Winter – Volume 1 is available now for your Kindle !

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WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

 As I was conversing with a WriteSpa client, and we were discussing assignments and goals, I asked her where she wrote. She hesitated, then said, “It’s a bit problematic…I don’t have a laptop and my computer’s in the living room. I don’t really have a place for it.”

From the way she spoke, I could tell that using “the computer” was for her a chore, a bit of a nuisance, something that she ‘should’ turn on and use, like a vacuum cleaner, perhaps. I knew that for her to have a satisfying relationship with Mr. Write, the ambience surrounding the area where she worked was crucial. (more…)

WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

Although Thanksgiving appears to be a uniquely American holiday, the mood now all over the world feels hectic, festive, familyish, planning ahead to the end of the year – and it sometimes can feel dark. Very few holidays are not based in some way on seasonal or pagan rituals – whether they are secular, as is Thanksgiving, or religious. In northern climates (in days long ago), this might be the last time you could see families and friends till spring. In agricultural civilizations, it’s the celebration of the end of harvest. It’s okay to feast now; by February there may be very little left. Nowadays we don’t have that worry; instead the anxiety has crept inwards, and emerges as family-related issues: passionate reunions, guilt, or nostalgia. This time of year can be fraught with tension, excitement, friendliness, food, warmth, light, depression, and so on. (more…)

WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

Your sense of smell is possibly the oldest of the five primary senses, and, fascinatingly, it is most intimately associated with the formation of memories. In those old days (a million years ago), it was crucial to forming our experience of food and sex; but by now it’s evolved to an art of perfumes and fragrances. (more…)

WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

Most of you know that each day of the week is connected to a planet, which is in turn connected to a god or goddess. Each of these relates to a color, a metal, a crystal, a personality. It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe these soul qualities are or are not ‘real.’ What matters is that color can help you weave a pattern of balance and simplicity into your busy life.

How?

For one thing – by keeping it simple. Simplicity is the essence of calm, harmony, serenity. Having to choose between a number of things is stressful. Becoming aware of color can simplify our lives enormously. This is true even in something as basic as deciding what to wear: If it’s Friday – a day symbolized by the serene green of Aphrodite, the goddess of love – reach for a mint green sweatshirt; no agonizing. If it’s Saturday, wear dark blue jeans. At the mind-numbing market, if you can’t decide between blueberries or strawberries, let the color of the day be your guide. Accessories are easily decided on as well: reach for those moonstones or pearls on Monday, or the grey and purple silk tie. Not only is this relaxing, but it makes mundane tasks much more fun. When my children were young I’d often avoid arguments by pointing out that they had to eat their green broccoli because it was Friday. Or that the red t-shirt was just right since it was Tuesday.

Another way color can help us is by tempering our temperaments. Each color has a different vibration, and each one impacts us differently. Burger King has known this for years (all that pink and orange actually does make us eat faster). Blue draws us inward to a place a quiet. Yellow does lift our spirits! By becoming conscious of all the different colors in our limited spectrum, we balance our natures. Otherwise we might be particularly drawn to reds, and then lose the blue-ness of our interior being. Or we might be fond of green, but forget to absorb the soul of purple. Balancing our melancholic tendencies by wearing yellow, or soothing our anxiety with a peaceful green, makes sense.

Originally, the Ancient Greeks named the days week after the sun, the moon and the five known planets. The planets were named after the gods Ares, Hermes, Zeus, Aphrodite, and Cronus. The Romans substituted their equivalent gods for the Greek gods: Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.  Eventually the Teutonic peoples substituted the Latin names for the gods with their own: Tiu, Woden, Thor, Freya. Saturn remained the same.

Here’s an abbreviated outline of the soul qualities of each day:

Monday – Selenes/Luna later Artemis/Diana: lavender or dark blue. The day of the moon is internal, emotional, reflective, a great day for quiet and meditation.

Tuesday – Ares/Mars/Tiu: red. The warrior god helps us in our search for Self, standing up to others, fighting for the good, working hard…he symbolizes action and energy. In Norse mythology Tiu was the god of war and sky.

