drawback manifests, when you look at the overall structure of the story. The main story concerns the skull and Braddock, but at the same time you focus on these interludes to make sense of background. My need to shift from one POV to another coupled with the story’s demand to switch focus from the interludes to the overall story arc complicated my reading process.   

Two overall themes dominate “The Screaming Skull”, disbelief and guilt. Braddock struggles to rationalize the skull’s nature and why it screams. There is a strong rejection towards all that not known and metaphysical, which borders to blind and desperate ignorance of what the skull is and why it screams. Through denial of the obvious truth [as to the identity of the skull, then about the cause of its owner’s death] Braddock seeks to absolve his guilt towards Mrs. Pratt [I will not comment any further on the connection between those two; that is for you the reader to discover]. Guilt makes sense of the story.

Guilt explains why the captain talks as fast as he does and why he launches into these mini-stories, to escape talking about the skull. The guilt is evident in Braddock’s emotional attachment and interaction with the skull. He tries to please the spirit inside, despite his failure to name it as such. He enters a state of contradiction with himself, both trying to humor the skull and appease through his care and manners. Since Braddock rationalizes every event connected with the skull, he overlooks the true danger of his predicament. In this well-mannered panic “The Screaming Skull” resembles Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” as both of the stories share the motif of the narrator’s guilty conscious as a means to their demise. While Poe straddles the gothic genre tropes, Crawford head off to uncharted waters and leaves a lot open for discussion.

In the end, I consider “The Screaming Skull” a peculiar story. It possesses rich texture, but is a spoken monologue distilled from a conversation. The buildup doesn’t surprise or frighten, but the promised resolution is quite satisfactory to keep going, until you reach the ending.      

[January 31st] Dear Aspiring Writer Dude

Dear Aspiring Writer Dude,

I haven’t written to you, maybe because I never thought I’d take my split personality fetish to my blog, but I consider writing to you, because you are beginning to look like a stoner caught in an endless phase of the munchies and there is only so much sugar before your body decides to flip you the bird and slap you the bad kind of diabetes, which coincidentally has deep roots in your family tree.

I appreciate how valiantly you fought during your exams, even though the amount of studying you did barely covered the minimum. I also admire your ability to handle the late nighters at work so that you could study in the morning and I also think that some time off of everything is a good award. You did a brilliant job at not buying an axe and going The Shinning on some of the people, who annoyed you during your low-on-sleep periods. Certainly, you managed to learn the days of the week and not to make a mess of the launch of the podcast, whose fiction and non-fiction pieces you are responsible for. Overall, good job.   

Selling your soul to 9gag, though, was a low blow. You know how you are when it comes to a brand new shiny. You know you can’t resist it and that you keep coming back to it. Addiction is not beautiful or elegant in any of its manifestations and yours to 9gag is not any different at. This is why you should get your butt in your chair and get cracking. You didn’t write all the goals with the idea that they will complete themselves through their own volition.

Don’t allow fear to keep you off your chair and your work.

Best,

Your Conscience(?)*

*Do writers have one?

PS: I realize I have missed a lot features, but I will catch up. 

[January 20th, Culture of Bulgaria] How to Remove Hexes and the Evil Eye the Bulgarian Way

In the recent months, I’ve taken to Bulgarian folklore and old wives’ tales. One of the topics I adore deals with charms and ways to battle the ‘whammy’ otherwise known as the ‘evil eye’. If you don’t know, Bulgarians are extremely superstitious and living in a household, where all your dreams had to be looked into the dream dictionary, I’m a great deal superstitious myself and have never doubted the techniques my grandmother used, when my sister and I were still small and received a lot of attention.

The whammy or ‘evil eye’ is a hex, which is cast on newborns or small children, when family or friends cuddle, croon or devote too much attention. This whammy manifests as headaches, sudden crankiness or drowsiness. The child will grow uncomfortable and may even develop a mild fever. Sometimes adults are susceptible to whammies as well, especially, if they have been away from their loved ones. Naturally, I think that the whammy is the result of a child having to deal with too many people at a time, which can be exhausting even to an adult. Yet, I can’t deny that washing my face will get rid of the whammy. Perhaps it’s placebo, but even with placebo, it’s quite potent.

