Channeling, from what I’ve observed, is a way of tapping into deeper insights, whether the person doing the channeling interprets them as being from the Higher Self,  a dark but highly evolved corner of the brain, a spirit guide, or some sort of alien entity.  Honestly, I don’t care so much about how the person perceives the insights they share as I do the message they have to offer.

I’ll include of few of my favorites in this post, by the way. RuneHealing’s new channeling videos are now up on Youtube, though you may already be familiar with his meditations to clear negativity and his energy work videos.

As an observer, I’ve noted a few things about people who channel that have helped me distinguish real from fraud.

1. The message itself tends to contain information or insights that the person wouldn’t normally know or know how to express. I’ve seen teens do this, and there is just no way they would ever know such information on their own. Sometimes it’s private information; sometimes it’s very wise insights. It’s amusing to hear a 14-year-old deliver an incredibly beautiful and insightful message and then ask the adults present what it means. The real-deal folks tend to be very consistent in their messages.  I’ve followed the teachings of one particular channeler for the last decade and the message never falters, unlike with just about every other teacher or preacher I’ve know whose message changes at least slightly as they grow and change as individuals.  The source of the information, whether Higher Self or  guide or what, very definitely seems to be a different personality to me, at least in the cases where I know the channeler well. Not radically different but at least as different as a sibling or twin.

2. Very often, the voice and sometimes vocabulary will change. Those who listen to Esther Hicks of Abraham-Hicks when she channels are familiar with the change in voice to a clipped “Good morning” of “Abraham.”  To me, the vocal change has been the most notable difference in people I’ve known personally who do this.  I can tell they are tapped in or hooked in or connected to this source of insights when their voices change, usually to something lower and with a different tenor or texture.  I’ve worked with new channelers who were completely unaware of the vocal change until I brought it to their attention.

3.  Often, but not every time, I will notice a change in the channeler’s eyes.  I’ve seen pupils widen many times.  Other times, they stare at a spot in space, lost in a trance-like meditative state.  Again, this isn’t every time, but for a couple of people I know well, it’s been a startling thing to witness and usually matches the vocal change.

Do I channel?  Hmmm, not in the sense I describe above, but I understand it moreso as a writer and often…as a very good friend.

I have written books that felt like SERVICE.  Like a mission.  I had to work at those books.  Other books, I have felt as if I was tapping in to something that was both deep within or far outside myself. When my Lauren Hartford writing team decided to put together our pagan/Universal Law “instructional novel,”   Fire Burning in Water, I finished my part of the novel in a matter of days, with almost no editing required for my part.  The words just rushed out onto the page with no pre-planning.  It was more like transcribing the story as someone else told me, even though I didn’t hear words….just knew the next thing.   I could not hold back.  I HAD to write, even though I didn’t know what was coming next.  My part of the story was not exactly uplifting (it’s an alternate reality with some retro-causal theory thrown in), and I found that my part of the story was upsetting to me.  While I was writing it, I could not get a long-lost friend out of my mind.   A very bizarre experience for me!   As a group, we decided to change up my  part of the story just a little but it’s still essentially as I received (?) and wrote it.  About 2 years later, I received news on my old friend and his disturbing situation.  Almost everything I had written had come true for him in the month before the news and secrets I had never expected played out just as they had in the book. 

Was I channeling a spirit guide or alien entity?  Um, not that I’m aware of!  Maybe it was just a matter of tapping into something I recognized about that person at a subconscious level and letting it out before I was willing to recognize his secrets and addictions on a conscious level. 

The way I most commonly am accused of channeling is when I’m writing a heartfelt letter, usually an email because I have awful penmanship and keyboards let me move fast.  Sometimes, it’s like I have to say something to them and don’t know what’s coming out.  I simply start typing and hit send when I’m done…and find out later that I’ve freaked them out a bit because I’ve told them something way too personal that I didn’t know and given them help with a situation that I had no idea existed.  I do have to be careful with that in my novels, because I will have someone on my mind while I write and later will be accused of spilling their secrets when they’ve never  told me.

Again, I don’t really consider those examples to be channeling in the way we normally think of channeling.  It’s just a feeling of “must…write…this…now.”   Then I write stinging or unusual insights. My voice is my writing voice and yes, I do get intently focused and trance-like when I’m writing like crazy, so maybe it is.    

But think about it.  We all probably tap into that insightful source–wherever it originates–more than we realize.  Some capture that in video; others in writing.  I’m sure artists and musicians do the same.  It’s a flow of creative energy to me, but I’d love to hear from more scientific minds on how they express “channeled” thoughts.

In WAITING ON THE THUNDER, available for your kindle or kindle app, I explored the themes of faith, whether it’s faith in yourself, which the hero has lost, or faith in God, which is what’s happened with Megan.  Having been a good church girl all her life, she left her hometown after her husband and best friend betrayed her, and she’s been licking her wounds ever since. 

So what happens when you pray and the answer isn’t yes?  What happens when you ask but don’t receive?  Sometimes, the answer isn’t no, but  it’s just not the right time to receive what you asked for.

This novel really embodies that theme for me. 

In the early 1990’s, I read about a Southern judge who, known for his “creative punishments,” sentenced a man convicted of sexual assault to live in a community known for its unappealing women.  As with many things that touch my life, that story sparked an idea for a novel.

I originally wrote the novel for an editor at a major New York publishing house, but when she left for a new assignment, the manuscript was lost in the shuffle and—disappointingly—was never published.   For years, it’s been sitting on an old hard drive because it was considered too religious or too spiritual for the market I wrote it for.  But in cleaning off an old computer before donating it, I re-discovered the fully-edited-and-ready-to-publish book, with instructions to remove the Christian references.

If this book had been published on schedule, many of the spiritual elements would have been edited out of the final version.  The time wasn’t right for it then.  But I do believe it is now.

Waiting on the Thunder is Christian-themed without being preachy, and contains elements of violence,  death, sexuality outside marriage, and the usual high body count found in my suspense novels.

Do you see this photo of the path through the woods?  I cannot see where this path ends.  As with Life, I can see only a few steps ahead.  In places where the path is straighter, I can see farther, but what’s around that next bend?  Or just over the hill?

To me, it’s unknown.  And I’m a person who likes to know. 

I occasionally have visions of the future–photographic flashes, if you will, sometimes  accompanied by sounds, smells, and–most distinctly–emotions.  I have met strangers whom I remembered from the future as extremely important to me, complete with all the feelings that flank a deep love relationship.   And I have had strong intuition about certain things around that next bend, both joyful and painful.  But I still don’t know what’s around the bend.

And I still want to know.

Somehow, I feel that I’m more in control of my destiny if I know.  If the flashes aren’t there or the strong intuition or the very serene sense of “knowing” and I still desperately want to know, I will attempt to divine for it.  It’s my way of reaching out into the future, raising a periscope high above the forest so I can turn the looking glass this way and that, and see where the path leads.

It’s been pointed out to me by past spiritual teachers that my persistent need to know is a sign of a lack of faith.  Having faith in the Universe and that I will be taken care of is one of my life lessons, and one I have not yet mastered…but I am working on it.

Two months ago, I began an exercise that was meant to be artistic and turned out to be very spiritual for me.  During this exercise, I discovered that art is an act of faith.  Although I had been a writer all my life, I had never until two months ago participated in National Novel Writing Month.  This year was different–I had room in my life to give it a try and see if I could actually write a whole 50,000 words in 30 days.  And I had a story worth telling–the story of a woman trying to find her purpose in life and a man who would do anything for love.  Two tortured, not always nice characters discovering their dark places alone and together and in the process helping me work through some of my own dark places, as often happens when I pick up a pen or sit down at my keyboard.

