Charlotte Rains Dixon

Its Pretty Amazing: This Vision Board Stuff Works

So, you might be a bit like me (or a lot like me, since you are reading this blog).

You might be like me in thinking that this vision board stuff is all well and good when it comes to applying it to a book that you're writing.  Because, book writing is a very visual thing, right?  And so finding pictures of your characters and settings is a great idea because it will help to visualize things for the writing.  And yeah, maybe you can see how having a visual reference could help you to not get stalled or, God forbid, blocked on your project.

But, vision boards for your life?

Um, maybe.  Except they take a lot of time.  I mean, you've got to leaf through magazines or do searches on Google and find just the right image.  And, honestly, who knows exactly what they want in life anyway?  So why bother?

I'll tell you why bother: because this shit works.  Excuse me for being profane.  But this shit works.  Let me tell you my little story.

This spring I took a class at church called the 4Ts Prosperity Program.  The 4 Ts class, created by the late Stretton Smith, is a spiritual approach to prosperity based on the 12-Step program.  Stretton encourages class members to set intentions for what they want in life and also make a vision board.  And so, I began the process.

And it took flippin' forever.  First I took an hour or so one Saturday afternoon to find images for what I wanted.  And then the pile of images sat on my desk for a few weeks, until I felt guilty enough had time to work on the vision board again.  And then when I started sorting through the images I realized I had way too many for one board.  So I ended up with three, count 'em, three vision boards: one for my spiritual goals, one for my temporal goals (if that's the correct usage of the word) and one for my travel goals.

Because, I love to travel.  And there are places I really, really want to go.  Like Hawaii, which takes up one-quarter of my travel vision board, and Africa, which takes up three-quarters of it.  I have wanted to go for Africa for years.  If you gave me one place I could choose to go above all else, it would be Africa.  And Hawaii would be second.

This travel vision board sits above my desk, with the board with the other worldly goals to its right side.  And when I'm gazing off into space (an important component of writing) my gaze often lands on the images of Africa and Hawaii.  And besides that, every morning I'd read my list of intentions, all 90 of them, with trips to Africa and Hawaii duly noted.

So, guess what happened?

First of all, the women at my church designed them a retreat next April on Maui, for an unbelievably cheap price which can be paid in payments.  So I signed up.  Kind of a miracle, no?  And then the real miracle happened.

A trip to Africa to write a book materialized.  For this November.  It is not final yet, we are working on the details, but it is looking pretty certain that it will happen.  I've been in a daze for days.  And when it does happen, I'll be blogging every night in this very space.  I'm so excited I could just pop.

So think good thoughts about the trip for me, would you?  And check out the website of the wonderful folks who are organizing the tour here.  You might even want to donate money to their cause, because they are building wells to provide fresh water in Ghana, some of which we'll be visiting and I'll be writing about.

Like I said, its still not all final yet.  But I've got great hope that it will happen.  So please hope and pray with me. 

* Photo by Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain

***Because this shit works, imagine what it can do for your book!  If you haven't yet, sign up for my list and download my free Ebook on  Jump Starting Your Book With A Vision Board.  The form is to the right of this very post.

Off I Go Again

I'm heading to LA tomorrow. 

Yep.  Swimming pools.  Movie stars.  Just like the Clampetts. 

Except I'll be working the entire time, attending a two-day business intensive that is part of the Suzanne Evans 10K Coaching Club.  Together with 98 other women, I'll be designing a plan for the next stage of my business.

Frankly, I'm terrified.  And excited, too.

Some days I just want to be a writer.  I am a writer, it is the basis of all that I do, every single thing.  But sometimes I want to go back to the days when that was all you had to do.  Before you needed to do nearly all the marketing for your career yourself. Before social media and coaching and blogs and websites.

Some days all I want to do is write novels.

And instead, I'm designing classes and products and writing newsletters and blog posts.  I'm coaching clients and critiquing student work and attending networking groups.

Truth be told, I love everything that I do.  I love all the extra stuff almost as much as I love writing, and I know that if I decided some day to stop it all and just write, I'd miss it.  (And of course, that day will never come, because the world has changed now.)

But still, some days I just want to write.  And that is good.  Because it is what drives everything.

A couple notes:

Patrick Ross has requested that I write a post on ghostwriting.  Meant to get to it today, but I ran out of time to do it justice, so expect this brilliant expose next week.

I'm taking registrations now for the Book Proposals That Succeed Teleclass.  It is going to be rockin' so don't miss out.  Check out the page here.

On The Road Again

I'm heading out again first thing tomorrow morning.  It is unusual for me to book trips so close together (I got back from Nashville less than a week ago), but it is just the way it worked out this time.

Tomorrow's destination is Diamond, Oregon, way over in the southeastern section of the state, a near-eight hour drive from Portland.  I first visited this area last fall, which you can read about here, complete with photos of cows.