Water in one capacity or another always is incorporated in the rituals for removing whammies and their effects. My granny’s personal favorite is to fill a glass with cold tap water and bring to the front door’s handle. She would scoop a bit of water and pour it over the handle, making sure that the dribbles fall into the cup. This ‘washing’ of the handle would be done three times total so that the energy of the outsiders would be washed out of the handle and therefore our home. Then she would bring the glass to my forehead and wash my face three times.

The Turkish Eye or the Evil Eye Beads, whatever you prefer.

 Of course there are other ways to do this. Some people prefer to simple wash their child’s face at the sink, while others bring holy water from the church. Third, whisper words of power out of earshot to imbue the water with cleansing properties. There are literally hundred ways to do a proper hex removal, though we also have excellent preemptive techniques, which ensure no whammies will hit you in the first place. I remember vividly that my sister used to have a blue bead ties to her hand. Then, when she grew up a bit, she carried a bracelet with a Turkish eye for protection. Though I have not seen in it practice, I also know that a red string tied around your wrist will protect you from the evil eye.

And this has been a very short guide on how to remove and protect yourself from whammies?          

[January 18th, Weird Wednesday] "The Other Side" by Alfred Kubin

The opening story in “The Weird” is an excerpt from “The Other Side” by Alfred Kubin, first published in 1908. I have no knowledge of the traditions in European literature at the time of its publication and this is the first time I’ve encountered Alfred Kubin as a writer. I opted for an open interpretation of this text without any prior research, which might have helped me say something accurate as to the meaning of his work. The only text discussing “The Other Side” that I have read is Maureen Kincaid Speller’sexcellent take on the excerpt.

Weird Wednesday’s purpose as a feature is to allow the stories to speak to me and “The Other Side” has proven to be vocal. After the initial reading, I willingly accepted the reality that had befallen the city of Pearl, where an epidemic of sleep knocked out the city’s whole population for several days. However, the mysterious and highly contagious disease functions as a means to set the stage for an inevitable rebellion, instigated and flawlessly executed by all members of the animal kingdom.

In a grandiose and all-devouring display of dominance, the city of Pearl wakes to swarms and herds and prides and packs and flocks of beastly conquerors, who have overthrown humans. At his stage “The Other Side” reads as an environmentalist's wish fulfillment fantasy come to life, yet, reading this excerpt as nothing more than the literal would be insulting to the potency of the prose and its latter direction.  

The 'weird' in this tale has rooted itself within the nameless protagonist's delivery, who serves as a vessel for the reader’s senses. This man collects 'slices of life' encounters between the old and the new citizens of Pearl, neatly chaining one with the other complete with observations. What causes surprise here is not so much the abrupt uprising of the natural world, but the still, calm 'matter-of-fact' reception of these apocalyptic events by the population. It is this peculiar juxtaposition between the dangerous outside world, where one might become prey no matter the hiding place, and the pacified calmness displayed by the citizens, who insist on keeping up with appearances no matter what, that tilts the reader’s perception of how reality functions in the Dream Realm.

This tilted reality can be likened to the absurd logic, on which dreams run. In this direct sense, I'm reminded of Paul Jessup's stories in his collection “Glass Coffin Girls”, where our reality rots and transforms into a reflection from a carnival mirror. Certainly, the sickness that affects manmade objects supports the idea of how reality erodes. Perhaps the denizens of Pearl and the Dream Realm haven't woken from their slumber, but have only achieved consciousness in a never-ending shared dream.

The possibilities for interpretation are countless, because Kubin didn't intend to rationalize the bizarre fate to befall Pearl. However, the strongest association I make with everything that has transpired within the excerpt concerns themes in Bulgarian literature and models in behavior during the centuries of enslavement by the Turks and then decades under the communism. I’m rather surprised how well “The Other Side” is in dialogue with the peculiarities in works by a great number of revolutionary writers and poets as well as the psychological survival tactics the Bulgarian society had to adopt in order for its identity to withstand the occupation during those two periods.

