My Muse: A Trickster Extraordinaire!

"Your book is a trickster!"
– Book-Birthing Rule #9, Birthing Your Book…Even If You Don’t Know What It’s About

The “trickster” exists in many cultures. In myth, think leprechauns (Ireland), coyotes (U.S. Southwest), the Greek god Dionysus and the Hawaiian/Polynesian demigod Maui. In literature and popular culture, think A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Puck, King Lear’s Fool (along with every court jester ever conceived), Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bart Simpson, the Pink Panther and Bugs Bunny.

In short the trickster is an archetypal figure that dupes its victims into doing its bidding. Mischievous by nature, it will lie unashamedly and break any rule to get its own way. 

To date, I have written five books on writing and each includes some version of what I say in Birthing Your Book’s Rule #9: “As you craft the book you think you are writing, [your book and your muse] will often trick you into writing something you never expected to write, something you never thought you wanted to write, something, perhaps, that is uncomfortable to write.”

When the idea came to me for The Emmeline Papers, the third book in my award-winning Sara Stories, it was going to focus on one of the minor characters in After Sara’s Year: Mac's quirky, eccentric, single-minded Aunt Emmeline Mandeville. The idea for the story arrived nearly fully formed (or so I thought), along with the title. 

Had I been smart, I would have remembered not only my Book-Birthing Rule #9, I would have recalled how that same tricksterish rule played out in Sara’s Year, the first of my Sara novels.

When I sat down in a Santa Monica Starbucks to begin Sara’s Year, I also had a concept and a title. The title never changed, but my original idea vanished within minutes of launching into that first day’s writing.

Because, like lightning, a trickster never strikes twice in precisely the same place or the same manner, my experience with The Emmeline Papers was entirely different, if with the same ultimate effect: The title has not changed but everything else about the book has!

Part of the impetus for that change came from a book that I was asked to not only edit and design but contribute to, an anthology titled Still Me…After All These Years: 24 Writers Reflect on Aging.

I began my first draft of Emmeline the same way I began my very first novel: in a writing workshop I was leading. This time, I was teaching at Unity Santa Fe, not in my long-ago Toronto living room. And this time, I assumed that I knew what I was doing. (Never assume anything!)

Twenty-three years earlier at that Toronto workshop, I had felt guided to participate in a writing exercise that I was facilitating. The result eventually became The MoonQuest, and that evening’s writing would become an integral part of the novel.

With Emmeline, I set out to begin a novel whose plot I believed I knew. Within a few weeks, however, I had trashed that opening scene and begun again, from an entirely different premise.

(This time I didn’t dare fight the title, which insisted on remaining intact. With Sara’s Year I did fight it, only to discover in the final scene of the first draft why that title was perfect!)

What happened to me that changed the Emmeline story? Author Karen Helene Walker, who had conceived and was compiling the Still Me anthology, sent me the first of its essays to edit.

Those, along with the essays and poems that followed in the ensuing weeks, moved me, inspired me, made me laugh, made me think and, in a few instances, made me cry. As a 62-year-old, I also recognized myself and my experiences, joys and concerns in many of them.

But the Still Me essays did more than that. The more I read, the more I began to think about Emmeline and her “papers” in a whole new way. It didn’t take long before I realized that the book I thought I was writing was to be something else altogether — something more engaging for its readers and, for better or worse, more emotionally and creatively challenging for its author.

Ironically, The Emmeline Papers is not a book about aging. All tricksters move in strange and mysterious ways, and my trickster-muse is no different. Aging is a component of Emmeline, but the story is more about many of the things that we experience regardless of our age. It’s about hopes and dreams. It’s about mortality and death. It’s about fear and courage. It’s about loss. It’s about relationship. It’s about life. It’s about many of the themes addressed — both touchingly and humorously — in Still Me…After All These Years. (And for fans of Sara’s Year and After Sara’s Year, it’s about far more than Emmeline: All your favorite characters are back for this third installment of the series.)

It will be a couple of months before you can get your hands on The Emmeline Papers (I’m aiming for a late spring release, but you can preorder your copy now). However, Still Me…After All These Years is available today and well worth the read, regardless of your age. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a contributor!

