Friday, August 31, 2012

New Directions

I doubt that I could ever stop being a writer, even if I wanted to. Words flow through my veins as freely and naturally as does blood. But today I'm letting go of the direct book-selling that has been integral to my writerly self since 2007 -- by removing direct sales of my books and CD from my website (and, with it, the availability of author-signed copies). Why? To make space and energy for new directions...most significantly, for my new role as director of The Q'ntana Trilogy Movies: The MoonQuest, The StarQuest and The SunQuest.

In practical terms, the demands of the director's job will make it increasingly difficult for me to fulfill individual and personalized website orders. More important, though, is the symbolism of the act: I'm letting go one aspect of my storyteller persona to make room for another, one that's more expanded and expansive...one that invites in new levels of success and achievement, along with new risks, new fears, new challenges and new opportunities.

Quite possibly, other outmoded pieces of me will also fall away in the months ahead. That's a good thing. I can't add new clothes to the closet of my beingness unless I get rid of some of the old ones. Or, as I put it in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir...

"In a coaching session with a client, I had likened the stripping-away process she was experiencing to a demolition that removes everything of a building but its skeletal structure. She was finding the process unnerving, and I assured her that new walls, floors, ceilings, fittings and furnishings could only be installed once the old ones had been shed. I found myself in that same place in the days after my birthday..."

I wrote that about an experience I had in 2010. Today, a month before another birthday, I find myself in a similar place. Once again, it's unnerving. This time, though, I welcome the unsettledness, am excited by the certainty of r-evolutionary change and look forward to growing into my expanded self.

In this moment, we project that production on The Q'ntana Trilogy films will begin in 2013, with the first movie, The MoonQuest, slated for a 2014 release. What a ride it's going to be! I hope you'll stay with me on the journey as I chronicle about it here and on Facebook.

In the meantime, if you want a signed copy of The MoonQuest, The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write or both, act now! This is your last chance!

For right now, you can still opt for a copy signed to you (or, as a gift, to a friend) from my website through this direct link: markdavidgerson.com/onlinebookstore.html. But I will be shutting down my site's online bookstore some time tomorrow morning (Sept. 1), along with the option for signed copies.

Once I make the switch, paperback editions of both books (along with the CD version of The Voice of the Muse Companion: Guided Meditations for Writers) will be sold only on Amazon (with ebooks/MP3 downloads still be available in all the usual places).


Photo: Wilson State Park, Plymouth Township, Kansas (c) Mark David Gerson

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Sunday, August 19, 2012

What's Your Vision?

Do you know who you are as a writer?
Do you have a vision for your writing?
Do you have a vision for the project you’re working on? For the project you have barely begun to conceive?


Connecting with and holding a vision for yourself as a writer and for your work can help you more easily move into writing and hold the energy of your creation through the entire process of conception, creation, revision and release.

One way to hold that vision is by creating a writing invocation or vision statement that propels you into the energy of your day’s writing. It can be as brief as a sentence or as long as a page. It can speak in general terms about your role as a writer or in specific terms about a particular book, poem, article, song or story — whether you already know what it is or just that you’re called to write it.

I used a vision statement for Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir (too long to reproduce here), which helped me continue to write through and past my initial resistance to the project. My Director's Statement for The Q'ntana Trilogy Movies (The MoonQuest/The StarQuest/The SunQuest) is also a form of vision statement for my visual-storytelling work on the films:
"This story has always been bigger than me — from the moment it insisted itself onto the page as first a series of novels, then as a series of screenplays and now as its director. It’s a story that has so long been such a part of my life that it’s as though it lives deep within my cells. I am every one of its characters, villain and hero, and have lived each of their joys, triumphs, disappointments and disasters. For decades, I have watched its themes play out in the world around me...just as I have experienced them play out in my own life. In the end, I am as much the story as its storyteller, as directed by it as I am its director."
For The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, I crafted both an invocation and a vision statement; together they formed part of the ritual that awakened me to my Muse, activated my inner writing space and ensured that all I wrote hewed as closely as possible to the book’s true essence.