Wednesday – Hermes/Mercury/Woden is the messenger god. His color is yellow. This is a great day to handle communications and accomplishing tasks that require mental acuity.  Hermes (or Mercury) is known as the god of commerce, communication, invention, and travel. In Norse mythology, Woden is known as the headstrong leader of the wild hunt.

Thursday – Zeus/Jupiter/Thor. Orange. Kingly. Expansive. Friendly. Opportunity, luck, good fortune. A good day to look at the big picture or start a new project under the generous auspices of Zeus, the Greek king of the gods. Thor is the god of thunder and Roman Jupiter created thunder and lightning.

Friday – Aphrodite/Venus/Freya. Green. The goddess of love and beauty appreciates the attention you pay to beautifying your environment and yourself, as well as socializing with those you love.

Saturday – Cronus/Saturn. Dark blue or black. Saturn helps with the details: making sure everything is on track in the material world. He’s there to help you over the long haul. He’s also known as the god of agriculture and time.

Sunday – Helios/Apollo/Day of the Sun. White. Apollo is the storyteller, the musician, the poet, the god of light. This is a good day to be creative.

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Fun Writing Practice

Each day this week make a conscious effort to be aware of the day’s color. Today is Thursday: note the orange instances in your life. A coffee cup, a tangerine, a bookmark, a shopping bag… where do you see something orange?

Write down everything you find that is the color of the day and describe the items using the soul quality of that color. Orange is outgoing, it’s a balancer between the heart (red) and the head (yellow), it’s expansive, it radiates. It’s a friendly color. So when you’re describing your orange coffee cup, describe it in a friendly, outgoing way. There are so many variations – millions and millions of shades and moods and tones to every color. Burnt orange is not the same as blood orange or pale salmon. Be as specific as you can when you observe the color.

Noticing color enhances your writing because, as with all description, everything you write needs to be relevant. So if your heroine is wearing a blue dress, it needs to express her dreamy, quiet, or triste qualities. If the house is painted yellow, it represents cheerfulness. (Unless you want to be interesting and show how the yellow paint is peeling, or how the mustard-dark quality of the yellow depicts the lack of cheer – you can get complicated and unusual here.)

The most important thing is to enjoy becoming more conscious about the gorgeous colors in our world. Heightening our awareness of the days of the week, and the gods and goddesses who rule them, and the placement of the planets in the sky, takes us out of ourselves. It’s like watching a rose unfurl, or the leaves on the maple tree beginning to turn. Observing the world around us is crucial to balancing all those stories and ideas that happen inside us most of the time.

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Daily Happinesses

• The plop of a hickory nut
• New socks
• A meaningful dream
• Meeting a leprechaun
• Cowbells
• Holding hands
• Watching a meteor shower with a friend

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WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

Studies involving fifty or so Nobel prize winners in physiology, chemistry, medicine and physics, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning writers and other artists, reveal a surprising similarity in their creative process.

Called ‘Janusian thinking’ after the Roman god Janus, it involves holding two opposing ideas or images in your mind at the same time. The researchers conclude most major scientific breakthroughs and artistic masterpieces occur through the process of formulating antithetical ideas and then trying to resolve them.

Janus was the Roman god of gates and doors, bridges, openings and closings, beginnings and endings, past and future. Represented by an image of two heads, each looking in opposite directions, this unusual god was worshipped at seasonal markers such as planting and harvesting, at beginnings such as marriage and birth, and even historical epochs, such as the transition from primitive to civilized cultures. Janus’s namesake, the month of January, describes the gift he had of being able to see into the future as well as into the past – a gift he was given by the god Saturn. At midnight, on the last day of the year, he looks back at the old year, and at the same moment he looks forward into the new. That’s not easy to do! We get lost in nostalgia for the past and longing for the future – try being in both at the same time. (It’s not necessarily ‘being here now.’)

Here’s an example of Janusian (or paradoxical) thinking: The physicist Niels Bohr imagined that light could be analyzed as either a wave or as a particle, but never simultaneously as both. He had to hold both concepts in his head at the same time in order to conceive his principle of complementarity in quantum theory.