For instance, the concept of sleep on a mass scale, such as Kubin’s sleep epidemic, has a rich history in Bulgarian literary traditions as willful surrender of the conscious mind. During the centuries under Ottoman rule, Bulgarian writers and poets used the 'sleep' to criticize society for their complacency and slave mentality, even though Kubin’s sleep epidemic doesn’t serve as such within the context in the excerpt. Further touching points between Bulgaria and Kubin can be found within the need to maintain normalcy under any and all conditions, even if that is impossible. This persistence to keep a semblance of what Pearl used to be while under the constant animal attacks and demolition can be compared to the same efforts Bulgarians had to make during the Ottoman occupation. The animals represent not only the fear of the citizens, but serves as masks that show the true nature of the human oppressors. For me this association is easy to make, because anthropomorphism has its place in our literary traditions and is still practiced today [even though we use it to bring diversity to our swear language]. Last on the list here is the narrator's psychological breakdown near the excerpt's end. It neatly embodies the inner discord of a person, who hopes and thinks and tries to resist a status quo, even if that desire is expressed through his heart's true intentions.

I will conclude by saying that “The Other Side” by Alfred Kubin is an extremely potent story, mainly because it's represented not in its entirety. There is no clear way to define the proper dimensions of this story, which I don’t mind, because it allows for the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. As an excerpt “The Other Side” remains limitless, irreal and opulent as a dream. In short, a fine way to open a compendium dedicated to the all-encompassing weird.       

[January 16th] To-Do List Apocalypse

As you can tell by the lack of posts, I'm extremely busy though I missed at least five great opportunities to share my opinion on relevant topics such as the bitch fight over a negative review written by Liz Bourke at Strange Horizons [oh boy that was a delicious fight] and a matter of female objectification as led by Jim C. Hines. All rather brilliant, but at the moment, I'm amidst preparing a final paper for this semester, dealing with domestic warfares in my household and preparing all the future shows over at "Tales to Terrify" [more on that later] and writing for "Weird Wednesday" [thankfully I prepared earlier this time and am having help on polishing the rough edges].

This is why I'll leave you in the company of naughty pen and his nerd dirty, dirty talk.

I think the follow-up to that was "You will fit me like a glove".

 

[January 14th] The Kitschies: Creative Tenticles of Doom

Being a part of the genre community means that you will face one award after another. It’s an inevitable event in any book nerd with ties to SFF. I’m not much of an award person, because I’m constantly dwelling in the past. The books I read have all been talked about to death and I don’t have the reading capacity to catch up with all the new ones to hit the shelves and pop up on a shortlist. My ability to hold a proper conversation on any award’s shortlist and comment on the likely winner is therefore impaired. I’m indifferent towards awards, because I rely on a number of recommendations from people, whose opinions I trust.

For this latter reason, paradoxically, I can’t not comment on Anne Perry’s and Jared Shurin’s award The Kitschies, which I’ve been following for two years, counting 2012. I have been a reader of Pornokitsch long enough to know that our tastes in literature overlap and I can trust their decisions. When someone, whose opinion I hold of importance, speaks, I pay attention, which is why I will follow how this year’s Kitschies develop and even comment on the Inky Tentacle category for Best Cover Art.   

Did I mention that the awards are handmade tentacles? I pronounce Professor Steampunk Octopus as the award's unofficial mascot! Art by Meg Lyman

 The Kitschies’ mission is to “honour the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works of genre literature”, which means that the judges will search for envelope pushers and innovators of our time. It’s an interesting angle and perhaps even makes the selection easier as you have specific criteria to work with other than the ‘best’, which is the case with quite a few other awards.   

The award’s a fresh, young, promising one; qualities that only add to the appeal of it. It’s a lot easier to come to follow a tradition as it makes its first steps and has room to grow and branch out. As a new award, The Kitschies have the potential to pleasantly surprise the genre community [although the possibility of the exact opposite is also true]. The first sign that The Kitschies will be one of the awards to keep a close eye on is the announcement before the revealing theshortlist on Friday, which shed light on the withdrawal of two books from therace due to close relations between the judging panel and the authors.

Even though I’ve made minimal observations about the industry, there is no denying that it’s a bit incestuous. Though nothing wrong in on itself, this crosspollination of activities makes it hard to organize awards without some sort of controversy attached in one way or another. It’s of great importance to eliminate any close relations in connection to awards, whose winners are decided through a judging panel.  