Although I had wanted to try NaNo before, I had always had a career, busy home life, kids.  This year, I had an empty nest, a short break in my relationship, and not so much overtime to work in the office.  So I decided to pour my passions into writing as fast and furiously as possible for the entire month of November.  I finished the month with 50,105 words and the next month with another 35,000 words.  Another 15,000 words or so and I’ll proudly be done with THE SECRET LIVES OF LIBRARIANS, the first of the 9th Gate Book series.

While the creative aspect has been a blast, the spiritual aspect surprised me.  The other thing I did completely differently from any writing I’ve done before–instead of sitting down and writing it all out or dictating a chapter, transcribing it, reading it, and then dictating more–was doing nothing but dictating the story.  No going back to analyze and agonize over what I’d already written.   I dictated on my commute to/from work, on power walks, while folding laundry or cooking.   To my shock, I found that I’d written 500 pages entirely on my phone’s recorder app, and in record time.  Oh, the Gods were good to me!  

I was okay for the first few chapters where I could remember everything, but then it became strangely disconcerting.  (Yeah, that’s often the sign of a spiritual lesson, isn’t it?)  I began to feel ungrounded, worried.  Although the story was plainly there in my audio files, like life experience only I remembered, I didn’t have anything to look at to see exactly where I was or where I was going.  I knew I had come a long way–all I had to do was look at the transcription word counts from the audio files–but I didn’t have the actual printed pages to look back at, the manuscript dog-eared or scribbled on.  All I had was the momentum to go forward around that next bend.  I knew how the story started, how it ended, and some things that happened on the way.  But I didn’t know that Lilah had been abducted as a child and how her survivor’s guilt turned her into a self-proclaimed monster or how Daegan would understand calling on his Gods most often when he was in need or desperate or desperately in love and the correlation between prayer and romantic need.  These were things that I discovered as I moved forward on the path, both literally and figuratively.

Then one day, about 80,000 words into the story, I was out with my phone’s recorder app turned on, walking at a nice 4 mph clip, when I came upon the path in the photo.  I didn’t know where it led and I didn’t know what was around that next turn.  Specifically, what words would I be dictating?  What insights would come to me when I turned that corner?  I had just recently heard a lecture by Dr. Wayne Dyer where he talked about having faith when he sat down to write that whatever he needed to write would come in the perfect way, and that’s the way I approached this entire novel–completely on faith that whenever I pick up that recorder and head down an unknown path, whatever I need to know to write about will come to me, that the creativity and inspiration will be there, that the right words will be there and it will flow. 

That I will never turn that corner and find there’s nothing there for me but emptiness. 

Some surprises, yes.  Often.  But that I’ll be okay and the words will come. 

Art itself is like that, like Life.  It’s all an act of faith.  Whether it’s the writer not knowing what happens in the next chapter, the sculptor not knowing the resulting form, the photographer not knowing exactly what will be captured in a split second of the life of her subject, or the musician sitting down to pluck out a few chords to match his lyrics.  Or even the seamstress or quilter with a pattern in her head but still no idea which fabrics she’ll pick or how the end result will look….except beautiful. 

Writing THE SECRET LIVES OF LIBRARIANS has been like that: the faith that what I need will be there when I reach that point on the path.  Even though I have no idea how it looks now.  I don’t need to know the exact words when I put on my walking shoes and head out the door to finish these last chapters.  The words will come as I stroll the curves and twists of the path.  I don’t need to know.  It will come.

And the same in my life.  I don’t need to know exactly what’s around the next bend. 

Because it will be okay.

I have faith.

Readers would be amazed to know that neither the author nor the publisher are making “grocery money” off most of these books at those prices because they just can’t stomach raising the prices any higher. So I understand when readers talk about book exchanges, even though I as an author will never see a penny of royalty for any reads a book gets after its first sale via a bookstore or publisher website.  You know that happens.  And Gods know, there are plenty of people who want me to send them a free book “to see if I get hooked on your work.” 

Sigh.  It’s no wonder so many of my favorite authors have stopped writing when confronted with the choice of feeding their children by working at Wal-Mart or writing the books they love but don’t get paid for. There’s only so much time in a day and most of us have bills to pay.

Several online friends were talking about a book club for pagans, from the readers’ point of view, and it made perfect sense as a reader.  Then one said something that made me wonder.  They mentioned exchanging books by mail, using media rate and how it would probably be less than $3 to send a book.  Let’s say there’s another $.50 for an envelope if you can’t find a small box to recycle or have a free envelope. 

So they’re willing to spend $3 to $3.50 for a book…with most of that money going to the US Postal Service and none to the author or publisher.  Hmmmm. So here’s a—perhaps—better suggestion that’s greener because it doesn’t spend additional natural resources on transport or waste trees and if financially more favorable to authors. 

If you’re interested in continuing to see your favorite authors writing books about your favorite subjects (rather than spending their writing time waiting tables or sweeping floors) and you’re willing to spend several dollars on a book’s TRANSPORTATION to you but wouldn’t think about it for the book, then please consider spending the same amount as you would on postage by buying one of their less expensive ebooks.

For example, if you’re a Prime member at Amazon, you can go right now and borrow pagan and spiritual ebooks from their lending library to be read on your kindle—and the author will get a small royalty that sends a signal to please keep writing. 

Some examples you can read for free:

A REVERENCE FOR TREES (A PAGAN LOVE STORY)  

FLYING BY NIGHT (A PAGAN SUSPENSE)

WORKING THROUGH GRIEF

SHAYNE ON YOU (Maggie Shayne’s book that is so magickal and full of Law of Attraction!)

If you don’t have a kindle, you can download the kindle app for free and read ebooks on your computer, tablet, or smart phone. 

Examples under $5—and yes, some are ones I’ve had a hand in because it’s easier to list quickly what I know about personally. In ascending order of price:

A REVERENCE FOR TREES (A PAGAN LOVE STORY)   $.99

THE ARCHANGEL’S RETURN: ANGELS, PROTECTION RITUALS, GUIDES AND ENTITIES (an instructional story) $.99

SALT AND FIRE: CLEANSING AND HOUSE PURIFICATION RITUALS (an instructional story)  $.99

THE SWEETEST POISON:  HYPNOSIS, COVEN DYNAMICS, AND ENERGETIC CONNECTIONS BETWEEN LOVERS (an instructional novella)  $.99

ELEMENTS OF FUN: 14 NATURE BASED PROJECTS to ENJOY WITH YOUR CHILDREN  $2.99

MAGICK’LY DELICIOUS (A PAGAN COOKBOOK)  $2.99

GIFTS FOR THE GODDESS ON A COLD WINTER’S EVE  $3.50

GIFTS FOR THE GODDESS ON A WARM SPRING MORN $3.50

ACCESS: AN END TIMES THRILLER  $4.99

CELEBRATING THE TOWER CARD: THIRD DEGREE CHALLENGES, SHIELDING, WITCH WARS, AND CULT DETECTION (an instructional novel): $4.99

FLYING BY NIGHT (A PAGAN SUSPENSE)  $4.99

FIRE BURNING IN WATER: LAW OF ATTRACTION, EXAMPLES OF MISUSE AND SUCCESSES PLUS OTHER UNIVERSAL LAWS (an instructional novel):    $4.99

If you are an author with a pagan, New Age, or spiritually eclectic book on Amazon or at another ebook site and it’s price is roughly the same as POSTAGE via media mail, please use the comment section below to list it.  Tell us where we’ll find it and let us and our readers support your work! 