Einstein recalls how he first conceived his theory of relativity: “For an observer in free fall from the roof of a house, there exists, during his fall, no gravitational field in his immediate vicinity. If the observer releases any objects, they will remain, relative to him, in a state of rest.” Falling and being still – at the same time. It is possible!

Some of the best descriptive metaphors you’ll read are Janusian: Keats describes April rain that “fosters the droop-headed flowers” and “hides the green hill in a shroud’ at the same time – life and death in the same imagery. Powerful.

An artistic example of Janusian thinking are those extraordinary artistic renderings by M.C. Escher, who draws, for example, cubes that are paradoxical – they can be visually ‘seen’ either as protruding or receding.

Practice looking at a cube in this way, and trying to regard it from either perspective. Just an exercise this simple will help your decision-making skills as well as loosen up your imagination. You are, literally, thinking ‘outside the box.’ There’s no better exercise for a writer than to free yourself from the constraints of what is expected, clichéd, outworn, one-sided. Anything that seems impossible is bound to challenge and thrill anyone who writes fiction. You’re reaching beyond the obvious – and that’s the essence of being creative. Janusian thinking – holding two diametrically opposing views in your mind at the same time – is like gold to writers.

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Fun Writing Practice – Janusian Writing

Think of something, and ask yourself: “What is the opposite of this?” Then try to imagine both opposites existing at the same time.

In writing a story you do this all the time. A character holds passion and hatred for an unfaithful wife in his heart at the same time. A young, angry boy may long to run away from home, but his love for his family keeps him captive at the same time. Warring emotions in characters are Janusian qualities: you might feel both pity and bitterness when you see an enemy fail. Or both disappointment and relief when something exciting and scary doesn’t happen. And of course there’s always the pain and the pleasure of unrequited love.

Choose a theme for a poem or a story: for example, envy, or summertime, or moving into a new house. Now ask yourself what is the opposite of your theme? Gratitude, freezing darkness, a departure? What are the bridges between these opposites, so that both are true at the same time? For example, you might write a story about the intense envy you feel when your best friend wins a million dollar lotto ticket. Let your words unfurl the momentous upheavals and personal disasters that the winnings create in your friend’s life, which inspires gratitude for your modest means… Or you might describe a balmy summer afternoon seen through the eyes of a cold-hearted, dark-spirited, wintry CEO.

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Daily Happinesses

• sipping ouzo in the shade at a Greek taverna
• weddings
• a whole day spent alone
• requited love
• castles in Wales
• druids
• the ancient Silk Route

WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

When I was around seven years old, I remember visiting my grandmother, Ethel Cook Eliot, at her home in western Massachusetts. One night she sat on the edge of my bed and told me about some rain goblins she’d seen. She described them to me as about eight inches high, skinny, wrinkled, brown-skinned, and rather leaping in spirit. Her description was so detailed and vivid that I knew without a doubt she actually had seen these creatures.

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WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

Simplicity is one of the finest things in life – right up there with love, ‘doing nothing,’ and walking in the woods. The empty plot of earth that doesn’t have anything planted yet is one of the most magical things in the world. So is the moment before the music starts. Or the sweetness of a haiku. An empty shelf. The beach at dawn. Your child’s face. A blank notebook.

In the I-Ching, the hexagram called Wei-Chi means Before Completion. It’s the hexagram of extraordinary optimism – opening the way to the future. Everything is on the verge of great abundance, but the transition from chaos to order is not yet completed. The change is prepared for, but there is still responsibility – it’s time to set things in order. It’s the stillness before the celebration. The anticipation before the great meeting. With this hopeful outlook, the I-Ching “Book of Changes” comes to a close, exemplifying that with every end comes a beginning. It’s springtime.

This is a great time to eliminate things you don’t need any more. Old sweaters, a pile of books you keep for sentimental reasons, a routine that’s become a bore, a knickknack, old letters, old habits, prejudices, thoughts. Throw them away – or give them away if they’re worthwhile – and leave room for something new to come your way. Empty your closets of things you haven’t used in a year – and allow space in your life. Don’t fill the drawer – leave it empty. Clear a shelf – and don’t put anything on it. Clear an hour – and don’t make plans. Choose not to buy, or plant, or prettify. Don’t purchase that new hat. If you clear away old leaves and leave a plot of earth, you might be amazed what emerges. If you clear your life of things that are no longer vital, you’ll feel a thrill equal or more intense to the one you’d feel if you’d bought a new dining set.