And what about my contribution? It also links back to The Sara Stories. It’s called “It’s Never Too Late to Follow Your Dreams” and it tells the story of how I came to write Sara’s Year. A series of age-related health scares forced me to ask myself the question many of us of a certain age find ourselves asking, even without medical prompting: “If I’m to die sooner rather than later, what is it that I want to make sure I do before I go?”

It won’t surprise you (though it did surprise me!) to discover that it’s a question that also pops up in The Emmeline Papers.

As I move forward with Emmeline, I continue to be struck by the creatively tricksterish wiles of my muse and I have to wonder whether the fourth and final book in The Sara Stories (as yet untitled) will bear any resemblance to my current notion of it!

Meanwhile, The Emmeline Papers continues to unfold, thanks in some measure to the gifted and engaging contributors to Still Me…After All These Years!

• Look for Still Me…After All These Years in paperback on Amazon or as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, Kobo or iBooks



• Look for The Sara Stories (Sara’s Year, After Sara’s Year and, soon, The Emmeline Papers) in paperback or ebook from your favorite online bookseller or signed by me to you from TheSaraStories.com. (You can also preorder The Emmeline Papers from my website.)

How Sara's Year Got Its "After"

When the earliest readers of Sara’s Year approached me in the days and weeks following the book’s publication, they spoke with a single voice, and an unexpected one: “We want more,” they cried. 

Many wanted to know what was next for Marc-Allan Cameron (Mac), the celebrity artist in Sara’s Year who turns out to be as unlucky in love as he is lucky with fame and fortune. Others demanded to know the fates both of Bernie Freed, the young man who walks out on his mother’s funeral and spends the rest of Sara’s Year discovering all that he never knew about her and about himself, and of his friend, Erik Donnekin. And what about the title character, still others asked: What’s her after Sara’s Year story?

As I wrote in the introduction to Sara’s Year (and in an earlier blog post), that book was sparked by a series of health scares, in the midst of which I asked myself what I would want to make sure I accomplished should the worst occur. The answer was a new novel. Sara’s Year was the result.

It was to be a one-off. When Sara’s Year was finished, I planned to produce a new book for writers. 

Sarah’s fans had other ideas. (That’s not a typo: There’s a reason why Sarah the character has a different spelling than Sara the book.)

At first I insisted that there would be no After Sara’s Year. I felt complete with the story and its characters and felt no call to continue the saga. But as readers continued to push and prod, I began to reconsider. 

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I had to confess that I, too, was curious about the fates of Mac, Sarah, Bernie and Erik. But the character who most intrigued me, the one no one ever asked about, was Sadie Finkel. 

If you’ve read Sara’s Year, you’ll remember Bernie’s aunt as the quintessential alteh machashaifeh; that’s Yiddish for old witch (“that’s witch with a b”). Sadie was so utterly unpleasant in Sara’s Year that the author in me wondered how she had become that way and whether there could be any hope for her. 

It didn’t take me long to realize that the only way I would find out what happens to Mac, Sarah, Bernie, Erik and, yes, Sadie would be to write them into another Sara story. And now it's finished!

Although After Sara’s Year is, officially, the second book in what I am now calling The Sara Stories, you don’t have to have read Sara’s Year in order to be able to follow this new story. The two books are interconnected, but each telling stands on its own. 

By the way, The Sara Stories will not end with After Sara’s Year. I had barely begun a second draft of Sara’s Year when an idea for a third installment in the series popped into my head. No, I won’t be calling it After After Sara’s Year, but it looks as though it will include all your favorite Sara characters...plus more!

For now, though, I invite you to enter (or reenter) the world of Sarah and her friends in After Sara’s Year, the book I couldn’t have written without readers like you. And to encourage you, I have a special offer for you: 

Preorder your signed copy of After Sara's Year today, and start reading it before it hits bookstores!

You haven't read Sara's Year?

No problem. Each of the Sara Stories stands on its own!

Look for both books at
www.thesarastories.com 

While you're there, considering adding the award-winning Sara's Year to your order – for yourself if you haven't read it yet or for a friend if you have...or any of my other books. Just let me know to whom you want those signed as well. 

Marc-Allan Cameron hasn't felt alive in 30 years. 