This time I'm going with two writer friends and we're staying at the hotel. Hoping to get writing and hiking in, as well as planning for a retreat one of the writers and I want to host (perhaps at the Diamond Hotel). 

Here's the catch:  I'm pretty sure there's no internet at the hotel, so I won't be posting this week.  I'm sure it will be good for me not to have internet access, but still, the thought is a bit unnerving. I'll report how I do when I return on Thursday evening.

In the meantime, go check out the blog of Roz Savage, ocean rower.  She's amazing, and she's just set off on another leg of her journey to row around the world.  I love reading her daily blog posts about her adventure.

Can you even imagine doing such a thing?  I can't, but I love that there are brave people in the world who do.

How do you handle not having internet access?

Separation Anxiety

I'm leaving for Nashville tomorrow, and I don't want to go.

I do really, because I'm the "book doctor" at Room to Write and there are going to be a dozen fabulous writers there.  And I'm going to see lots of friends.  Stay on the beautiful Scarritt Bennett campus and then with my friend Candace.  Get a lot of writing done.

But at the moment, everything is going wrong and I don't want to go.

When I leave Nashville for Portland next week, I won't want to leave Nashville.

I've gotten used to this push and pull of emotion before I leave for a trip.  It always happens.  I think of all the reasons I shouldn't go and long just to be at home.  Which is really just a silly illusion because I adore going to Nashville for all the above reasons.

So, its separation anxiety.  And the only thing there is to do about it is live through it.

Like so many things in life.  And writing, come to think of it.  Rejection comes to mind.

What do you get anxious over, either in writing or in life?

 

The Brain Dump

I'm just back from a road trip that knocked my socks off. 

I drove, with two friends, to a remote ranch in southeastern Oregon, near Steens Mountain.  (The above photo was taken on the gravel road up to the summit if said mountain.  The Aspens were peaking and unbelievably gorgeous.)  This part of Oregon is very different from the west side, which is lush and green.  Instead, we were in high desert country, basin and range, where wild mustangs still roam and we saw at least 30 different kinds of birds, including a great horned owl, whooping cranes, a bald eagle, grebes, and mountain bluebirds.

Seeing as how we were on a ranch, there were also cows:

 
Excuse the sideways image, I don't know why it is loading that way.  At any rate, this is the cattle looking in the front door of the ranch house.  Crane your neck to the left and note the gate in the background, which, being city girls, it didn't occur to us to close.  So we had a lot of fun herding the cattle out from the backyard and back into the front pasture.  They went every which way, over the fence, leaving fur behind, and under it, breaking down a couple rails along the way.  One even went under barbed wire.

We climbed to the top of the afore-mentioned Steens Mountain:

From where I'm pretty sure you can see Idaho and Nevada in the distance, hundreds of miles away.  It was colder than a witch's you-know-what up there, and windy as hell.  But spectacular.  Oh, and all these years as an Oregonian, I thought it was Steens Mountains, plural, as in a mountain range.  But it is one very long mountain, a fault-block mountain which makes it so.

The idea was to write:

Which I did a wee bit of.  But mostly I was too busy inhaling the grand vistas, spotting birds, looking for wild mustangs, and meeting fabulously interesting people during dinner at the Hotel Diamond, which has been in operation since 1898.  Considering that its in a town with a population of 5 at the end of a road, its amazing and wonderful to me that the place is pretty much always booked up. 

By the way, the writer Ursula Le Guin stays at the same ranch house we did every year with her husband, and is so inspired about the place she just wrote a book about it, which you can buy here.  And, in another by the way, a friend and I are planning a writing retreat for next year that we've been scouting locations for--and this might just be the place.  So stay tuned for more details about that.

When I did have a small amount of time and sat down in the grass by Benson Pond to scribble away, I intended to work on something I've wanted to get done for a long time--a new freebie to entice people to sign up for my newsletter.  Its going to be a really good one, and I'm excited about working on it.  But I found I couldn't.  Why?  Because I had too much new stuff in my mind to focus.  That day by the pond I wrote about what I had seen.  And even since I've been home, I've still been writing and processing. 

I've been engaging in a brain dump, getting every new experience and vista out of my head an onto the page, clearing the way to go back to my other work.  And now, after journaling and blogging about it, I'm starting to feel clear enough to write the freebie.  So sometimes it is important just to allow yourself to do a brain dump.

What about you? How do you process new experiences?

Trust Versus Foolishness

Two experiences with the GPS system in my rental car:

1. I'm driving to Nashville on Friday night to pick up a friend at her condo and go to dinner.  Gertie, which is what I've named my GPS, tells me to take a freeway route that does not look at all familiar to me.  But, I figure, it is important to trust Gertie.  After all, she has the satellite hook-up, not me, right?  And it is good to trust in general. So I take a deep breath, follow her instructions and arrive at my friend's front door easily and quickly.  Gertie success.