It feels like…stagnant energy has  become unstuck.  That makes sense for people as well as projects.  The impulses behind a new start or a do-over shake loose the stuck feeling.  We WANT to move forward.  We crave movement, even if we’re standing still, because if we just stand still, the world moves forward and we lag behind its movement  and so move backward.  We don’t discard the older project by breathing new life into it any more than we discard our own selves by changing up how we present ourselves and what we present to ourselves.

With this unstuck energy, I am already finding nice surprises.  A short book I wrote months ago, GIVE YOUR LIFE DIRECTION, is suddenly finding new life and receiving attention from new readers.  I suppose it could be tied to New Year’s resolutions and goals for 2012 but whatever the impuse behind the new attention, seeing it springing to life after all these months is gratifying and. well, makes me giggle a little (not a common thing!)

Here’s the original info page.  If you’ve been a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll recognize some of the chapters.

Give Your Life Direction: 23 Life Coaching Tips to Motivate You, Re-Focus Your Time, and Overcome Resistance to Positive Change

by Lorna Tedder

Published by Spilled Candy Books

From the author…

The purpose of this book is to share with you 23 different methods I used to get to that “good place” I’ve sought all my life—from committing to taking real action to change, to making time in my life for the things I want, to stopping nosy people from giving me unwanted advice, to figuring out what works for me and keeps me healthy, positive, and happy.

There was a time when I felt as if I had no control over my life’s direction because I was letting everyone and everything direct me. I used to be uptight, over-stressed, anxious, and…in physical pain…from all the expectations I placed on myself and allowed others to place on me.

When I divorced after a long-term marriage, I began to search actively for a different way to live my life—not just more productively (because I was already very productive) but with serenity and genuine enjoyment. That meant looking closely at my beliefs and behaviors. Self-knowledge is crucial to making wonderful changes in our lives, and it’s not always easy. The more burdens we carry, the harder to let go of them. The more shadows in our past, the more frightening it can be to shine the light on them because we’re not always sure there’ll be anything of substance left by the time the shadows are all gone.

Slowly, I began to peel off the layers, to let up on myself instead of badgering myself to be better to an impossible degree of never good enough. I started to let go of the way I’d learned to look at things and accept that there were other, easier, more fulfilling ways to look at life. Then I started to let loose, just be myself and insist on it without being my own worst enemy.

If you can use any one of the methods in this book to lighten your own load, then you can take those important first steps to a more enjoyable life path. In only a few steps, you’ll start to figure out your life’s direction and how to make course corrections so you can find solid footing as wonderful new vistas begin to unfold in front of you.

I wish you beautiful changes,

Lorna Tedder

Author of The Long-Awaited, Honest-to-God Secret to Being Happy (and 23 more tips for living your joy)

*******

Download the ebook  from Amazon Kindle now.

We know this can be a tough time of you for some of you, and this is our way of trying to help others through what we’ve been through ourselves.

We’ve just released Elements of Fun on Kindle!    When we were putting this one together, what we aimed for was to incorporate the elements of air, water, earth, and fire as much as possible into the projects.  Take a look here and few the first few pages.

——

Elements of Fun:

14 Nature-Based Projects to Enjoy with your Children

by Lady Sialia

Published by Spilled Candy Books

Fourteen fun projects to do with your kids, all with Nature-based themes. Includes instructions for wind chimes, kaleidoscopes, ornaments, wreaths, sand art, crystal sculptures, and more. Perfect for parents and teachers of grade school children.

*******

Available for your Kindle or Kindle app.  Buy it here.

100 and More Ways to Feed the Body and Soul: Baby Steps to Less Stress, Better Health, and More Energy

by Lorna Tedder

Published by Spilled Candy Books

Over 100 tips for stress relief, ergonomics, desk exercises, and health in general.

*******

Download to your Kindle or Kindle app now.

WORKING THROUGH GRIEF is now available for your Kindle or Kindle app. This book has been available and selling well as a pdf on this site for some time now but I have been remiss in uploading it to Amazon for Kindle.  I’ve probably received more positive feedback on this one subject than on everything else I’ve ever written.

It was originally written for my best friend over a decade ago when she lost her mother, based on my own experiences with friends and family.  When Daddy died 5 years ago this weekend,  I went back and read it as a reader rather than as a writer, and it still rang true for me.  For those of you who purchase it, I sincerely hope it helps you find a better peace of mind so you can to honor what you’ve lost.

—-

Working through Grief: Tips for Coping with the Pain of Loss

by Lorna Tedder

Published by Spilled Candy Books

Originally written for authors who were trying to earn a living through their creativity while emotionally devastated, this short book has been updated for anyone facing the death or loss of a loved one–and trying to figure out how to keep moving forward. The book covers the definition of grief, the expected length of mourning, the unexpected emotions and reactions, dealing with “stupid” (though well-intended) comments, and many tips for coping with the pain that comes with loss.

Working through Grief has been used by support groups, grief counselors, and religious organizations to help their members and clients find some measure of peace.

*******

Download the ebook  from Amazon Kindle now.

When I began writing novels for Silhouette Books in the 90’s, I had posterboards with plot points and pictures.  I had composition books of the kinds of houses or cars I wanted and how I wanted to decorate my homes.

Just entertainment?  No.  And looking back, I can now see that most of my vision boards did come true.  Yes, even the hot men with earrings and turned-up collars who gave fantastic foot rubs and knew the latest in music.

For most of my life, I’ve done the kind of work that is hard to see, at least until it’s done. My dual careers have been in mental and creative fields, where the product was most often intellectual property. Sometimes it’s hard to stay on track and keep producing when you can’t see the end result for many months and there’s no evidence yet of the work that’s been done.

If I were to knit a scarf, you would be able to see the yarn and pattern before you saw the finished product.  If I were to photograph a party, you could see the digital photos in the view screen even before I transferred them to my hard drive or posted them on Facebook or printed them.  If I were pruning the shrubs outside your office, you’d see prunings on the ground.  If I were digging a ditch, you’d see a hole and dirt.  But for writers and managers, it’s harder to keep in mind what the end result should look like, so I use vision boards as guides…reminders of what is to come.

I’ve found that, when managing people, it’s helpful to sketch each person under my supervision and picture how I want to develop their talents.  Are they holding awards in their hands?  Are they smiling at their new promotions?  Are they wearing a sash that proclaims them to be the lead xyz on a particular program?   Those vision boards, I keep entirely to myself, though I occasionally share those ideas with those involved.

For my writing, vision boards are even more fun.  They’re almost always mock-ups of book covers.  I have a blast creating them, and sometimes, they give me ideas for the book.  And sometimes they won’t stop giving me ideas and turn into a whole series of books! But they do help me immensely to stay on track, and any time I wonder if I might put away the manuscript for a while, all I have to do is look at the book cover/vision board for inspiration.

To celebrate our personal and professional plans for the future–more to come on that–we are putting most of our backlist on sale for $.99. Not all, sorry–we don’t have the rights back to all our previously published books.