For Sadie Finkel, it's been more than 50. 

When life comes knocking, will they let it in?

The newest spellbinding addition to the award-winning Sara Stories!

Preorder your signed copy today!

Preordered books will ship by mid-August, Priority Mail to US addresses. 

** Note to Canadian Readers: If there's a Canada Post shutdown, your books will ship once the labor dispute is over. To bypass Canada Post, contact me about UPS rates.

Raising a Glass in Gratitude, for Every Moment in My Life

 It's always significant for me when Easter falls in March. Although Easter is not part of my religious heritage, this holiday that marks death and celebrates resurrection parallels two personally significant death and resurrection events in my own life: the death of my mother in 1984 and the resurrection of my creativity 10 years later, almost to the day.

My mother rarely pressured me to be or do anything other than what I chose to be or do, and for that I will always be grateful. Yet all parents carry expectations for their children, however unconscious, and all children tune in to that, even if they're not aware they're doing it. When my mother died on the evening of March 26, 1984, the burden of that unconscious awareness lifted. This is how I tell it in my Acts of Surrender memoir...

"As courageous as I had allowed myself to be while [my mother] was alive – to come out as a gay man, for example, or to quit a secure job for the risks of freelancing or to leave my hometown – all my choices and actions had been colored by how I thought she might respond and had been filtered through her world view. With her gone, all her hopes, fears and expectations for me were gone, too. Suddenly, without being conscious of it or of what it meant, I was free. It would take a few more years before I could begin to grow into that freedom, before I could let it unalterably transform me and my world."

One of the most dramatic expressions of that newfound freedom showed up on March 28, 1994. That was the day I penned the first words of what would become The MoonQuest. This, my debut novel, would come to stand as a metaphor for the unblocking of my stifled creativity: It takes place in a land where stories have been banned and storytellers put to death.

When it was finally published 13 years later, it would also launch a writerly career that has now produced 12 books (with a 13th on the way), a trio of optioned screenplays and three stage plays-in-progress.

However, just as my mother's passing did not unleash an immediate flood of creativity, nor did The MoonQuest: It would take me more than a decade to complete an initial draft of my second manuscript, The StarQuest. (Ironically, I started writing The StarQuest a few days after Easter in 1998.) The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, my third manuscript but second published book, also didn't materialize for several years. And it wasn't until five or six years years ago that the real tsunami of creativity hit: It's only since 2010 that I have started and/or completed most of my books, screenplays and stage plays.

It's not surprising, then, that I greet this and every March with mixed emotion: with gratitude to my mother and sorrow at her absence, and with awe at the creative awakening that ignited 10 years later in a Toronto writing workshop I was teaching (a story I shared in my February 2016 newsletter). I will be raising a glass to both as the month draws to an end.

One final note: A year before her death from cancer, my mother confessed to me that she had made many poor choices in her life. I thought a lot about those regrets as I wrote my most recent novel, Sara's Year, the story of how one woman's abandoned passions inspire both her son and her oldest friend to live their dreams.

I am now 61, my mother's age when she spoke those words and when she died the following March. Like my mother's, mine has not always been an easy life and there are situations and circumstances that I sometimes wish had played out differently.

But unlike my mother and the Esther character in Sara's Year who borrows bits and pieces from my mother's life, I have no regrets. I recognize, not always happily, that all my choices and all my experiences have made me a stronger, more compassionate human being, a more insightful and creative artist and a more effective and intuitive coach, mentor and motivator.

Perhaps the greatest gifts of all were those very years when I didn't feel free to create and when I felt tied to my mother's hopes, fears and expectations. Like the caterpillar trapped in its cocoon, they forced me to push free to become the butterfly I now am.

So as I raise that glass, it will be in gratitude for every moment in my life – the blocked as well as the flowing, the deaths as well as the resurrections. And I will look forward to many more years of that same flavorful yet maddening goulash of love, fear, frustration and creation that comes together in every moment to shape each of our lives.

Photos: My mother on her second wedding day, some time in the 1970s • Me and my mother at a family gathering in the late 1960s • The current and original MoonQuest book covers.

Look for The MoonQuest, Acts of Surrender, Sara's Year and all my books in paperback or ebook from your favorite online bookseller or signed by me to you from my website.