Invocations and vision statements are not fixed in stone. As The Voice of the Muse progressed, as I matured through the writing of it, I continued to refine both my invocation and vision statement.

Here's my vision statement for The Voice of the Muse:
The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write is about freedom — freedom to grow, freedom to create, freedom to write. Through a dynamic blend of motivational essays, inspiring meditations and practical exercises, it nourishes, nurtures and reassures its readers, inspiring them to open their hearts, expand their minds and experience, with ease, a full, creative life.
To read my writing invocation, turn to page 172 of The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write.

To help you create your own vision statement and/or writing invocation, follow the Vision Quest meditation that starts on page 174 of the book, or listen to track 9 of The Voice of the Muse Companion: Guided Meditations for Writers.

Regardless, awaken your passion, energize your vision...and write!!

You'll find additional tips and inspiration on my website, where you can read my "Rules for Writing," sign up for my mailing list and read/hear free excerpts from The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write.

• Do you have a vision for your writing? Feel free to share it here.

Photos: Avenue of the Giants, Garberville and Fortuna, California; Sunset, Albuquerque, New Mexico (c) Mark David Gerson

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Saturday, August 4, 2012

Taking Storytelling to Its Next Level

TOSHAR: How do I start? This story has so many beginnings.
NA'AN: Where all stories begin: Once upon a time.
~ The Q'ntana Trilogy: The MoonQuest Movie

In this moment, I feel like Toshar in one of the earliest scenes in The MoonQuest book and film: I have a story to tell you, but I don't know where to begin.

Do I begin with the genesis of The MoonQuest book? Do I go even farther back to share, as I did in Acts of Surrender, all the ways I denied my creativity its expression through so many years? Do I leap ahead to the moment I knew, without it making any sense, that I needed to adapt The MoonQuest as a screenplay? Or do start closer to the present moment, with the completion of The SunQuest, the final story in The Q'ntana Trilogy?

Na'an, the single-minded Tikkan Dreamwalker of my Q'ntana stories, would have me begin where all stories begin, and so I shall...

Once upon a time there was a Story and a Storyteller. Although, somewhere back at the beginning of  time, The Story chose its Storyteller, The Storyteller knew naught of that...knew not, in fact, that he was any kind of storyteller, let alone this Story's teller.

The Storyteller moved through many lives in many forms until he reached this one. But though The Story had brushed up against him often through those lifetimes, it had never lingered. It had whispered on the breezes that danced around him, caressed him gently in the falling of the rains, and crooned to him softly at the setting of the sun and the rising of the  moon.

Still, he knew nothing of The Story, or of the hidden destiny that linked his story to The Story...until the moment he did. In that moment, The Story he did not know so filled him that he had no choice but to begin to let it out, even as he did not know what he was doing, even as he did not understand the import and implications of his actions.

He wrote first one part of The Story, which titled itself The MoonQuest. He wrote it in one form, and then another. Before long, a second part of The Story began to push its way through him. It called itself The StarQuest and also emerged in two forms. The ink had barely dried on his parchment when the third and final part of The Story insisted itself onto the page: The SunQuest -- once again in two distinct forms.

Somewhere through that lengthy journey, The Storyteller grew to realize that he could no longer separate The Story from his story, that they had always been indivisible and that his destiny had forever been to tell them.

Then one day, finally, The Story was told. And although it had not fully achieved its final form in the world, The Storyteller believed that his work with it was done. He had, after all, set it to parchment as he had been instructed to do. The final form would be for others to realize, for that form was beyond his purview as Storyteller.

Or so he thought.

The Story thought otherwise. The Story knew otherwise. The Story knew that its every form could only be The Storyteller's responsibility, for every form was, itself, a story-telling.

At first, The Storyteller closed his ears to this. But his heart would not close, for his heart knew the truth: that this, too, was his destiny and that he could no more turn his back on it than he could have turned his back on The Story's original form.