For now, the following novels and non-fiction guides are available from Amazon Kindle as $.99 ebooks. Click on the book cover below for more information and download links.

Many of you comment privately on my blog and ask me to keep it private or you email me.  I honor that.  Most of the comments I received are not posted here for that reason.  My spam filters keep out most of the trash, but because it doesn’t keep out everything, I do personally read all blog comments that the filters don’t consider spam.  I’ve made some interesting new friends that way and have reviewed and recommended material as a result.  However, there are the phony comments with the sole purpose of promoting the commenter’s own website or book.  They used to be easy to spot because they were excessively vague and effusive.  Okay, trashed.  Immediately.  No value added to my blog and I refuse to provide a link to a spammer.

The new trend in book and website promotion is an equally vague blog comment that is mildly (or more) insulting.  There’s always some “constructive” criticism that tends to be dead wrong, a reference to being a big fan who has read many posts, and a promise to come back and read more…and a link to the commenter’s website where a book is being sold.    Here’s the most recent one I received, with the link removed to avoid aiding a spammer in upping his search engine rank with another link:

Author : stress reduction (IP: 75.39.97.192 , 75-39-97-192.lightspeed.bcwdoh.sbcglobal.net)
E-mail : RoloffMohn12@hotmail.com
URL    : http://

Whois  : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=75.39.97.192
Comment:
obviously like your web-site however you need to take a look at the spelling on quite a few of your posts. Many of them are rife with spelling issues and I to find it very troublesome to tell the reality then again I will surely come back again.

(NOTE:  Had I approved this comment, all the above info and more would have been visible.)

My first thought, before I saw the spammer link, was “Oh, crap!  Did I have too many typos on my itty-bitty keyboard?”  Then I looked at the article in question, one of my more scholarly ones and not a typo on the page.  Never mind the punctuation errors in the comment–I don’t usually complain about errors or even text-speak in a comment–but they did give me another hint that this is a new trend in book promotion.  Most of these sites seem to be through one of those template sites where you write a few articles that support a site of about 15 pages that sells ads and usually an info product masquerading as a book.  They follow a particular formula, every one of them, and I’d bet that the forum they’re all on is buzzing with how to promote their sites this way.

In fact, if you copy part of the comment into Google, you’ll find lots and lots of blogs that have been duped into giving the spammer links that will drive traffic and improve their rank in search engines.

Could I be wrong?  Am I calling out someone who is a long-time fan of my site?  Uh, no.  My traffic stats show that these people have never visited my site, which search engine was used to find my site, how many posts were read (just the one post VISITED because there wasn’t time to read it), and that they were on my site barely long enough for their presence to register while they hurriedly pasted the same comment on my blog as on so many others.   If this were a one-time deal, I’d blow it off, but sadly, it’s becoming a regular nuisance.  What I’m most annoyed about is that I’m still idealistic enough to think that people involved in spiritual teaching are or should be ethical.

It’s ironic that this book, Super Tapping, and several others that have been spammed to me recently, are all subjects that I’m very interested in and frequently promote.  Would I buy or recommend Super Tapping after being lied to? 

Oh, hell, no.

My NaNoWriMo project–one that was loosely plotted ten years ago in NYC after a writer’s conference when I was on a roll.  In fact, I loosely plotted a whole series with the same characters.  Life has intruded, and many other books have been written meanwhile,  but it’s time to jump back into the fun of this black magic, black ops, dark sex kind of suspense novel.

——

November1st  begins National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and this November, November 2011, will be my first year to participate.

That may sound strange coming from someone who has been a writer–and a published one at that–for so many years, but I’ve never been able to do it before–holding down a stressful full-time job, plus home businesses, plus two children.

Well, this year, all that is different. This year, I have an empty nest, so I have the opportunity to see exactly how much time can I devote to writing one novel–whenever I’m not at work, that is–and how far can I get into completing a brand-new suspense novel that’s been tugging at my heart. I’ve decided to approach NaNoWriMo not as merely finishing one novel.  Hey, I might get lucky and finish one and then part of another or … life may happen as life often does,  and I won’t get finished at all, but maybe I’ll get a few good chapters written, which is further than I’ve been before on any of  these new projects.

No, I’ve decided to approach National Novel Writing Month the same way I’ve approached my diet in the past year.  Rather than use the word diet, I prefer the term way of eating. I threw myself into a new diet that worked exceedingly well, lost the weight I wanted to, and got back into shape.  I can call that diet a  success, but I didn’t stop there and go back to my old habits. No, instead I looked at it as a new way of life, of not eating certain foods that are bad for me, and of eating foods that will fuel me to better health and feeling good.

For National Novel Writing Month 2011, I plan to approach it the same way as eating –a way of eating and a way of writing. 

Instead of finishing a book hastily thrown together in 30 days, what I intend to do is get back into the practice of writing multiple pages a day on one novel.  I go back to my old standby of dictation and editing while transcribing, eking out time wherever I can and not insisting on having a full day or even a full hour to do blessedly nothing but write. 

It’s the habit I’m after this time, not the book,  because the habit will bring many more books as it has in the past…before life and my non-writing career intruded on the deep, dark plans I had for my characters

The Lauren Hartford writing team has been especially touched by his work, including Issac’s checklist for determining if a religious group may be a cult.  The Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame was a critical tool used by the High Priestess in Celebrating the Tower Card: Third Degree Challenges, Shielding, Witch Wars, and Cult Detection  and has been instrumental in changing the direction of spiritual paths to safer surroundings.

He will be missed.

One of my favorite methods is the one used in this short “instructional” novella, Salt and Fire: Cleansing and House Purification Rituals, by Lauren Hartford.  It’s told in fiction-form to show you step by step how it’s done and any potential hazards to watch out for.

What I like most about the Lauren Hartford Method is that it combines four elements, even though it seems that it would combine only two.  Salt, of course, represents the element of Earth.  Alcohol becomes a burning liquid, so the elements of both Water and Fire seem to play together.  The strong, fresh smell–the element of Air–is the result as the other three elements react to each other. 

Get the book.  It’s only a few bucks and you need to know the dangers before you try such a serious “house-cleaning.”

PDF version. $3.00 Retail Price. Download pdf file now.

 A small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years.

At the center of this image made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short…..

Photo copyright and more info at 

 http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/b1509/.

Huh?  What am I working on?

Maybe it’s just a writer thing—because I don’t usually hear it asked of “normal” people within 10 seconds of someone meeting them  or reconnecting with them—but I often run into people who immediately after saying hello launch into questions of what I’m working on.  They don’t mean the multi-million dollar projects I’m working on in my non-writing career or my latest home repair-refurb-redecoration. You writers, artists, and musicians know what I’m talking about.

I don’t get the question from people who are very, very close to me.  They already know what I’m working on.  They hear it all the time because I’m excited about it, Gods help them.  The question is always from acquaintances or friends outside my small inner circle.  They know how much I love writing but don’t keep in touch that often…or just stay out of earshot when I start plotting a novel.

What I’m currently working on, writing-wise, is editing a Lauren Hartford project and several non-fiction ebooks, including 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It.  And I’m almost done with some last-minute tweaking of  Waiting on the Thunder.  I’m done, but I’m having a hard time letting that one go.

But I’ve started a new novel, too.  First time in a long time that I’ve started a new project.  I still have three finished books yet to edit since I started my last new novel, and I wrote all three of those while power-walking daily with a digital recorder, busy girl that I am.