And watch for The MoonQuest movie, the first installment in a trio of epic motion pictures based on my screenplay adaptations of my Q'ntana Trilogy fantasy novels.

Happy Birthday to Me!

As I write in Acts of Surrender: A Writer’s Memoir, birthdays for me have always been more about the transformationally personal than about big crowds and noisy parties.

Shortly before my 21st birthday, I came out as a gay man; shortly after, I moved into my first apartment. Just before my 30th, I lost my mother’s wedding band at Stonehenge – a symbolic break from her influence (I had been wearing it as a memento since her death six months earlier). On my 40th, having sold or given away most everything I owned, I moved to Nova Scotia.  A few weeks before my 42nd birthday, I launched a new life in Sedona; four weeks after my 50th, that life abruptly ended.

Now, today, on my 61st, I once again leave the crowds behind in favor of a quiet birthday celebration…a shared birthday celebration. Shared with whom? With Sara’s Year, my 12th book and fourth novel, which launches officially today.

As I noted in last month’s issue, Sara’s Year emerged from a series of health scares that prompted me to ask what I wanted to be sure to accomplish if I were to die sooner rather than later. It’s not surprising, then, that a “death and rebirth” theme figures prominently in the story, even if it wasn't consciously planned. Given that, what better day to birth the book than my birthday?

Here’s another birthday parallel, one that makes today’s book launch even more apt: Just as we emerge into the world naked and vulnerable, we authors are similarly naked and vulnerable when we release the murmurings of our heart to the world. If each new book I write takes me deeper as a writer, then each new book also reveals more of that depth to you. That makes Sara’s Year my most “naked” book yet!

“Walk the earth naked, clothed only in your truth,” I write in Dialogues with the Divine: Encounters with My Wisest Self. How perfect, if somewhat scary, to be spending my birthday in my creative birthday suit!

Help Me Celebrate with a Gift That’s as Much for You as for Me: Order Sara’s Year TODAY!

Why today (apart from the obvious)? Amazon and other book-site rankings are affected not only by the number of books ordered but by how close together those orders are. That means that a bunch of book orders over a single day or two has a more dramatic impact on rankings than the same number of orders spread over several weeks.

Here's where to find Sara online...

• Amazon: Kindle/Paperback
• iBook store
• Sara’s Year is also available as an ebook in the Google Play, Kobo and Nook stores and as a signed paperback from my website

"It's Never Too Late to Follow Your Dreams"

One of the first questions I asked myself, as I dealt with a series of health scares last year was, “If I’m to die sooner rather than later, what do I want to be sure I do before I go?” To my surprise the first response that bubbled up from somewhere deep within was, “Write another novel.” So, parking myself at a Santa Monica Starbucks (where else!?) a few weeks later, I switched on my laptop and began to write...even though I knew nothing of the story I was being called to.

Eight months and a different book later, I found myself back in Los Angeles, this time to sign books at the Conscious Life Expo. It was there on the second day of the event that a stranger marched up to my table, scrutinized me and my book display, and with a gaze of alarming intensity, asked me for my rising sign.

“Virgo,” I told him.

“When do you normally write?” he asked next.

There’s little you can call “normal” about my work habits. One draft or book might write itself more easily in the morning, another in the afternoon, another late at night. That’s what I told him.

“You need to be writing two hours before dawn,” he declared, backing it up with a complex astrological explanation that I pretended to understand.

“Not going to happen,” I muttered. I am barely functional two hours after dawn, let alone before. Yet when the next morning I awoke spontaneously at 4:30, I put my visitor’s theory to the test: I found the few pages of my barely started novel and continued where I had left off.

Through the months that followed that peculiar encounter (though rarely before dawn), Sara’s Year revealed itself to me with a speed and clarity that I had rarely before experienced in my writing, often through the meaningful coincidences that Carl Jung termed “synchronicities.” There were many – far too many to chronicle here – and each left me more in awe than the last. 

Of course, I had many moments of resistance, as I often do when launching a new project. But as with every other of my books, I found ways to surrender to the greater wisdom of the story and, in so doing, write my way through and past my apprehension.

