The Invention of Lying

This will probably be my last post for a month, as I have decided I won't be doing NaBloPoMo again this year (since I managed to complete it last year (in a way), the challenge isn't as big as NaNoWriMo). However, if you would like to read something in the meantime, I suggest the blog of regular commenter Chaotic Good: Wordsmith. He has set himself a challenge to write something every day, and I think they're all fictional (at least the ones he has written so far have been), but he doesn't stick to the same genre, so there's a bit of everything. My favourites so far are:

The Magic Wagon Part 1 2 3 4
Trouble in Toytown
Blueberry Pie

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I read somewhere that people who are good liars also tend to be more intelligent. It makes sense, because in order to tell a good lie, you need to come up with a plausible alternative, but you also need to keep track of what you said, who you said it to, and keep that separate from the truth (it might help to convince yourself that the lie is the truth, but that's not always very easy). I remember my mentor telling me about his 4-year-old daughter (who sounds incredibly intelligent). He caught her telling a lie, and she kept insisting that it was true. Eventually, he explained to her how he knew that she was lying, and she stopped trying to argue. The next time she tried to tell the same lie, she corrected the mistakes she made last time.

I can usually come up with a plausible alternative, but it is the keeping track of lies that I find difficult, which is one of the reasons I tend not to lie. I'm even trying to cut down on my white lies.

Last night, someone asked to join our HoN clan. From previous experiences with him (and the fact that a few of the current clan members refuse to play with him), I didn't want to let him join. However, I was really reluctant to turn him down because he is friends with someone MrMan5.5 respects a lot, and I didn't want to cause trouble. I told Julian, and he told me to tell the person that if he joined, Julian was going to leave. Not that it's a big deal if Julian leaves the clan, because we can still play together, but I would prefer it if we were in the same clan.

I didn't want to use that as an excuse not to invite him to the clan, but Julian said that he was happy to be the bad guy, so I did. I don't know if Julian would have followed through with it though. What makes it worse is that Julian then told me about something he saw on TV, where someone threatened someone else in order to make them tell a lie. Hearing it in the third person, it sounded to me like the threat was obviously a bluff, so it seemed like Julian was bluffing as well.

I just played a few games of HoN and completely forgot where I was going with this, so I'm going to leave it here.