2. The next night, I'm going to a different friend's condo, also in Nashville.  I give Gertie the address, and off we go.  Again she tells me to take an odd exit.  But, based on my experience of the previous evening, I decide to follow it.  After about 10 minutes, it occurs to me that I am lost.  Well, not lost exactly, but way far away from where I was supposed to be.  And so late for drinks with my friend that we had to cancel.  All was not lost, however, as I drove straight to the bar at J. Alexander's to watch the mighty Oregon Ducks stomp University of Tennessee, even though I actually had to resort to texted updates from my son, seeing as how LSU fans had taken over the bar to watch the LSU-Vanderbilt game.  Why, when the game itself was being played in a stadium not 100 feet away, was beyond me.  Despite all this, we must rack this up as a Gertie fail.

So, the question is, to trust or rely on one's own experience?  In the past, I've hated using GPS systems because I have felt better about relying on my own knowledge.  (And, one might say, because I have a control-freak streak.)  But this time I'm going to so many different places on my own I've decided to indulge in a bit of trust.  With decidedly mixed results, no? When does blindly relying on the GPS system become foolishness?

When do you trust and when does knowledge override that trust?  I don't have the answer.  I'm not even sure how it relates to writing to be honest.  But I can't wait to see what you guys think.

Photo by dirkjan72 from Flickr, via Everystockphoto.

Stranded, or Withholding Judgment

Currently, I am temporarily residing in the lovely and fast-growing city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, home of Middle Tennessee State University, which is the home of the writing program I co-direct, the Writer's Loft.  (Our fall workshops and orientation are next week and there are still a few spots left. You can come on Friday for the low cost of $50, and there will be workshops with Whitney Ferre and Kathy Rhodes. Check out the website for more info.)

I left Portland on Tuesday, expecting to arrive here that night.  Instead, I arrived on Wednesday night, after an unexpected stranding in Houston.  There was a hurricane, they said.  So they had to cancel flights. The weather looked like a lot of hot, steamy rain to me but what do I know?  I got the last room at the airport Marriott and barely slept all night, worried about my flights the next day, even though the bed was soft and bedbug-free (I checked) and the pillows plump and numerous.

Next morning, bright and early, I landed on a flight to Newark.  From there, I'd catch my connection to Nashville.  Never mind that it makes absolutely no sense to fly all the way across the country from one coast to the other and then double back again.  But, this turned out to be the best part of my adventure, even though I thought that hanging out in the airport bar with a bunch of stranded travelers would be.  (Can I just say that Mad Men are alive and well in this millennium?  In the time I drank two glasses of wine, the businessmen sitting beside me at the bar downed three mixed drinks and three glasses of wine.  Gee-zus.) Because upon hearing that I was a writer, the friendly flight attendant invited me to join him in the back of the plane.  I sat on the jump seat as he regaled me with ideas for screenplays, jokes, and classic lines of dialogue from movies.  This made up for the fact that there were no blankets and it was freezing (said friendly flight attendant made the pilots turn up the heat) and that an Angry Bald Guy who punched the overhead compartment in his fury was sitting next to me.

My point to this story? Well, as the title hints, it is that we often shut ourselves down to interesting adventures and experiences because we're so worried and judgmental.  Upon hearing that my flight had been cancelled, my first thoughts were dread and fear.  Where would I stay?  What if there weren't any rooms?  What if I really couldn't make it to Nashville until Thursday, as they initially told me?  How would I cope without my suitcase?  I was already pre-judging my experience before I'd even started to experience it.  So I made a conscious effort to let all that go, and just hang in there and go with the flow.  And it worked out great.  I hung out in the bar, met an interesting fellow writer, saw the Manhattan skyline from the Newark airport, and made it to Nashville in only minorly stinky clothes.  In short, I had an adventure.  And I loved every minute of it.

And now here I am in Murfreesboro.   And I'm determined to celebrate and enjoy whatever comes my way, good or bad, without pre-judging.  After all, life's an adventure.

What do you pre-judge?  Um, your writing, perhaps?  I do that, too.  But that's a post for another day.

Photo credits: airplane by Richard_B, courtesy of MorgueFile, Marriott Houston from TripAdvisor, screaming man, Brbankston from Everystockphoto, downtown Murfreesboro from Pollinator, via Wikipedia.

Traveling Down A Different Road

We went to the beach for a night this past weekend.

But it was to a different cabin in a different town than we've ever stayed at before.  We traveled down a different highway, went to different beaches, ate at different restaurants, saw different things.  All of this was quite by accident, but it was also quite wonderful.

And man oh man, did it get my creative juices flowing.

I'm lucky to live in Portland, Oregon which is about an hour from the coast.  This is a good thing, yes, but it also tends to make me complacent.  I live so very close to the Pacific, and yet I can go months or longer without visiting--when it is a quick hour drive away.  Last week I started jonesing for the ocean.  Big time.  I wanted just to see it, to hear seagulls, to smell the sea air.  I wanted to feel the sand beneath my feet.  Needed the sensory experience of the sea.  