The result is a story I am profoundly grateful to have been chosen to write and one that has left all my advance readers clamoring for a sequel. It's also one that continues to remind me – as I hope it will also remind you – that it's never too late to follow your dreams!

Special Offer for My Blog Readers!

Order your signed copy today!

www.sarasyear.com

"Unlived dreams. Family secrets. Betrayal. And characters who haunt you long after you’re finished their story. You won't be able to put this book down!"

– Karen Walker, author of The Wishing Steps

"A masterful journey with a brilliant cast of characters. What an adventure!"

– Carolyn Flower, author of Gravitate 2 Gratitude

You Know You're Writing the Right Story When...

synchronicity (n) The simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection. Meaningful coincidence. Used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung.

More than any other writing project I have tackled, Sara's Year, my new story-in-progress, has bombarded me with so many meaningful coincidences that my once-mighty resistance to this novel-plus-screenplay has pretty much crumbled.

In case you missed my recent posts about the project, here as well as on Facebook and Google+, here's a recap...

Sara's Year is set in Montreal over a 50-year period between the 1930s and the 1980s, with a brief but significant episode in postwar Halifax. Not only is this story more directly autobiographical than anything I have ever written (other than my Acts of Surrender memoir, of course), it's also more creatively challenging than anything I have ever attempted. In addition, it involves considerable research because of its real-life setting and one real-life character.

Given all that, it's no wonder I was so hesitant when my Muse came knocking at my door! It didn't help that the first scene I wrote veered in such an unexpected direction that it was eight months before I returned to the manuscript. More accurately stated, I was nudged back to the manuscript by the first in a long and still-unfolding series of synchronistic events that eloquently and unequivocally demonstrated that this was my story to write...so I'd better get on with it!

It all began a year ago when, facing a series of health scares, I asked myself: "If I'm going to die sooner rather than later, what is it that I want to make sure I do and/or experience before I go?" To my surprise, the first answer that bubbled up from deep within was "write another novel." Soon after, with a vague sense of the story and a working title, I launched Sara's Year in a Santa Monica Starbucks.

Eight months later, I was signing books at the Lighted Bridge Communications booth at the Conscious Life Expo in L.A. when a man walked up to my table and, with a gaze of almost alarming intensity, asked me for my rising sign. "You need to be writing two hours before dawn," he proclaimed when I answered "Virgo." The next morning I woke up unexpectedly early and returned to Sara's Year, although any thought of a consistent predawn writing routine quickly evaporated.

After one of my first Facebook posts about the project, referencing Montreal's legendary Baron Byng High School (many well-known Canadian cultural and political luminaries were graduates, as was my mother; even William Shatner attended for a time), my sister messaged me. Did I know about the famous student murals at Baron Byng? Our mother's signature was on at least one.

No, I hadn't known. But a Google search turned up a 66-year-old article about the murals and about Anne Savage, the longtime Baron Byng art teacher and well-known Canadian artist under whose tutelage they were created. That day, Savage became a key secondary character in Sara's Year, my fictional pseudo-Baron Byng was replaced by the real thing and my version of the school's student murals became part of the story.

There have been too many Anne Savage synchronicities to chronicle in this post, but here are a few...

• I was out for a walk one day when it occurred to me that one of my best friends in high school might have had an Anne Savage connection through his mother. Ann Peterson was Art Supervisor for the same Montreal school board as had been Savage after she left Baron Byng. "Anne Savage was my mother's mentor," Greg wrote me. "She was really responsible for getting my mother the job."

• One of Anne Savage's artist colleagues and friends was Arthur Lismer, for three years principal of Halifax's Victoria School of Art and Design. By the time I discovered this, the school was already playing an important role in Sara's Year. (By that point in its history and my story's chronology, the school had been renamed the Nova Scotia College of Art (it's now NSCAD University).

• When I needed an excuse for one of my characters, an NSCAD professor and Anne Savage fan, to find himself in Montreal in 1956, I discovered that Savage had a one-woman show in the city that year. Perfect!

Which brings me to the many Halifax/NSCAD/Anna Leonowen synchronicities. Here's a sampling...