Be clear about what matters. Simplify your life, your home, your routine, your relationships. Keep the vital ones, empty the rest. Be clear, be empty. And watch what happens.

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Fun Writing Practice – Clear the Clutter

When in doubt – throw it out. As you look at individual words in your story or essay, ask yourself whether or not it’s vital for it to be there. You might be surprised how much more powerful and convincing your writing can become by eliminating clutter. By paring your piece to its essence, you are allowing the words to speak for themselves. They don’t need you, the author, to give them a crutch or that extra drink.

Right now, I’m in the process of revising a novel that’s 103,000 words. The task I’ve set myself is to bring it down to 999,999 words. I am not deleting any scenes or characters – just words, clichés, extra verbiage: words, words, words.

Here’s an example:

“She moaned again, burying her face in her hands. We waited for something—no one knew what—to happen next. Harry was taking a long time getting the glass of water.”

Do you see which word is purposeless and annoying? Yes, you got it! “Next.” What the heck is it doing there? Ugh! Completely unnecessary! See what I mean?

You don’t want words to get in the way of your writing – you want them to be the writing.

I’m reminded of my yoga teacher’s instruction: to let your breathing breathe itself.

Let your writing write itself.

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Daily Happinesses

• French onion soup on a cold day

• meditation

• Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges River

• laughing in the kitchen while you wash dishes together

• changing the furniture around

• writing a poem

• an affectionate cat

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News Update:

For those of you who haven’t heard: my novel, Heaven Falls, is now available for purchase in either e-book, softcover, or hardcover. Purchase it through Telemachus Press or Amazon.

I’m in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks and something I’m reminded of is the importance of tag lines in the movie promotion biz. On the billboards advertising upcoming movies these little catchy soundbites or slogans seem as important as the movie title itself.  They personify the plot and the mood of the film. Not easy to do! More and more often you’ll find these slogans on a book jacket. Sometimes the best ones are more memorable than the title of the book or film itself.

Since I’m in Hollyland I dug through for some classic tag lines to share with you:

The one I remember best is from Love Story: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Here are some others:

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.” Jaws 2
“In space no one can hear you scream.” Alien
“Houston, we have a problem.” Apollo 13
“It’s 4 A.M. – do you know where your car is?” Repo Man
“One Man’s Struggle To Take It Easy.” Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
“They’ve saved the best trip for last…But this time they may have gone too far.” Back to the Future III
“Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas.” Army of Darkness
“What if someone you never met, someone you never saw, someone you never knew was the only someone for you?” Sleepless in Seattle

Choose a story you’ve written and come up with several tag lines. This exercise is a good one for us writers, who tend to get so caught up in the characters and story that we find it hard to summarize. But it’s excellent practice, really important if you’re trying to pitch to an author or editor, and it also helps you to know the spine of your story. You don’t have to be catchy or funny for this practice to be successful, by the way. Have fun with this: don’t agonize.

Read your phrases out loud to a friend and ask them what they think your story is about.

A concluding paragraph is the reader’s bridge from your story back to their own lives. In this exercise you’re going to try to connect the two in some way.

Write a one-paragraph conclusion to a story that you haven’t written.

You’ll need to resolve the story you’ve imagined. Without reiterating the tale, or summarizing, you need to make the gist of the tale clear. Don’t introduce something new at the end of a story (particularly not a new character or idea, or even action), and don’t summarize. Conclusions can be very difficult to write, but this last paragraph is what a reader takes away with them, so it’s your finest opportunity to make an impact.

Here are some ways to approach this exercise:

•    End the paragraph with an intriguing question or a made-up quote
•    Moralize or warn.
•    Futurize – describe how the events made a difference.

As always, try doing this exercise daily for a week – concluding a different ‘story’ each day. You’ll be amazed how much easier it gets as you loosen up your conclusion-writing muscles and start to enjoy the freedom of concluding a story without worrying how you got there. It can be a lot of fun.