Interviews: The Path to Fame

Tuesday morning Patricia and I sat down for an interview.  One of the questions involved a term I hadn’t heard of before.  I had heard of writer’s block. I fight it constantly, like a lot of other writers.  But readers’ block I hadn’t heard of before. Patricia explained it as when you just can’t get into a book or story you’re reading. I explained that I was going through it at that very moment with a book I was reading called Goblin Corps (author’s name withheld)  I’m sure he worked very hard on his book, but I just can’t get into the story.  

I may well have used up my 15 minutes of fame by now, but it’s all right, because several of my friends who don’t want fame gave me theirs.  I need fame, because as an author my success depends on it. My favorite song by the late great David Bowie is “Fame.” It’s funny about writing.  It’s the one field I can think of where participants actively encourage those who might well become our competitors. But maybe not. After all, we are each in pursuit of our niche audience; our own special corps of readers.  My readers may find your books tedious, while your readers may find mine frivolous, and so on it goes.  

I finally thought of the word I was searching for this morning to explain how I feel when I’ve been writing.  Endorphins get released from my brain into my blood stream, and so I spend the rest of the day riding a writer’s high.  It gets to be that way when you are doing your rue Will, what you were always meant to do, and I discovered this without going into seclusion for six months to do the Abra Melin working.  It’s a working some magicians perform, to attain knowledge and conversation with their Holy Guardian Angel. But I knew mine in life, and he was always encouraging about my writing. In fact, he described NaNoWriMo as “the Olympics for writers.”  I have always fancied this comparison of writers with athletes. One of the hints I drew from a book I have on outwitting writer’s block is “the ugly notebook,” where I warm up my brain in preparation for writing, just as an athlete or dancer warms hir muscles in preparation for performing hir sport or dance.

We discussed briefly my current project about exploring the Andromeda Galaxy after using their new friends’ technique of felding  space to get there when it is millions of lightyears distant. She was tickled when I told her that the dominant life form is feline.  They have a very delicate hold on the galaxy, mostly performing the administrative tasks necessary to hold their empire together.

It was an enjoyable experience, so much better than when I used to be interviewed for a job.  Now I’m being interviewed for what I was always meant to be, a writer, and that’s as it should be.  Stay tuned for exciting news regarding my next release from Crimson Frost Books.

World Building> Culture>Invented Religion

When world building, the religion or ideology you choose to saddle it with can flavor the entire culture.  Look at the influence Western Christianity has had on both Europe and the Americas. Sure, there are some Native American influences on Latin American Catholicism, see for example the Virgin of  Guadalupe being the Aztec goddess Tonantzin syncretized to the Virgin Mary. And there are other examples, too numerous to mention in Central and South America.  

Getting away from Christianity now, I wanted to develop an antagonist for my intergalactic contact story, which I am now in the process of creating.  The evangelical jesoids proved to be too easily killed, and I wanted an antagonist with some oomph behind him/them, so I decided to invent my own religion.  Although decidedly alien, being from another galaxy (Andromeda) and all, I wanted this faith to have the most annoying characteristics of several Earth religions I knew of, namely evangelical Christianity, Mormonism, Hare Krishna, and Scientology.  

One factor that stands out, for me, anyway, will be male leaders with hypnotic control over their flocks.  These leaders have supernatural power over their flocks. They can get them to do anything for the good of the cult, including sacrificing their  very lives.For this exercise, I also decided to bring out a concept I’d used in a piece of fanfic I’d written some 40 years ago, the opposite of the Force, the Flow.  It does what you might imagine it does; it flows over a person, enabling hir to do what s/he would reckon to be impossible, if not highly unlikely. This means s/he can go invisible, flow under doorways, and teleport.  S/he would have total command over matter and mass. Of course, I’ll have to think of some limitations. It wouldn’t do to have hir be omnipotent, after all, and maybe hir power is relative to hir status within hir congregation.  Yeah, that’s the ticket, I’ll go with that.  

Of course, were you to invent a religion, it would have vastly different parameters, depending upon your experience and reading on the topic.  See what you can do, starting with a tabla rasa, a clean slate, so to speak..

A Writer's Greatest Tool--Hir Sub/unconscious

What is a writer’s greatest tool?  No, it isn’t your PC, your laptop, your tablet or your favorite pen.  It’s right between your ears, and yet as large as outer space itself. It is where all your ideas come from, the fount of all our symbols and images.  Sigmund Freud called it the subconscious, and Carl Jung called it the unconscious. I put it on 2 different levels, and call it the sub/unconscious. We are only dimly aware of the subconscious.  It comes through in our dreams, and some of the things we say when we are not thinking. The unconscious comes through literally when we are unconscious, under anesthesia or from an accidental blow to the head, or the hallucinations of a schizophrenic or under the influence of LSD or shrooms.  

They are different for everyone, and are the sum total of everything you’ve ever experienced, through life experiences, books you’ve read (including the Bible.  A frightening amount of images come from religious imagery) TV or movies you’ve seen. If you are religious and go to a church where an effective orator is preaching, many images can come from listening to that person’s sermons.  All this is uploaded to our own personal mental Cloud, to use computer terminology, and can be accessed almost spontaneously.

In the days before I made friends with my own sub/unconscious, I used to try to scare myself with these images because I was then writing a novel about a woman who was being pursued by something so horrible that she could not even face it.  This will be featured in a forthcoming novel. I wanted to see what was so horrible that one could not even face it. Then there is what Paul Atreides said in Dune to his grandmother the Reverend Mother Helen Gaius Mohiam, “Try looking into that place where you do not dare look.  There you will find me, staring back at you.” I have tried looking into that place which is unlookable to “us, to women.”There I only see a reflection of my own face.

Then, sometime in my late forties, (I am now only a couple weeks short of turning 73) I made the conscious decision to make friends with my own sub/unconscious, and do you know what happened?  The images I used to frighten myself with no longer had the power to frighten me. I could look upon the face of the Christians’ pet thought form Satan himself, and be unfazed. I imagined the bloodiest scenes I could, the better to describe them for my stories, and still I was unfazed.  Now I wonder why this is. Have I become so callous and inured to these scenes that they have no effect on me? Has observing violence on television gotten me so unsensitized that I am immune to any emotional effect? I have a tendency, when things bog down in a story, to start a war or an argument among my characters.  

There are three and a half months until the first Camp NaNoWriMo, and I already have an idea for it.  Where did that idea come from? (See last Thursday’s blog about where story ideas come from.) Superficially it came from a show I was streaming on Netflix called The Pyramid Code, that that idea germ merged with some memories in my mind about Nikola Tesla, and before I knew it, I had a full blown story idea in my head.  Certainly some images from my sub/unconscious must’ve gotten in there and clinched the deal, because soon I was scribbling the story idea in my notebook, which I keep in the bookcase headboard of my bed.  

I urge you in the strongest possible terms to make friends with your sub/unconscious.  Who knows what hidden treasures you can discover between the veils?