Word of Mouth: Nocebo
I immediately thought of ‘noseeums’, which is an incredibly tiny biting midge/fly (Ceratopogonidae), and if you’ve ever visited Gulf Shores, Alabama, in the summer and stayed for a week in a beach house of stilts, you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.
Nocebo actually has to do with medicine, science, and patient experience. It’s considered the opposite of placebo, which is a sham treatment given to a patient that causes a beneficial health improvement based only on patient expectations—like the old sugar pills my granddaddy’s fishing buddy, Dr. Shipp, used to give out. Placebo = I will please.
The nocebo effect occurs when the patient takes the sham treatment and experiences negative health effects and worsening symptoms—the Evil Twin of placebo. Nocebo = I will harm.
Both placebo and nocebo effects are real and influenced by expectations and previous experience, and both are all about the brain’s anticipation of a particular result.
In fact, up to 25% of patients in clinical trials receiving the control treatment will drop out of the study due to the nocebo effect.
Voodoo Death
In researching nocebo, another fascinating term came up: Voodoo death.
It’s also called psychogenic death, and it’s a person who essentially wills themselves to die. Voodoo death occurs when someone believes they are cursed to die … and they do.
BTW, I use the Evil Twin Trope in the De-Extinct Zoo series—you’ll meet the villain who triggered it in Shattered, A De-Extinct Zoo Mystery book 4.
In the meantime, I’m going to watch the voodoo doll I bought in New Orleans very closely …
Writing Updates
Calendar
May 20th: I’m heading to a Mystery Bookclub at op. cit. books in Taos, New Mexico, to discuss The Third Warrior, A Nicky Matthews Mystery.
May 30th: Books in Santa Fe. I will be signing/selling my books beside 40+ authors with an excellent mix of genres. Admission is FREE.
It’s TIC Season
I’m deep in edits on Shattered, and my writing tics are stinging me like noseeums at the beach.
I had an awful AP review of Hearts of the Missing when it was published that focused on my penchant for using the word “heart” in various and sundry ways. “Heart” (apparently) acted like a bat to the head, and the reviewer wrote a book review almost as snarky as this post.
It still smarts, so I do extensive editing passes on tics (overused words) and what I think of as “franchised phrasing”—those familiar, prefab lines that go down easy but don’t actually “feed” the story. They’re fine as small bites, but too many and the reader starts craving something with real substance.
A non-exhaustive list (which is sad in itself) of offenders I screen for includes:
The “quick hit” emotional shows:
hearts stuttering/thudding/pounding
stomachs dipping/clenching/flipping
breaths catching/hitching/stalling
The gaze parade:
eyes locking/meeting/flicking/cutting
The physical flinches:
shoulders tightening
jaws clenching
hands curling into fists
lips thinning
And the ever-popular sentence tic:
“For a heartbeat…”
“Something in her chest…”
“A flicker of something raw…”
Individually, none of these is terrible. But pile them up, and they turn into a kind of emotional wallpaper—same colors, same pattern, in every. single. room. They don’t break the plot, but they absolutely add sand to the gears of cadence and flow. Once you start reading the same five actions/reactions on repeat, they turn into potholes that can break the fictive dream.
So right now my life is:
Tic hunt
Run a search on a suspect word or phrase.
Stare in horror at the number of hits—I used “something” 62 times(!)
Decide which ones earn their keep and which ones get the axe or a more specific, character‑true replacement.
Cadence triage
After the tic purge, I have to make sure I haven’t flattened the rhythm—or my voice—by over-sanitizing.
That’s where the read‑aloud pass comes in.
Enter Speechify
I load the chapter, hit play, and sit there while a disembodied voice reads my book back to me. Every repeated tic, clunky cadence, and word echo stands out like an unmowed blade of grass. It is tedious. It is backbreaking. I sit in a chair for hours, pausing, tweaking, replaying—over and over. It always takes longer than I think it will.
And it’s absolutely worth it—because all that obsessing over tics and rhythm is in service of one thing: a smooth, immersive read for you.
You’re welcome 😜
Have you wanted to read one of my books but worried about costs?
Libraries
Do you know that a lot of authors are available in online libraries for free or a fraction of the cost of books on online booksellers? With the rising price of both ebooks and hold-in-your-hand paper and hardbacks, libraries become a very cost-effective option for readers.
For example: Sting of Lies is available at Hoopla and Palace Marketplace, two online libraries, or go to your local library and request it.
Click the button below, then go to one of the online libraries that carry SoL. Check it out.
Dump the next boring bestseller. Try a New Author.
FRONTIER JUSTICE by Michael Cardwell
Wounded in a Montana blizzard by a friend’s bullet, rookie game warden and Afghanistan vet Danny Coogan is dragged into a lethal tangle of cartel gunrunners, tribal politics, and frontier justice—where the only way to stop the killing on the Dead Horse Reservation may break every law he swore to uphold.
I KNOW WHEN YOU’RE ASLEEP by Jessica Blade
When anonymous “pranks” at her high school start killing her friends, Mandy Wright receives a note naming her as the next target. To survive, she must untangle the killer’s twisted game, uncover who’s behind the rigged “accidents,” and outsmart a murderer who keeps changing the rules.
THE NIGHT YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT by Elara Voss
Private driver Morris Hale thinks he’s the one observing—until enigmatic heiress Elara Quinn turns the tables. In a world of underground chess games and unspoken rules, one misread silence becomes a sentence. The Night You Should Have Left reveals how a man learns he was never the player, only the piece.
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Hmmm...why wasn't I aware of a nocebo effect? Fascinating!