And yet, the upcoming weekend was Memorial Day.  We could only go one night because of obligations on Friday and Saturday night (the Eagles concert!).  What were the odds of getting a reservation for one night?  None, even in this recessionary time.  Enter my new son-in-law, who offered up the use of his family's cabin in one of the small fishing towns that dot Tillamook Bay.

And thus beginneth the different trip to the beach.  A drive down the Wilson River Highway through lush, green, rainy woods where woodsmoke and mist hung low to the ground and the river burbled along next to the highway.  The cabin on the hillside above the bay with a tiny view of it obscured the whole time by mist. A visit to Oceanside, where long ago a local family blasted a tunnel through the cliff to get to the beach on the other side.  I kid you not.  See the photo of the bunker-like entry below.  It was dark and moist and, well, creepy inside, but also irresistible. 

And there was Netarts, home to Lex's Cool Stuff, the best second hand-store on the Oregon Coast, and a visit to the Cape Meares Lighthouse and then back to Tillamook to eat at a scrumptious Mexican restaurant which featured the best Margaritas this side of Texas and my friend George's blender.

The funny side note to all of this was that the weekend before, I was in Manhattan, as far as you can get on the eastern side of this continent.  And a mere week later, I was as far as you can go on the western side.  Ah, modern life.

But here's the best part:  I kept pulling my journal out and scribbling madly.  I wrote a bit about what I was seeing, but mostly I wrote other stuff.  Ideas for stories.  Ideas for blog posts and newsletter articles.  Ideas for the novel I'm sort of working on.  Ideas for life in general. Something about experiencing the new that just jogs the ideas out of the brain.  Maybe the new sensory input literally pushes out the old to make room it. 

So my new rule in life is do something new every day.  Drive a different way home from the grocery store, skip around the block, wear your hair in a crazy style, write something completely different.  I dunno, what do you think? Give me some new ideas for newness in the comments, if you please.  And, um, be nice.

The Adorable Purple Sandals

Yesterday I wrote a brief post about my trip to New York and how I bought an adorable pair of purple sandals.  Yet I failed to offer up a photo of said adorable purple sandals.  So, for those of you interested, check them out in the photo to the right. 

Cute, huh?  And surprisingly comfortable, too.  I wore them for hours on Saturday afternoon as we walked through Chinatown and all the wonderful shops of Canal Street, full of scarves and knock-off purses and cheap jewelry.  Heaven!  When we were children, our family drove to San Francisco every summer to visit relatives and there our favorite thing to do was visit Chinatown.  We'd come home laden with rice candy and woven thingies you stick your fingers in and dolls and little purses.  So it is no wonder that both my sister and I love the ticky tacky stores of Canal Street in Manhattan.

We also went into probably every shoe store in New York and studied what shoes women wore on the streets.  I am now ready to report what the latest in shoe fashion is: flats.  Zebra flats, beaded flats, red patent leather flats, plain black flats.  Except for the two skanky young women we saw one night, nobody is wearing heels.  You heard it here first.

The shoes and Canal Street were only a portion of the overall trip.  We met an interesting man from Nottingham, England, who owned a huge, thriving bakery, a woman from Portland who has already become a new friend, and a man from Virginia who told us where to buy beads in Hong Kong.  We saw museums and my Beloved Niece's dance classes and performances and visited friends and ate and drank and walked.  And walked.  And walked some more.

And I came home with my head swimming, full of images of Manhattan that go beyond shoes.

This is a good thing, because when my head is swimming it is alive and making new connections and carving new furrows or whatever that brain circuitry is called.  I'm coming up with new ideas for blog posts and articles and info products and books and stories.  Sometimes when you travel you get shoved out of your comfort zone.  Walking much farther than you normally would on feet that are sore, for instance.  Or staying in a hotel where the bathroom is down the hall.  And then you find out that you will not only survive such things, you'll enjoy them.  And suddenly you have a different view of the world.

Which is a wonderful thing for writers.  Or any kind of creative person in the world.  And aren't we all creative?

Anybody have a good travel story to share?  Or even some news about shoes?

Five Pairs of Shoes

I'm just off the plane from Manhattan (we got in an hour early--have you ever heard of such a thing?), where I walked so much I went through five pairs of shoes in as many days.  Okay, I did buy one pair of adorable purple sandals and wore them all through Chinatown, but considering the number of shoe stores we went in, its a miracle I only came home with one extra pair!

More tomorrow.  In the meantime, a few photos:

   

  
I love New York!

20 Aspects to New York City

Early tomorrow morning, I'm heading for New York City.  Five plus days in the Big Apple, fun times!  Here's the drill:

Who'll I'll see

1.  My sister, my traveling companion.

2.  My niece, student at Tisch NYU, the reason for our visit.

3.  My nephew (from a different sister) who I've not seen in years.

4.  Kate and Adam (child and husband of my friends Sue and Walt from Nashville).

Where we'll stay

5.  Hotel 17, in Greenwich Village.  Cool, huh?  I'm a little worried about the shared bathrooms, but life is an adventure.