It’s hard to explain what this new fiction project is, but it’s a suspense novel with the working title The Hand of God.  It’s not a religious book, though I’ve definitely thrown in some Law of Attraction.   The title refers to a specific image, and that’s the genesis of this new novel.  You want to know how I get my ideas?  Right here. 

Last week, while visiting with family out of state, I drove past an out-of-the-way spot that had a really strong visual allure to me.  An image there stood out, and to me, it looked like a “Hand of God.”   Later on the trip, I took my family out to dinner, to a place I’d never been—a hole in the road that served everything fried, including gator tail.  On the wall behind us was the same symbol I’d seen earlier, several miles away, painted into a mural.  That’s when the story began to form. 

I’m not sure how to explain it yet without giving away the story, but I know who the villains are…and the victims…and the protagonist.  The protagonist is not in any way based on me, but she’s the imagined adult version of a child I observed earlier this year.   The crime is based on something that never happened to me because, wow, am I ever being watched over!  But I came close enough that it got my attention and this novel will put it to bed for me in a therapeutic way.  The 24-year-old protagonist has abandonment issues—both the constant abandonment throughout her childhood and her adult patterns of abandoning others before they can abandon her—and those abandonment issues from her childhood are tied to someone else’s dark secret and even darker revenge.  Yep, my kind of story. 

The best part is that I’m not writing it according to any guidelines or any preferred market.  I’m just lettin’ ‘er rip.  Having a blast with discovering the twisted past she’s repressed and how it endangers her.  I’m not writing it for any particular audience or publisher.  I’m doing it for me.  It puts me into a joyous place, all this creativity, and when I’m done, people who love it will recognize the spark in it and love it, too.  It’s not the path to money or fame or anything but my enjoyment.  Anything more that it turns into is just gravy.

So what are you working on?  And is it for you?

This article is from the upcoming book, 23 Ways I Screwed Up My Life  with the Law of Attraction—and How I Fixed It

Early in my writing career, I became a regular victim of  my own sabotage.   It wasn’t the baby editors or the money-grubbing agents or the sucky market.   At the time, I believed the only way for me to gain acceptability as a novelist was to find a major international publisher who would pay me a pittance for a book that would sell 100,000 copies.  Technology has brought many new options to writers since then, and though I’ve not sold as many copies of books I’ve published through what used to be unconventional means, I’ve made more money per book than most of the ones I sold to major publishers, and I’ve done it  by finding new and unique ways to get my work to my audience. 

I’m primarily a suspense writer, and I love a good  thriller with a little romance thrown in and maybe even some paranormal.  Though I’ve written in just about every genre but westerns, my biggest sellers were in the  romance genre, particularly  what’s known as romantic suspense or paranormal romantic suspense.   That means lots of plot and complicated twists and some form of boy-gets-girl.  I didn’t really care which genre I got published in as long as a major publishing house validated my writing.  I shoe-horned myself into romance amid many skilled authors who could go deeply into emotion and character whereas I was more about the story and keeping the surprises coming right up until the last page. 

Unfortunately, instead of using the Law of Attraction to bring me opportunities that were easy and fulfilling, I did a great job of shoving my dreams away from me and making it as hard on myself as I possibly could.

The most obvious example of attracting the wrong thing to myself was in my rejection packages.  I joined the best writing groups out there, including the Romance Writers of America, which had excellent tools for teaching the craft and business of writing for publication.  They taught me what I needed to know about writing, selling, and promoting my novels, to the point where I hit a couple of chain bookstore bestseller lists under my pseudonym.  They taught me what to expect from an editor and how the whole process worked to get an editor to read your manuscript without using it for a foot stool (my second editor did that with another author’s manuscript).  They taught me that  if the editor wants your work–something that you could expect to happen rarely–you would get “the call.”  Acceptances were always a phone call.  Rejections meant a fat package in the mailbox.

Or a package that wouldn’t fit in the mailbox.

Writers had a lot fewer options for publication in the 1990’s when I was getting my start.  We had to accept conditions we didn’t like, such as “no simultaneous submissions.”  That meant we printed out a 400-page manuscript, packaged it up, spent a small fortune to get it to New York City, and then waited for a response…often up to six months, even when we were under a contract that said the editor had to notify us within 60 days of acceptance or rejection.  Remind them at five months, as I did with my second editor, and the rejection could arrive almost immediately for every project on her desk.  My longest submission–where I actually received a response at all–took 24 months to the day on a 30-page proposal.  Good thing I had a personal invitation from that editor to send the book!

I was prolific, and I rarely had fewer than five projects out for review, usually at more than one publishing house.  But instead of every day expecting every phone call to be from an editor in New York, which would have been the best way to use the Law of Attraction as a writer, I came home from day job and began to crane my neck to see the mail box from the moment I spotted my house down the street.  Sometimes I saw them crammed into mailbox,  those returned packages with a polite “Doesn’t work for me” or “Pushes the envelope too much” attached to pristine, unread tomes or to pages that smelled of cigarettes and coffee.

If I turned the corner on my way home and didn’t see an overstuffed mailbox or maybe a box resting atop it, my heart would skip a beat.  Another day, I thought, without a rejection, and that meant the possibility of going to contract on a new book. Then I would steer past the mailbox and into the drive and I’d crane my neck to see if perhaps the mailman or UPS had delivered a rejected manuscript direct to my door, which was also a familiar sight.  If not, then I could wait another day to see if the editor called with good tidings or left me an unwanted package.

Looking back, I see now that I was looking for rejection. I was focused on it.  I didn’t listen for the phone call–no, I looked for the rejection in the mail.  It became part of my daily ritual, Monday through Saturday, to look for rejection on my doorstep.

There were many other abominations that happened, like losing my editor, like getting a new editor who hated suspense, like having an editor give my killer title away to another author after rejecting my manuscript for being too similar to one she’d just bought, like having an editor give my entire synopsis AND the heroine’s unsual name to a has-been author who needed a new historical bestseller,  like finding a terrific editor and having the company close down the line three months after my novel was published due to a change in the market.  I could go on and on, but honestly, I’ve forgotten most of those atrocities now.  I no longer focus on them.  At the time, it was a feeling of helplessness in the big, bad publishing world and anything that could go wrong did.   Like with most authors I knew.  There were things going on in my personal life where I felt I had no emotional support from my loved ones and I put a lot of desperation (aka resistance) into having my dream career as a successful, full-time writer so I could leave a less fulfilling but more prestigious career.   

Things turned around for me when I found a place of contentment with my writing career.  I don’t have to put that old pressure on myself to make a new bestseller list or get a three-book contract or have my editor adore me.  All I have to do is love what I write and ways to get it out there to readers who enjoy my work will appear.   But since I’ve come to understand the Law of Attraction, I never ever go looking for rejection.

There’s an annoying form of money-making out there right now that has brought up some inaccurate concerns about Spilled Candy Books, both from splicing bad info together and by making it difficult to find good info without coming directly to us (in case you’re shy).  It’s called splogging.