• I was researching NSCAD to make sure it was around in 1946, only to discover that it was founded in the late 19th century by Anna Leonowens (the real-life Anna of The King and I). Once I discovered that the original Anna and the King of Siam movie premiered in 1946 and that The King and I musical premiered 10 years later (again, perfect timing for events that needed to play out in both those years), the two films (and Anna herself) became key elements in the story.

• On a side note, I also discovered that post-Siam Anna not only lived in Halifax, she died and was buried in Montreal.

• While I was waiting for my team of volunteer researchers to find out for me when and where those films premiered in Halifax (the original film) and Montreal (the musical), I placed them in the theaters that would best serve the geography of the story: Anna and the King at the Capitol and The King and I at the Palace. When the research results came in, I discovered that the films had, in fact, premiered in those theaters.

• The King and I opened at the Palace in Montreal exactly 27 years before the day I had already selected as the relevant character's funeral, an anniversary that also now plays into the story.

• In my nearly 18 years living in the U.S., I have never knowingly met anyone from Nova Scotia. One morning, about halfway through the first draft of the novel, I attended a workshop at the Apple Store. One of my fellow participants introduced himself as a Halifax native!

Where is Sara's Year today? I finished a first draft of the novel last week and am about a dozen pages into a first draft of the screenplay. Meantime, those "meaningful coincidences" keep showing up, which is just as well: Every time I feel discouraged about the project (often) or doubtful about my ability to carry it off (even more often), another synchronicity presents itself to remind me that I am writing the right story!

• What about you? What synchronicities have shown up in your life recently, whether as part of your creative life or not? Post your story as a comment on the original blog piece.

• UPDATE: Sara's Year is finished and out, and it's attracting not only rave reviews but awards! Look for it in paperback or ebook from your favorite online bookseller or signed by me to you from www.TheSaraStories.com. And watch for the reader-demanded sequel, After Sara's Year, coming in late 2016!

Photos 
#1 – This prototype cover featuring an image of Montreal's distinctive staircases is only being used to keep me inspired as I move forward with the project. It is not the final cover. (Credit: https://hammerphotography.wordpress.com)
#2 – Me at the Conscious Life Expo, February 2015 (Credit: www.marlenaelise.com)
#3 – Baron Byng High School
#4 – Artist Anne Savage
#5 – Now Halifax's Five Fishermen restaurant, this building was home to the Nova Scotia College of Art during Sara's Year
#6 – Montreal Palace Theatre (Credit: McCord Museum)

A Novel Screenwriting Experience

I was out for a walk yesterday, reflecting on the afternoon's work on my new novel-in-progress, when a little voice (if you're a writer, you know the one), said, in a not-very-still, not-very-small way, "Work on the screenplay for Sara's Year at the same time as you're working on the novel."

Now, I had always planned to adapt Sara's Year for the screen, just as I did with my Q'ntana Trilogy fantasy novels. At one point, I had even considered writing the screenplay first, as I did with the trilogy's third installment, The SunQuest. But simultaneously!?!!? Insanity!!

"You're crazy," I muttered, a not atypical reaction to my Muse. "How can I work on both versions  at the same time?"

Then I remembered how dialogue-heavy this first draft of the novel is turning out to be...as though I was setting myself up for the screenplay.

"Oh," I said.

Then I remembered thinking, as I was writing that afternoon, how cinematically the novel was unfolding.

"Oh," I said again.

Then I remembered how true to their novels my screenplays have always been.

"Hmm," I said.

Then I remembered that my Muse has never steered me wrong, however bizarre and unconventional its guidance.

"Okay," I said, very softly. "I don't know how I'll do it. But I'll do it."

If you have followed my writings, especially my Acts of Surrender memoir, you'll recognize this journey from resistance to surrender as a fairly common one for me. All that has changed over the years is that, thankfully, my surrender now occurs more expeditiously.

I'm still not sure how it will work. Will I write on the screenplay one day and the novel the next? Will I immediately translate each scene from one form to the other? More likely, the experience will be an organic one that will vary from scene to scene and day to day.

All I can know in this moment is all I have ever known: that I must trust the story to reveal to me not only its trajectory but the optimal ways to express that trajectory, and that I must exercise that trust in the moment-by-moment process that is the creative journey.