What we'll do

6. Visit the Guggenheim.

7. Visit the Cooper Hewitt which is hosting the Design Triennial, which has exhibits of stitchery from Natalie Chanin, among other things, that I want to see.

8.  Visit the Cloisters, which I saw years ago and adored.  What's not to like about the unicorn tapestries?

9.  Visit MOMA, if we have time.  Both my sister and I have been there recently, so it is farther down the list.

10.  See the beloved niece's dance performances every night. 

11.  Hear jazz at the Village Vanguard.  I hope.

What I'm taking

12.  The Hole We're In by Gabrielle Zevin.  I'm three-quarters through it.

13.  The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton.  Can't wait to start it.

14.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by What's-his-name.  For my sister, I already read it.

15.  A very small knitting project with demon yarn in pretty colors.  Even if it is demonic.

16.  My journal.  Of course.

17.  My computer.  Tried my best to envision myself without it, but that didn't happen.

What I'm not taking

18.  The biography of Mark Twain I just bought.  This is killing me, but I'm trying to learn that I don't need to take five books with me when I leave for six days.

19.  My stitching project.  Too complicated for travel.

20.  Work.  Except for that one wee project I might work on while in the air. 

Lest you think my absence gives you an excuse not to read my blog, no such luck.  I've got posts pre-written and scheduled all week, including a fabulous guest post on Friday.  There are also cats involved.

And Also (Further Notes on Travel)

I'm in the Denver airport and I've been thinking about the post I wrote yesterday about traveling, a writer's travels to be exact.

In retrospect, I realized I wanted to write a paragraph about what I missed when I travel, but I didn't.  Why? Because I was rushed and had a million things to finish before my sister picked me up at the crack of dawn this morning.  That's another thing about traveling so much: it makes me feel as if I'm always in a rush.

And then I don't have time to do things I want to do, because I'm so often preparing for a trip, giving a workshop, responsibilty for a weekend orientation, meeting with ghostwriting clients, etc.  For instance, I've been organizing my office for months now.  Every time I start to make some progress on it, a new trip looms and I get pulled away to get ready.

Back to the opening sentiment.  Here are things I miss when I travel:

My cats

Sunday suppers with my family

American Idol (there's no TV where I'm staying)

Knitting

Fires in the fireplace

Oregon rain

I'm sure if I thought about it longer I'd come up with more.  

And yet.  I'm reading reports on the Haiti earthquake as I wend my way across the country and it is just horrendous.  I am so damn lucky--we all of us are, anyone who has time to read this blog and worry about writing.  Odds are good we have roofs over our heads, and enough food to eat, and a nice hot shower (to say nothing of a nice hot fireplace).  Yesterday I had the utter luxury of spending the morning shopping and worrying about what I was going to wear for the workshop.

I am so damn lucky.  I love my life.  Home will wait.  I love traveling.  Lord, don't let me forget this.

***If you want to donate to the earthquake relief fund, go here to an excellent compendium on the Huffington Post.  I planned to do a round-up myself, but I'm running out of time before I board the plane to Nashville.

A Writer's Travels

I'm leaving again tomorrow, this time for Nashville. 

I travel a lot, sometimes a lot lot.  The last six months I have traveled a lot lot.  In August I was in LA, September in Nashville, October in New Mexico (a real vacation, who knew people did that?), November in LA again and December in Nashville.  That was not so very long ago, and now I'm heading back.

I have good reason to go, and I'm excited about the trip.  First up is the Writer's Loft orientation, a two-day affair for writers.  I'll be presenting my Writing Abundance workshop on Friday afternoon and it is open to the public, but if you are interested, hurry quick because we are filling up.  After the Writer's Loft, I am starting research for a new ghostwriting project.  I bought me a new digital voice recorder and I'm eager to get going. It is about a cat--what could be better?  Plus I'm meeting with two coaching clients--so far.  And I have tons of friends in Nashville who always get me into interesting things, like this time I'm going to visit a prison to meet a friend of a friend. 

I tell ya, this stuff doesn't happen to me in Portland, which is one reason I love travel so much.

But it is also hard.

Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining.  I love my life and I love traveling.  It is just that I get stressed out thinking about the logistics.  You know--getting to the airport on time, making connections, picking up the rental car, like that.  When, really, I rarely have trouble with logistics and if I do, it all seems to sort itself out (on my last trip home from Nashville, I just missed my connecting flight in Denver but got to have dinner with a wonderful fellow traveler who was also stranded).

And I worry that the orientation will be satisfying, that people will like my workshop, that the research will go well, that I'll be able to take good care of the dogs who live in the house I'm housesitting...and while I'm at it, I worry that I haven't heard from the agent who is reading my book, and that my blog traffic will go down when I'm not able to post as often while I'm gone, and that I've got manuscripts to read, and that my cats will miss me and be sad while I'm gone, to say nothing of my family.  Oh wait, never mind, they are all busy with their own lives that don't center around me, I forgot.