Splogs are blogs that have spam qualities.  These are usually created by third parties who’ve never been associated in any way with Spilled Candy or The Spiritual Eclectic—as customers, authors, business partners, even a random visit to our websites. They tend to have a bare-bones look to them and create new blog posts by posting parts of our The Spiritual Eclectic feed and feeds from other blogs that mention us.  They cannot re-post entire copyrighted posts from us, so they post bits and pieces, sometimes out of order and sometimes splicing info from different sources.  There are marketing gurus out there who’ll be happy to sell you a how-to package for $99, and we’ve talked to them for a better understanding.  The splogs hit the search engines (Google is choking on them) and when you type in a keyword for a search, you may well be taken to a splog that mentions your keyword but tries to sell you some affiliate product.  That’s how they make their money, if any—on affiliate products.  So far, I’ve not encountered any splog that makes money from a Spilled Candy book or course.

Where this becomes extremely annoying to me is when a former author reports to me that she read somewhere that I’m selling her out-of-print books at the Spilled Candy/Spiritual Eclectic site and references a splog as the source of the info.  The splog mentions a sale on out-of-print books years ago before they went out of print and we were trying to close out that inventory, plus a current sale on in-print books delivered to Florida instead of back to a warehouse, plus lists several current books.  The info is jumbled together and is an incoherent mess because it’s collated information from different source and different time periods.  I know this because I’m intimately familiar with the material, but now I wonder how often this happens to other publishers, bookstores, authors, bloggers, you name it.  Not to mention that as an author, I grimace when I find entire articles fashioned from my copyrighted words but rearranged and claimed by someone else. Sure, I could challenge it, but just contacting splogs would be more than a full-time job.  Until Google changes its algorithms to filter out splogs, it will be substantially less effective.

So to answer a few questions (these will be incorporated into our FAQ) that we’ve received as a result of splogs in the past few days:

-    Are you selling out-of-print books published by Spilled Candy at The Spiritual Eclectic?

No.  Legally, we do have the right to sell them because our contract gives us the right to sell existing inventory (no new books are printed) and pay our former authors royalties for them.  However, I don’t feel comfortable doing that at this point.  We voluntarily and immediately returned publication rights to those books nearly 3 years ago.  However, some bookstores that have years ago reported sales to us—and for which we paid the authors royalties—have since returned books to our wholesalers and distributors for credit (we don’t get to say no to these), so we do occasionally have out-of-print books shipped back to our home office.  I have refused to sell them because 1.  I’m concerned with how that would look to people who wouldn’t understand why these books are back in our possession (neither do we, frankly) and 2. Some of our former authors have taken their out-of-print books to new publishers and given them new life, which is as we’d hoped, and I don’t want to compete with their new editions by offering a cheap price on an older version.  We originally published many of these books at a time when there were hardly any other options for publishing a great book with a tiny pagan audience—that’s changed in recent years and so have we.

-    If you don’t sell out-of-print books that have been returned to you for credit, what do you do with them?

Initially, we offered them at cost (normally, that’s the actual per book printing costs only, plus postage) to the authors whose books were going out of print or to defray bills for additional books they’d purchased direct from us. That way, the authors could use them to shop the books to a new publisher or as promotions for other books they had coming up. We now donate them to a pagan prison ministry.

-    If you’d change your publishing company to do X or look like Y or focus on Z, I’d send you my manuscript to publish.

If you feel we need to make any changes to be the publisher you want, then we’re not the publisher for you.  That is not a rejection of you or your work.  We simply believe that you have to live by your vision and we have to live by ours.  If they’re not the same, then we would not make good partners. We would not ask you to change yourself or your vision to be what we want you to be, and we expect the same level of respect.  You should absolutely find a publisher who matches your vision—you owe it to your writing efforts to do that—and if we’re not it, so be it.  On both a personal and professional basis, any time I have tried to match my vision to someone else’s instead of staying true to mine, I have been miserable and the other person has been never stayed happy, despite my concessions. We stand by our vision and believe that others who share it 100% will find it just as we believe an author who stands by his or her vision will find a publisher who is a 100% perfect match for it.  That’s the Law of Attraction at its finest.

Lady Sialia  has put together over a dozen projects related to the four elements, all with Nature-based themes.  The book is not specific to any particular religion but Nature-lovers and followers of Earth-based spirituality will appreciate the suggestions.  This little book of instructions for how to make wind chimes, kaleidoscopes, ornaments, wreaths, sand art, crystal sculptures, and more is perfect for parents and teachers of grade school children.

By the way, Sialia is the sound a bluebird makes.

*******

Available in pdf in a condensed format for easy reading/printing.

$9.95 Retail Price

$ 4.95 Special Price on this website. Download the pdf file now.

Available soon for your Kindle or iPhone.

Two women from the Philippines are helping me with a home project. They’re smart, they work hard, and they’re compassionate. Traits I obviously admire. And even though they’ve both been handed their share of tragedy, they still agree, “Life is good.”

One is a single mother of six who just made the newspapers for being the victim of her former employer, a man she—along with quite a few other men and women—trusted and had great compassion for because of tragedy in his own family. She has a good heart, and because of it, she borrowed against everything she owned, including her home, to help someone she considered a friend.

She’s still singed from the fire but at the same time trying not to lose her sense of trust and compassion. That’s such a part of her that it would be a shame to lose not just her life savings but also her sense of innocence.

“But I’ve got great kids,” she tells me with a smile.

“Life is good,” echoes the other woman.

She’s keeping a positive outlook, which amazes me considering what she’s been through. Her friend tells me that people in the Philippines don’t suffer from depression like Americans do. Maybe it’s the pace of life here or maybe it’s the lack of attunement to Nature, or maybe it’s just not being ourselves. She finds it curious.

Then she adds, “Life is good.”

Before I can wonder how she can say that, she tells me that her husband was murdered in the Philippines in the 90’s but she had four children to raise and she had to go on with life.

“Life is good,” she says again.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Even when things are bad, there’s still enough good to make it all worth the effort.

Have you ever discovered that your intentions came true, just not in the way you planned?  Happens to me all the time.

A little over a year ago, I put the intention out there in a Law of Attraction exercise to take more courses, particularly enjoyable courses.  I didn’t have a set agenda of which courses, but I simply wanted to keep learning more and keep expanding my mind and knowledge.

And yet, I never did renew that Spanish language course I’d been taking at work because I didn’t have time there.  Nothing exciting showed up in the local college schedules that I hadn’t already taken.

It seems I spend so much of my time teaching, and it’s important to me to continue learning.  I don’t need yet another degree, but learning is extremely important to me.

As the Winter Solstice drew near—the time of year when I focus on my intentions for the next year—I thought about my intentions for the year that had just passed and how I hadn’t spent much time in classes at work or at home.  Very few conferences or workshops!

Fortunately, my day job requires that I take 80 hours of continuing education every two years, including lots of free online courses…but that doesn’t help with the enjoyable courses I’d wanted to take.  By boss came to me rather suddenly, reminding me that I was behind on my 80 hours and needed to submit any type of workshops or courses I’d taken recently, so I went into mad-scramble mode to keep from ending up on some big boss’ list of outcasts in the next few days.  I really had to strain my brain to come up with anything…at first.

I’d not only attended a two-hour geo-political lecture by George Friedman related to his book, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21^st Century, but I had downloaded the entire 9-hour, 41-minute audiobook and listened to it while cleaning out files at the office.    I decided to push my luck and see if I could get credit for the book, which was directly related to my work—and did!

That got me thinking.  Maybe there were other audiobooks I had listened to that would qualify.  As I began making a list of all the courses, speeches, lectures, workshops, and guides I’d listened to on my iPod while getting some exercise, gardening, or cleaning house, a pattern emerged that surprised me.

I’d been listening to plenty of enjoyable courses.  Without realizing it.