So, if you are an award buff, take your time to check The Kitschies. Here is their shortlist for you to see:

Red Tentacle:
The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington (Orbit)
Embassytown by China Miéville (Tor)
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd (Walker Books)
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone)
Osama: A Novel by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Golden Tentacle:
Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick (Tor)
God's War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs (Quirk)
The Samaritan by Fred Venturini (Blank Slate Press)

Inky Tentacle:
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch; illustration by Stephen Walter, design by Patrick Knowles (TAG Fine Arts) (Gollancz)
The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan; design by Peter Mendelsund (Canongate)
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco; design by Suzanne Dean, illustration by John Spencer (Harvill Secker)
Equations of Life by Simon Morden; design by Lauren Panepinto (Orbit)
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Siobhan Dowd; illustration by Jim Kay (Walker Books)

[January 13th, Culture of Bulgaria] The Head Shake vs. The Head Nod

I’ve been thinking about a good topic for my cultural post, but I decided against tackling yet another religious holiday, even though January is one of the busiest months for name days. I’m picking body language, because it’s an interesting topic on its own and Bulgaria seems to be one of the few countries [I’m including Greece as well], where the head nod is inverted in meaning with the head shake. 

Who ordered the scizophrenic head shakes?

 Or so the rumor goes, but I’d like to talk about the myth’s basics.  

As you know, internationally, the ‘head nod’ signifies agreement, whereas the ‘head shake’ stands for the opposite. You see it in movies, you see it on the TV and if you’re a traveler, you have confirmed this for yourself. Now, in Bulgaria, it’s said that shaking your head actually means that you are saying yes, while nodding your head means that you are disagreeing with a statement or answering in the negative. I’m not sure where this rumor started, because where I live in Varna, I have yet to spot a person shake their head for a ‘yes’ and nod for a ‘no.’

I had to google to confirm that this rumor is alive and well. Tourists that have visited Bulgaria have experienced this conundrum, which further perplexes me. In my community and social environment [including Bulgarian television] there are no examples to confirm this, although there are accounts of this being a thing. The only gesture to come close to this idea is what I call the ‘reverse nod’.

The ‘reverse nod’ is a means to communicate disagreement. Basically, you tilt your head back so the chin lifts, rather than dips as is the situation with a normal nod. In my family, we like to add a very clear ‘tsk’ noise to emphasize just how much we’re not on board with an idea or as is the case with my mother, how much something is SO not happening. Naturally, when you repeat this movement in a quick succession, it seems as though you’re nodding, but you’re not. I myself have been perplexed by the movement, especially when the person in front of me does not provide the much needed ‘tsk’ noise.

I haven’t seen the head-shake-yes in action and considering that I’m born, raised and located in Bulgaria, it’s saying something about the validity of this myth. However, I can’t dismiss the veracity of this myth based solely on my own personal experience as I believe two factors to be heavily present. Americanization and body language dialect.

Bulgaria’s on the fast track, when it comes to adopting Western values and mannerisms that have no root in our own culture. In the process, each new generation sheds something inherent from Bulgarian culture, which is no longer functional. This is the reason why Bulgarian kids are more adept at expressing themselves better in English than in Bulgarian. The same can be said about body language as I personally have grown up with American TV and have picked up all my visual cues from sitcoms. Bad stares, grumpy stances and the rolling of the eyes, all have come from US shows and to some degree Latin American soap operas [our channels had a lot of those]. It’s not unlikely for the new generations to pick up and implement something as fundamental as the head shake and nod. Perhaps ten to twenty years ago, more people said yes with a head shake and no with a head nod, but now with the internationalization of culture this practice is slowly being forgotten.

The second factor I mentioned deals with the dialect of body language. Bulgaria might be of a diminutive size, but each province has its own dialect. It might be slight changes to how one letter is pronounced. It might be connected with how a certain word is used and it might be a very jarring sentence construction, but each province has its differences as is normal. That is why I don’t think it out of the question to assume that some provinces would have kept on the inverted head shake/nod, while others like mine have discarded it. My only fault here is that I have not travelled extensively within my own country to be able to confirm this.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is to take all the information you read in travel guides with a bit of salt. If you do come to Bulgaria and feel that you’re unsure how to proceed in regards to the head shake vs. the head nod, it’s best to rely on the verbal ‘da’ for yes and ‘ne’ for no.