No doubt, you'll be hearing more about my Sara's Year experiences in the weeks and months ahead. For today, though, I will open Final Draft to the Sara's Year screenplay and Pages to the Sara's Year novel and await further instructions. If I listen, those instructions will come. And if I trust, they will prove to be perfect...just as they have always been

• If you missed my two recent posts about Sara's Year, look them up here and here

• To read about more of my various surrenders over the years, pick up a copy of Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir – on most Amazon sites, from my website, from select other online booksellers or from all major ebook stores

Hijacked by My Muse (Again)!

As 2014 melted into 2015 a few months ago, I felt certain that this new year would be all about this new "Birthing Your Book Guru" I had become...that the coming 12 months would be focused on more actively sharing all I had gained through 11 books and more than two decades of teaching, coaching and mentoring...that I would be coming out of the partial retreat of the past four years and returning to a more vigorous regime of workshops, webinars, classes and clients.

Not for the first time, I was wrong.

Not for the first time, my Muse hijacked my assumptions and pointed my in a familiar direction: toward a new book.

To be honest, I have had some resistance to Sara's Year, the novel's working title. "Hebrew Scripture," A Wrinkle in Time author Madeleine L'Engle once wrote, "is full of old men in long beards saying to God, 'You want me to do what!?'" Well, my beard is not prophet-long, at least not yet. But I have been thinking a lot about that quote recently.

As I wrote here a few weeks ago ("A Novel Experience"), this fourth novel is like nothing I have ever written. It's not epic fantasy like my Q'ntana Trilogy. And it doesn't take place in a mythical time and place.

But it is epic in scope: It's a tale of my hometown that spans the 50 years between the 1930s and 1980s. And it has felt so far beyond my literary skill that I frequently second-guess my Muse with a L'Engle-inspired You want me to do what!?

As so often in the past, though, resistance is futile.

Whenever I question, hesitate, doubt or procrastinate (often), my Muse reminds me not only of the title of my memoir (Acts of Surrender) but of one of the book's chapters, the one titled "All That Matters Is That I'm Writing."

So I'm writing. As I write, I'm letting myself be challenged by the breadth and scope of the story and by the unfamiliarity and distance of its setting (I wasn't alive during the first half of the story's timeline; I haven't lived in Montreal since the 1980s; and I now live more than 2,000 miles away, in a different country). And I'm trusting that if these characters chose me to tell their story, then I must either have what it takes to write it or will grow into whatever it takes through the writing of it or, more likely, some peculiar blend of both. (This is counsel I offer in all five of my books for writers, so it's not surprising that I'm being forced to heed it!)

What does this mean for my Birthing Your Book Guru plans? As Yhoshi notes in The MoonQuest, quoting the oracle O'ric, "a forced change in plan is opportunity disguised as irritation."

Whatever irritation I might feel toward my Muse, Sara's Year is an opportunity for me to stretch and build up my literary muscle. It's an opportunity to deepen my ability to journey through difficult emotional territory through my craft. And it's an opportunity to continue to live what has so long felt to be my primary passion and purpose: writing.

In practical terms, it means that my top priority for the next months must be Sara's Year. My next priority, of course, is my existing coaching clients: I know you're reading this, so know that I will always make time for you!

In whatever open time remains, I will take on a limited number of coaching/mentoring clients, by application. And while I will also work toward offering new online classes and coaching groups (also by application), none are currently scheduled or planned.

Another teaching idea, to be executed in what ever interstices of free time I can finagle, is to create a series of downloadable classes that you can follow in your own time and at your own pace. I'd love to be able to say that those are imminent. With Sara's Year now my primary focus, it's hard to say when that project will come to fruition. But as I launch into it, I will be sure to keep you posted.

I will also keep you posted on my progress on (and resistance to) Sara's Year, as I have done with other of my writing projects, in the hopes that it will inspire you to keep writing through your own challenges.

And as always, I encourage you to share with me (publicly or privately) not only your comments on my experiences but your experiences, with your own books-, screenplays-, poems- and stories-in-progress.

And now for the photos included here: Part of the fun of Sara's Year (and, some days, too easy a distraction) has involved Googling for relevant images to help me with my descriptions and to connect with the feel and flavor of the eras involved. Here's a selection...