Though I prefer to download speeches and recorded-live workshops from Audible.com, I can get many of the more popular non-fiction guides through my local library and listen to them on CD.  I can also listen to a gazillion college lectures free from iUniversity through iTunes, and love listening to psychology courses my daughter recommends.

What’s on my iPod this week?  The Anglo-Saxon World by Dr. Michael D.C. Drout, part of the Modern Scholar lecture series.  I understand if the migration pattern of Beowulf’s people isn’t your cup of, um, mead, but then, there’s also an audiobook on the history of beer-making….

My third workshop for the Florida Pagan Gathering was fairly crowded. I never saw several of the attendees at anything else related to the weekend events. Maybe they were aliens or angels or something just dropping by!
In any case, that was the workshop on building worm holes, Field theory, inter-dimensional portals, etc. Fun stuff. Turns out, the people most interested in discussing the material afterward with me were ceremonial magicians and lots of folks kept asking when the book is coming out. Um, well, I must get it written….

But at one point in the workshop, I was talking about how to use the portals for healing and communication, to focus and amplify energy. The room got very quiet and the conversation very serious, with me hypothesizing that other life forms might be able to lower their energetic frequency and help us raise ours so that they could communicate with us.

At that moment, that brief lull of one-second silence after suggesting other life might want to tell us what they want from a relationship with humans, a student’s cell phone went off, its musical ringtone blaring to attention….

“I like…big butts and I cannot lie!”

Today’s Book Spotlight is on Salt and Fire:  Cleansing and House Purification Rituals.  Lauren Hartford uses a “novel approach” to explaining how to perform a complicated (and possibly dangerous) ritual to cleanse your home.  All details are provided in the form of a short novella, covering the materials needed, the actual process, the dangers, safety precautions, helpful hints and tips, possible results, and various considerations that you won’t find in the usual “how-to” book.

As with all of Lauren’s books in her Priestess Diaries series, these novels, novellas, and short stories  are “teaching fiction.”  They stand alone or can be read as part of a whole if you like the characters Lauren presents.

Salt and Fire is one of the shorter books and can be read easily in one sitting.  Even slow readers can finish it within an hour.  It’s available only in pdf, so you can download it to your computer or mobile phone.   Retail price is $3 – good info, and for the price of a quickie vending machine snack!

Download pdf file now.

Other books by Lauren Hartford focus on protection rituals, hypnosis and guided meditations, the Law of Attraction, and real witch wars, with two upcoming books on listening to your intuition and building inter-dimensional portals.

Attract Him Back: Master the Law of Attraction to Bring Back Friends, Lovers, and Relationships from your Past is one of our most popular books and receives the most  queries, so I’ll try to answer the most recent questions in one batch.

1. Have you really attracted that many men back into your life?

Yes. Some I refer to in the book overlap between chapters, so there may be 5 chapters that are based on my experiences with one person.  Also, keep in mind that I’m not 22 with only one or two former boyfriends or friends I’d like to bring back into my life.  My romantic life has spanned 30 years, and I find that they tend to return at least once and that I’m given a second chance at  a relationship.

2. Have you attracted back any more men since you wrote the book?

Yes, three more have come back to me.  One was a very serious relationship and two others were dating relationships that ended suddenly and with no explanation.  Only one of these men would I be even slightly interested in building a new relationship with, and that is strictly as a friend.  Two had changed so much over the years that they weren’t recognizable to me, but I had wanted to bring them back into my life.  They person each was is gone and I’m not interested—at all—in the new version of either man.  The third one confessed to me that he made a poor choice in ending our relationship in favor of someone he thought was more suited to what his pre-conceived ideas of a wife were.  He’s been through 4 marriages/significant others since and has wondered all these years how life might have been with me if he’d followed his heart.  That’s nice to know now, after wondering for so long, especially why he broke it off, but I’m not interested in him romantically at this point in time.   Since he’s been honest with me, I’m very interested in a friendship and look forward to building on that, but whereas I didn’t meet his needs back then, he doesn’t meet my needs now.

3. Are there any more men you’d like to “attract back”?

Yes.  Several.  But I also realize they’re in a very screwed-up place right now or either they’re working through their own issues alone.  I have no doubt that they’ll return when they’ve worked through their problems.  Right now, I’m in a happy place and don’t want to deal with their dramas or deprive them of the life lesson of learning to fix their own problems.

4. Can you clarify a bit more about the vacuum and nature not tolerating emptiness chapter?

Yes, let me try to put it in a somewhat different way.  Whether we’re talking about time or people or effort, your life will fill up.  This is why we may let go of an old chore or hobby and still wonder why we don’t have more time.  For example, if you used to have a best friend you spent 2 hours a day talking to and you decide you’re not best friends any longer, those 2 hours a day will quickly get filled up with…playing online, watching TV, a new hobby, etc.  For the initial days, you’ll be lonely and really feel that gap in time but in 6 months, you’ll wonder how you were able to talk for 2 hours a day and get everything done that must be done.  That gap is that vacuum, and it gets filled with something, even if you don’t realize it or you’re not sure what filled it.

By the same token, if your life is full, then there’s no room for something or someone new.  If you are trying to move on to a possible new relationship and you haven’t gotten over the old relationship, then there’s no room for something new—or a retread of the old.  The guy may be long gone but as long as you’re holding that spot, no one new is going to fill it.  You may meet someone new and want them to fill that spot, but until you’re ready to let go of it and allow someone else to fill that gap, it won’t happen.  If you’re trying to attract a specific person back into your life, you may find that the place you hold for him/her is already full—of the way the relationship was and all the hurt that surrounded it when he/she left your life.  As long as you’re holding on to all that negativity/hurt/jealousy/anger/dark emotion, it takes on a life of its own and holds that place.  There’s no room for that person to come back.

My dearest, darling Lorna:

We are about to send you someone who will tell you some great and useful things, many of which you already know but need a new way of thinking about them… but the real gift will be more in what this man shows you than in what he tells you.

Love you muchly,

All the Hosts of Heaven

I was getting messages from the “Universe” long before I signed up for Mike Dooley’s Notes from the Universe mailing list.  Since the mid-90’s, I have frequently referred to Deity—God, Goddess, The Trinity, The Higher Power, That Which Is Greater, The All, The Source—as the “Universe.”   Though some people (surprising to me) consider it a disrespectful term, my use of it is to convey the vastness and magnitude of Deity, whether I’m talking to a Christian, Wiccan, or occasionally an atheist who can find commonality in more scientific approaches.  In any case, I often ask for insight and the Universe doth provide!

Last year, I was trying to figure out how to pull all my projects together to get them out to the people who need them.  I’d come up with a solution—put it all in one place—but didn’t have the right processes in place at the time, so I spun my wheels a lot.  The vision began to develop but I had qualms, and those stopped me from pushing forward toward fulfilling my vision.  There just weren’t many role models for what I was doing.  So I asked the Universe to send me some guidance.

Enter Mike Dooley of TUT.com and his famous Notes from the Universe that landed him a part on Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, the hype-friendly movie about the Law of Attraction.

Okay, well, I did ask the Universe for help—and what happens?  The Universe sends me notes.  I’m still amused by the irony of that.  If the Universe had sent me textbooks, I probably wouldn’t have paid attention, given my sometimes short attention span.  I mean, who wants to read Textbooks from the Universe?