But you get the idea.  Sometimes I start worrying so much that I wonder why I do this, why I set myself up for trips that entail so much responsibility and so many things that could go wrong.  And then I realize that if I didn't do it, I'd be bored with myself.  If I didn't set myself up for challenges, I'd probably never leave the house.  And, despite the fact that I long for a couple of months at home without rushing off again, the truth is I love traveling and I most especially love traveling to Nashville. And any crises I have to endure along the way will be worth it in the end.

So off I go again.  

If you are in the Nashville area, come see me at the Loft this Friday and Saturday or email me and we'll set something up, okay?  And meanwhile, if anyone wants to chime in on their own travel worries, feel free.  Other people get stressed about travel, don't they?  Don't they?

The Writing Life: Letter from LA

Sitting in the garden at the Pasadena coffee shop called Zephyr, I whiled away a few good hours talking with my screenwriting friend Brian.  We discussed the movie biz and the publishing world while a gentle breeze rustled the ivy covering the patio walls and handsome Armenians smoked hookahs at a table nearby.  Russian literature reared its head for consideration, as did the economy (what current conversation is complete without touching on that?) and other mysteries of life.

That was on day six of my trip to LA.  I was in Pasadena, to be exact, staying with my friend Suzanne, who told me all about her new modality, Reference Point Therapy, and took me through a couple sessions.  I had a tarot reading on day seven, which forecast many good things ahead for me.   I've had tarot readings when such was not the case, that's for sure--which is, perhaps, the beauty of the cards, which are difficult to fake.  Sort of like plotting a novel is difficult to fake--if it doesn't work, the problems are obvious.  (Less obvious, of course, is how to fix it.)

This trip turned out to be a much-needed bit of R and R.  After the year I've had, I needed it more than I realized.  I regret that I was unable to do many of the things I usually do when in LA, such as visit Julie or see Diana.  But I'll make time for them next trip.   This visit was strangely free of meeting with clients, though I did attend one networking event.  And, as usual, stumbled over my tongue when it came time to explain myself:

"And what do you do?" said the bright-eyed young woman.

"Oh, I'm a writer," I replied airily.

"That sounds so exciting.  What kind of writing do you do?"

This is the dreaded question.  "Well, I um, do a lot of ghostwriting.  You know, for business owners who need a book to promote themselves.  And I also do copywriting, like for websites?  And, let's see, I teach creative writing, too.  Because you know, my true love is writing fiction. And my main goal is to get the novel I just finished published."

By this time the bright-eyed woman has turned away.  I hear her asking a middle-aged man what he does.

"I help people maximize their business profits by teaching them to pay attention to their bottom line."

I really need to develop the art of the elevator pitch.  Its a good thing I'm not a screenwriter, required to take meetings with producers and pitch a one-minute synopsis of my novel ("It's, um, Bridget Jones meets Something's Gotta Give?")

But I did manage to have a lovely conversation with a chiropractor who immediately got how important having a book is to promote your business, despite my bumbling attempts to convince him.  And then I went home to a pretty good bottle of Syrah, so that made everything okay.

Yesterday, Suzanne and I went to see Julie and Julia, a most wonderful movie.  Neither of us had been to see a movie for months, and going to the theater to see movies is one of the things I love to do.  It took us about three hours to get there because we kept screwing up the showing times and having to drive back and forth to various theaters.  But it was worth it.  I loved the film.  What's not to love when Meryl Streep nails Julia Child, like totally nails her?  And Amy Adams plays a blogger who hits the big time. 

Now, at this very moment, I am sitting in the San Francisco airport.  I have a three-hour layover here, despite the fact that a direct flight from Burbank to PDX is only two hours.  But it gives me time to ponder southern California, and the strange hold that LA seems to have on me.  I don't miss it when I'm gone from there, but as soon as I get there, I start plotting when I can get back.  Can somebody explain this to me? Plus, I'm a Portland girl, through and through.  I like rain and greenery.  I like people who walk places (I can't tell you how many times I nearly got run down by Very Big Trucks on my morning ambles through Pasadena) and bicyclists and citizens who take public transportation and eschew their cars. I like pale skin, beaches you can walk along and not see many other people, and ice-cold ocean water.  I like people of various shapes and sizes and levels of beauty.  So can somebody please tell me why I keep falling in love with LA?

A couple of non-LA related notes:

Please go vote for Whimsey, my friend Julie's dog.  Because A. he's adorable and B. it would really help her out.

And don't forget the exciting contest that is coming up right here in this very spot next week.  Stay tuned!

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0.

I Confess

I cannot tell a lie, because you have no doubt noticed, but I am a blogging slacker.

Two weeks ago I headed to Nashville for the Writer's Loft fall orientation.   This was a big to-do because it was the first actual orientation that my partner Terry and I planned since we took over the program.  And, I am happy to report, it was a rip-roaring success.