#1 – A wartime trolley on Rue Ste-Catherine, downtown Montreal's main shopping street

#2 – The Westmount Public Library (the first public library building in Montreal and one of the first in Canada)

#3 – An important reminder!

#4 – Baron Byng High School, where many Jewish Montrealers of my mother's generation went to school

#5 – One of the book's opening scenes takes place in a fictional café-bistro something like this one



• Can't wait for Sara's Year? Check out my existing books – from most Amazon sites, from my website, from select online booksellers or from your favorite ebook store.

A Novel Experience

During a radio interview last spring, I was asked whether I planned to write a fourth novel. At the time Organic Screenwriting: Writing for Film, Naturally had only just come out and the idea of taking on any new book project was far from my mind. "Sure, if inspiration strikes," I replied aloud, adding under my breath, "some distant time in the future."

Soon after, though, I found myself in the midst of a series of health scares, and one of the questions I had to ask myself was this: "If I am going to die sooner rather than later, what is it I want to make sure I do and/or experience before I go?" To my surprise, the first answer that bubbled up from deep within was "write another novel."

Still, I was in the midst of preparing for a trip to Los Angeles. Now was not the time to start a novel. I would think about it when I got back.

As usual, my Muse had other plans: "The time for a new novel is now," it insisted "or, at least, next week. Start it when you get to L.A."

As crazy as that sounded – not least because I had no idea what this next novel was to be about – I did just that. One evening, after dropping my daughter off at her mom's, I parked myself at a Santa Monica Starbucks (where else!?) and began to write.

Eight months passed. The health concerns that had so concerned me dissolved and my focus turned to a different book, Birthing Your Book...Even If You Don't Know What It's About, and then to a related "rebranding" of myself as The Birthing Your Book Guru.

Little did I know that this guru's most challenging client was to be himself!

My first hint of that came a few weeks ago when I was back in Los Angeles – this time to sign books at the Conscious Life Expo. Although I was nearly 10,000 words into a different book at the time (a new memoir ironically titled All That Matters Is That I'm Writing), it was my "Starbucks novel" that claimed my attention during an odd encounter at the Expo.

The curly haired man with dark, deeply set eyes who walked up to my table never gave me his name, but something about his presence immediately demanded my attention. He ignored my greeting as he studied my display of books. Then with a gaze of almost alarming intensity, he turned his attention to me.

"What's your rising sign?" he asked with no preamble.

"Virgo," I replied.

"When do you normally write?"

If you follow my work, you know that there is little that's "normal" about my work habits. One draft or book might write itself more easily in the morning, another in the afternoon, yet another late at night. That's what I told him.

"You need to be writing two hours before dawn," he proclaimed, backing it up with an astrological explanation that eluded me.

"Oh. Yeah. Okay," I said aloud. Not going to happen, I said to myself. I'm barely functional two hours after dawn, let alone two hours before. But when the next morning I awoke at 4:30, I decided to put the mystery man's theory to the test. I found the few pages of barely started novel on my laptop and picked up where I had left off.

I have been working on the novel ever since, though not before dawn.

It has not been easy.

Each of my 11 books has found fresh challenges to throw at me, and this new novel is no different. From its scope to its research needs to its semi-autobiographical nature, it tests me in every moment – emotionally as well as creatively. And it dares me to trust more fully and deeply than I have ever before dared – to trust myself, to trust my abilities and to trust a story about which I know little, except as it writes itself through me. The result? More resistance than I would care to admit to.

I was thinking about all this last night when a friend texted me: "I just felt called to pick up a copy of Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir," he wrote. "I'm already reading it and loving every minute."

Suddenly I, too, felt an urge to open Acts of Surrender. And once I started, I couldn't stop – reading or sobbing.

Fifty pages later, I forced myself to put the book down; it was late and I could barely keep my eyes open.

What I realized, though, as I drifted off to sleep was that I had needed my own words and the example of my own life to remind me of who I am and what I’m about. I had needed them to get me past some of my resistance. I had needed them to get me to recommit to my writer self and to surrender to what can be the only thing of true importance in my life right now: this new novel.

Not for the first time in my life and probably not for the last, all that matters is that I'm writing.

Conscious Life Expo Photo: www.marlenaelise.com