I’d heard about Notes from the Universe much earlier but only in mid-2009 did I join up and become a fan.  In case you’re not familiar with them, the notes are uplifting insights—often humorous—and they’re sent from the viewpoint of the Universe and personalized with the recipient’s name.  (You can sign up at Tut.com.)

They reminded me a lot of the Gifts for the Goddess mailing list I started over 10 years ago and, in spite of its uber-fast growth,  let lapse because my own personal life crises (divorce, extended family illness, job changes, etc) got in the way.  For almost a year, I sent out a short article every day, Monday through Friday, each day focusing on a different category.  After three months, I suddenly realized I had enough “gifts” to create a seasonal book.  I did the same for all four seasons, though the last two books got side-tracked for a number of years while I agonized my way through family issues.  The series was well-received, and when I offered to give away free ebooks in a non-ebook-friendly world of a decade ago for a period of 2 months as my way of giving back to the community, I was shocked that my fledgling publishing company gave away $75,000 worth of Gifts for the Goddess on a Hot Summer’s Night, which is the shortest and simplest of the four books (and actually my least favorite!)

Whereas I abandoned my free “Gifts” mailing list when it was at its peak subscription count, Mike continued with his freebies, building a list that now swells to 275,000 or more.  His “Notes” became his connection with a market of 275,000 fans—and potential buyers for any other products he created.  So when I joined his subscriber list, I was pleasantly surprised that he lived in the same town as my daughter’s college and gave monthly speeches there—and that he had a single upcoming hometown seminar that was within a day’s drive of me and about 20 minutes from Shannon’s apartment.  I was so excited!

I loved his 6-hour seminar, “Playing the Matrix and Getting What You (Really) Want,” by the way, and did get a lot out of it.  Although I’m already quite well-versed in Abraham-Hicks, The Secret, and a whole host of other Law of Attraction gurus and  although Mike’s material was not anything particularly new to me, he had a different point of view that helped me make a few wonderful changes in my life.  But that was based on what he had to tell me in his products, not what he had to show me.

By becoming a buyer of most of Mike’s material, I saw something that I wouldn’t normally have felt comfortable with for myself or that it would work for me:  the whole idea of how you package your products…and repackage them.   The first time I “bought” Mike was through his free “notes.”  That sold me on his style and unique humor.  The second time was when I found out he offered a subscription to the audio from his live monthly speeches, which are usually 1 to 1.5 hours long.  I bought the yearly $98 subscription so I could tune in once a month and hear new goodness.  After the $200 6-hour seminar I attended, I purchased his 12-CD series for $80, bought a new CD series called Leveraging the Universe and Engaging the Magic for $30, and bought a book.  Okay, for most people (including me)  these were not inexpensive and I ended up gifting them to friends.  The information was very worthwhile, however, and might have been even moreso if I were not already so familiar with works of this type.  I always appreciate a new perspective.

But what Mike showed me that is affecting me so much now is that much of his material is re-packaged.  During one of his CD series, I recognized most of the stories from his seminar.  Told a little differently but still the same story and same lesson.  By the time I’d finished another CD series and gotten half-way through the monthly audio subscription, I wasn’t finding much that was new to me—but it was being told to me in different formats.  And that was what Mike had to show me that went beyond what he had to tell me.

Back in January 2005, I had started my Supergirl@40 blog—what I called my healing journal—to work through the aftermath of my defunct marriage.  My older teen convinced me to use her own blogging group and I started very small, with just a handful of people I didn’t know  off-line.  I kept few things truly private and wrote my rawest emotion, usually working through situations cathartically to get to my solution.  In the process, I uncovered occasionally profound insights into human nature, spirituality, and life in general.  It wasn’t long before abuse survivors started showing up to share their stories with me, as well as people who were currently going through the same territory I’d just come through.  As I worked through my starting over process, I started to note the patterns in my life and make course corrections though my self-inquiry.  I also started digging into much older wounds and patterns from my childhood and then clearing out very old shadows.  That doesn’t mean that everything became perfect or that I turned into some kind of Ascended Master or something as some of the New Age gurus seem to have achieved—I still backslide sometimes but I can note it and correct it more quickly now, and  then share my process for my latest “course correction”  with others.

Over a few years’ time, I quickly wrote around 3000 essays, though essay is usually a rather negative term for epiphany-filled scribblings.  I learned a lot in the process about how much people have in common beneath the skin, and ever moreso the closer to the bone you go.  I began getting letters from readers who told me they were “addicted” to my articles and that they used my writings as a “blueprint” for their lives.  I heard from strangers who swore I was writing about their own lives—right down to the same stories about in-laws,  things that go bump in the night, and OMG-I-put-together-a-home-gym-that-can’t-be-taken-apart-and-won’t-fit-through-the-door-when-I-sell-the-house.  Strangers marveled that I seemed to be writing about their lives while people who knew me swore I was spilling secrets that they’d never told me.  I did not, however, go the way of many writers and “monetize” my blog at that time with AdSense or corporate ads.  I simply wrote what I felt and shared it.

I wasn’t aware of Mike Dooley at the time to copy him and I no longer remember how I came to the decision, but around the time I’d written half a million words  in blogs and articles, I decided to take the best of the articles from the first year or two and put them in a “blog book” for my readers who wanted to catch up on the earlier material.   There was just one problem:  how to decide what to put into the package.  My friend and mentor, Vicki Hinze, was the one who suggested that instead of publishing one book with my favorite articles, I should publish them all, but break it into a trilogy.

“Life is in the details,” she told me, explaining that the greatest value of my articles was in the detail of what happened and how I worked through it.

So I turned my articles into fifteen 150-page blog books covering January 2005 to Fall 2007, in chronological order for those who wanted to follow my story and my growth process.  I have now made 11 of the 15 available in digital form on this site—4 are still in production—and the first 4 are available in print.  For much of the work I did at the end of 2007 and through the next year, I packaged both old and new articles into themed books, which became—thus far—The Long-Awaited, Honest to God Secret to Being Happy (which I also teach at regional spiritual gatherings), Give Your Life Direction:  23 Life Coaching Tips to Motivate You, Re-Focus Your Time, and Overcome Resistance to Positive Change (which was a bundle of my favorite coaching tips), and Attract Him Back:  Master the Law of Attraction to Bring Back Friends, Lovers, and Relationships from your Past (different ways I’ve used the Law of Attraction to bring former lovers and friends back into my life).  Those 3 ebooks have outsold everything else I’ve published that wasn’t overtly sexual in nature.

But my dilemma has been what to do about “overlap.”

Thanks to Mike Dooley and his Notes from the Universe and all the material that launched from that experiment, I’ve stopped worrying about overlap and I’m gleefully pushing my work out there to an audience that craves it and can made good use of it.  At this point, I plan to reconvene the chronological blog books under the Third Degree Diaries series but also package them (along with new material) in themed collections with many more on the Law of Attraction and its lessons, on romance and relationships, on starting over, on meditation, on empathy and intuition, and on bizarre metaphysical events.  Some of these will become audio books, and others will become new courses that can be licensed to the life coaches who read this site so that they can teach from my articles and make money doing it.

I’ve considered all this before but felt unsure of my steps.  I wasn’t sure where the draw the line between the books, but I don’t necessarily have to.  I’m glad I asked the Universe to send me some guidance—and that I’ve had the chance to see how Mike puts his material out to his audience.   I don’t see myself climbing on stage in front of crowds—I’m more a fan of writing than talking—but who knows what will turn up next?