So much so that I got completely re-inspired to work on my novel again.  Not just working on it, but working working on it, if you know what I mean--keeping the file open on my computer, working on it every spare moment, obsessing about it all the other moments, stealing time from paying work.  That kind of working on it, which I love because its been too long since I've been in this space.

To my credit, there has been guilt.  Lots of it.  So much that it finally drove me to cautiously log onto my Typepad account.  So here I am.  I've not gone anywhere, just deeply into the novel.

Here's the good news--I took copious notes while sitting in the workshops and lectures that inspired me so much and my plan is to write blog posts about what I learned.  Um, never mind that that has been my plan for the past week, since I returned home.  I'm going to do it.  I wrote this post, didn't I? 

I also have a pile of reviews to post on my companion site, Bookstrumpet.  So stayed tuned, there is much more to come.  Really.  Trust me.  I promise.

And now excuse while I go look at what I wrote this afternoon on my novel.

Oh, one more thing--I was having some computer issues last week.  Like big ones.  Like my beloved Vaio melting down type problems.  Its okay for the moment, but I'm in the market for a new one.   I'm so tempted by the Macbook.  So very, very tempted.  I've resisted the whole Apple cult for years and now I feel it ensnaring me.  Help me, PC users! Not a big fan of Dells, but I've loved my Vaio.  I would like it to be less than astronomically expensive.  So if anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear it.  Has to be a laptop--it goes with me wherever I go.

Writer's Loft Orientation Next Weekend

Yesterday I cleverly wrote a post on my new Centro phone and sent it to be published on Typepad from my backyard.  I know this is old news for those of you who have had Blackberries and Iphones for ever, but it is a major step forward for me.  I'm on the road to LA and Nashville a lot, and now, should I find myself without and internet connection, or stuck in an airport, I can check email, work on documents and even write a blog post. 

Another way to feed my internet addiction, just what I've needed.

I've been working on figuring out this phone because I'm heading off to Nashville on Tuesday.  Next weekend is the two-day orientation for the Writer's Loft, the program I co-direct with Terry Price.

The Writer's Loft is a certificate writing program that features one-on-one writing instruction that is based at Middle Tennessee State University.   Students write original work and critical essays based on their reading, and their mentors critique this work in a structured, supportive atmosphere.  You can read a lot more about it on my page about the program here.

This fall, we're doing something a little different and that is opening up the Friday portion of the orientation to non-students for the low cost of $50.  That morning, novelist Darnell Arnoult will be lecturing on, "Writing Out of Chaos, Or, How To Write a Better Story Than You Know," and in the afternoon poet Bill Brown will be presenting a workshop called, "Finding Your Pivotal Moments, Real and Imagined." 

Anyone who lives in the Nashville area and is interested in writing ought to seriously consider checking it out.  You can register directly on the website and read all about the program there, too.

I'm hoping to bring you live reports from the scene, as they say, or at least check in after the events of the day are over to bring you nuggets of writing information.  Stay tuned.

Testing

This is a test. No, not of the emergency broadcast system, but my phone, to see if I can post directly from it. Since I'm hitting the road on Tuesday, I thought it would be cool to figure out. The last test failed, here goes this one. Update: It worked! I sent the previous paragraph from my Centro. Pretty cool, huh? Now I can send posts from airports or wherever I happen to find myself. I know, I know, you're beside yourself with excitement. I'll also be trying to remember to send tweats for my Twitter feed which you can see on the lower left column. My only problem with that is I haven't figured out how to do it tactfully--ie, sitting in a lecture, pecking away at my phone might not go over so well.

Ah, LA....

where it is illegal to look different from anyone else.

It is a requirement here that you be thin, tan, have long hair, wear sunglasses and pout, AND be young.  Thus if you are not young it is required that you go get plastic surgery really, really fast.  And then you look like you are trying hard to look like everyone else, even though everyone knows that you went under the knife to do it.

Ah, LA.  I love it so, and I'm not even sure why.

Being here always makes me muse on the nature of identity and true self.  These are important topics for writers because letting that ole true self out in words is pretty much the key to it all.  You will find success only when you find your voice and you find your voice by writing enough that you can let it rip, and open a direct line from your deepest inner being, through the arm, out the fingers, and onto the page.  Or keyboard.  Or digital recorder.

My friend Deidre, who lives in Silver Lake, says that everyone in LA strives to look alike and act alike and be alike and then the one person who is not like everyone else arrives and they are the one who makes it.  So why does everyone else persist in attempting to be like everyone else?

And once you hit 40, forget it.  Actually, it might even be 30.  Soon it will probably be 20.

Lat night I had drinks with a friend who is an entertainment attorney and he says its a hellish culture of youth here  (my words, not his, but they have a ring to them, no?)  As an attorney, he is expected to be wise and mature so he doesn't have to worry about the the age thing, but if you are flailing about on the creative side trying to make it, you gotta be young.

The hell part is, of course, that everyone ages.  Even Hollywood Goldenboys.  Then they have to dye their hair and pretend they are still young.