And so with the same blend of excitement and exhilaration, terror and trembling, with which he had freed its first words onto his parchment, he embarked on a new journey with The Story. And in the same ways he had surrendered to its initial two forms, consciously knowing little about them, he surrendered to a third -- this time not as scribe but as visual impresario....as director of The Q'ntana Trilogy Movies.

A few days ago, I agreed to direct the three films that comprise The Q'ntana Trilogy --  The MoonQuest, The StarQuest and The SunQuest. In a life filled with imperatives that make no conventional sense, this is certainly one of them. After all, I have never directed a motion picture.

Yet I recognize the perfection in this call and remind myself that before The MoonQuest book, I had never written a novel and before The MoonQuest script, I had never written a screenplay. For that matter, as I posted on Facebook the other day, "I have no formal training for anything I have ever done, succeeded at and/or earned a living from." It was the Q'ntana stories themselves that showed me how to write them. It will be those same stories that will show me how to direct them. And despite a certain degree of trepidation, I have no choice but to trust them...and get on with it.

I'm gratified by the confidence that Anvil Springs Entertainment has shown me in declaring me "the only credible choice to take creative charge of this project." I'm more gratified still by the confidence The Story has shown me, and I will do everything in my power to meet its potential and honor its essence in the months and years of work ahead.

In one of my first acts as director of The Q'ntana Trilogy Movies, I was asked to write a "director's statement." At first I didn't have any idea what to say. Then, as with the rest of my involvement with Q'ntana, the following flowed onto the page as the perfect expression of my relationship with its story...

"This story has always been bigger than me — from the moment it insisted itself onto the page as first a series of novels, then as a series of screenplays and now as its director. It’s a story that has so long been such a part of my life that it’s as though it lives deep within my cells. I am every one of its characters, villain and hero, and have lived each of their joys, triumphs, disappointments and disasters. For decades, I have watched its themes play out in the world around me...just as I have experienced them play out in my own life. In the end, I am as much the story as its storyteller, as directed by it as I am its director."

A new journey begins.

• To celebrate this new road for both me and The MoonQuest, I have discounted The MoonQuest book on my website by 44%. The hard-copy paperback is now $8.99 instead of $16, but only through Aug. 8...and I will continue to sign copies to you through that time, even at the reduced price. Order yours today!


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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Light and Dark: Some thoughts on Chick-Fil-A

I have been wanting to write a blog post on this subject for a long while and have even started several. Not specifically about the Chick-Fil-A controversy, because this is bigger than one company and one series of incidents. What I have really wanted to explore is what happens when light is cast into the darkest corners of the world...and of ourselves. Today, finally, I found the words...

The good thing about all the anti-gay, racist and misogynist hate that has been surfacing in recent months in the U.S. is that it's now out in the open for all to see and experience. After all, the hate and bigotry now being exhibited is nothing new. It has always been present, simmering angrily, invisibly -- and fearfully -- in the shadows. But as long as it was hiding, unseen and unexpressed, most people remained unaware of it...or could pretend to themselves that it didn't truly exist.

The thing is, unless we shine light into the darkness, we will never see what lurks there. But once something like this becomes visible and is expressed, in however an ugly manner, two things can happen:

1) We who are directly impacted can act...although action rooted in equivalent anger and fear will never have a lasting effect. We can act both out in the world and by facing whatever levels of internalized fear and hatred we all carry and that will always reflect back at us from the outside world.

2) We who are not directly affected can clearly see a level of bigotry that was previously invisible to us and can, hopefully, be shocked enough to work for and support more enlightened attitudes and legislation.

Whenever there is an increase in light in the world and in our inner worlds, an opportunity exists to shine that same light into the shadowed corners of our inner and outer lives. Only then can we heal the festering, infected wounds -- personal and societal --  that cannot be dealt with as long as they remain hidden from view.

Only then can we be free.

Photo (c) Mark David Gerson

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