I realize that none of this is news, yet it continually perplexes me every time I come down here. Why do we all persist in trying to make ourselves just like everyone else, when there's only one of each of us in this whole world?  I'm veering dangerously close to getting teary eyed and talking about snowflakes here so forgive me, or better yet, explain it to me.

I'm reading Harriet Rubin's latest book, The Mona Lisa Stratagem: The Art of Women, Age, and Power, and she talks about how if a famous actor is on stage and a cat is on stage, all eyes will be on the cat. Why?  Because the cat is uniquely, gloriously, himself, no matter what.  Animals just are.  (This might help to explain why the most popular photos on my yahoo home page are always of animals.  So we're not as simple minded as I feared.)  Its the same thing with babies.  Ever notice how nobody can keep their eyes off them? 

Somebody ought to tell all the 20-something wannabe actresses that story.

And yet, despite my horror at the preponderance of clones everywhere and the cult of youth here, there is something about this place that keeps luring me back.  Maybe I like coming here so much because I can flee back north to Portland, where everybody seems desperately determined to not look like anyone else, ever. 

Or maybe its just the palm trees.

It's Hot in LA

I flew down to LA on Friday and at the moment I'm staying in Pasadena.  It is probably in the mid to high 90s at the moment, but yesterday and Friday, the temps were around 106-107.  Gee-zus.  This is way too hot for an Oregon native like me, especially given that we've not had much of a spring in Portland.  (I know, I know, its now summer.  We kinda went right from winter to summer.)

Even though Suzanne's house is air-conditioned, it still gets hot.  And yesterday my Vaio just couldn't take it, and kept blue-screening on me.   Poor little thing is over three years old, which must be like over 100 in computer years.  And so yesterday I ended up getting nothing done.  Suzanne and I tried to have a yard sale, hauling stuff out front to sell, but nobody came by.  It was too damn hot.

So today I was determined to get some writing done and this morning I got up and worked on the novel.   I did what I always tell people not to do, which was fuss over the beginning.  (I reserve the right to give contradictory advice.  And at least for me, the rest of the piece, no matter what it is, simply won't flow until I've got the beginning right.  I wrote about that somewhere.  Let me see...ah yes, here it is.) 

I fussed over the beginning and then wrote a wee bit more.  By a wee bit more I mean maybe a paragraph or so more.  But it doesn't matter.  Cuz I loved getting up and getting to the novel first thing.  I had a good bit of momentum going on that last week, but what with the need to hop on an airplane, work on a yard sale, and survive the heat wave, I had lost it.  Now its back.

Of course, the hell part is that I'm going to lose it again, as tomorrow I'm going down to Laguna Beach to stay with my mentor and friend Julie.  I'm stopping in Silver Lake to pick up another good friend, Deidre.
Together the three of us make up the west coast contingent of the Novel Goddesses, a group which also includes Linda, and two writers who do not yet have websites but will need them soon because Maryann is about to have her first novel published and Katy is working on a kick-ass one.

Losing momentum on the novel is going to be well worth it.  I'll get back to it when I return here on Wednesday. 

By the way, I'm working on the new book review site, which I don't even have a link for yet but will soon, and if you are interested in reviewing, please email me or leave a comment.

It's Off to Home I Go....

I'm heading back to Portland this afternoon, and I am, as always, sorry to leave Nashville.   I am not, however, sorry to leave the weather behind.  Yesterday there were tornado warnings which were relayed to me through a sort of old-fashioned round robin system.  Friends of Sue and Walt's who live up the street called Sue to tell her there were tornado warnings and Sue called me to tell me.  You see, there is no TV here.  Not that I miss it--except in times of weather emergencies.

But the tornadoes landed somewhere else and we were able to muster 14, count 'em, 14 people at the Loft alumni and mentors dinner last night.  The Sunset Grill offered half-price on any full bottles of wine purchases PLUS a lottery ticket and so Terry now has four lottery tickets to check when the winners are announced tonight.  Its all for one and one for all--we're going to split the winnings between the 14 of us. 

Last night there were no tornadoes that I know of, but Lord almighty there were raging thunderstorms all night long.  I mean, all night long.  In Portland, if we get a thunderstorm, which is rare, it might last half an hour and then its gone.  Not here, where they come in one after another.  I've learned that you can see lightning even with your eyes closed and that after a couple hours of thunder, you can actually get so used to it that you'll sleep through it. 

Before I leave I wanted to direct you to this cool post that my Welsh Zen buddy Derek wrote about me.  He and I have been corresponding on for a few months now, on all kinds of topics, but especially Zen, and writing, and our internet interests.  I've mentioned his Zen site before, but here's his writing site, and the post he wrote about me.

Thanks, Derek!

And now I've got to vacuum and shower and say goodbye to Juni before the taxi gets here.  By the way--dogs seem to have no problem sleeping through thunder.  Juni snored through the whole storm.