Photo: Hoverfly, by David Short
Creative Commons Attribution License
Eristalix pertenax on Mexican orange-blossom.
Taken 5/20/2011 using Canon Digital IXUS 70.
"We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other,to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity." - Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"
I just can't seem to get it together to write articles for the two publications I freelance for, AlignLife.com and Examiner.com. I have no readers at the Examiner yet, although I just started there recently. I'm thinking I should have become Chicago's Bob Dylan Examiner (they really have one) or the Ecstasy Examiner instead of Alcohol and Recovery. Who wants to read about alcohol and recovery? I try not to preach, but drinking people dont want to hear anything about their drinking habits. I asked to be the Addictions Examiner, but I have to wait until I prove myself on just alcohol or something.
There's a really exciting new publication on addiction, alcoholism and recovery called The Fix. You find articles on topics you won't find other places like this one on addiction and skin picking. It's called trichotillomania and they say it's not as serious as cutting, but it's still in the mental illness or neurosis family of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Oh ick, you say. There's reviews of swanky rehabs, ads for stuff I never knew existed like marijuana spray for pain, and serious articles about the top ten experts in the field of addictions.
I finished my "Developing Intuition" book by Shakrit Gawain, and I really do mean to keep at following my intuitive messages each and every day. She writes about all the people or voices we have in our heads. I know I have Miss Perfectionist, Mrs. Gumblehortz, my inner critic who wears her hair in a bun with not one stray hair coming out of it. Then there is Ms. Weatherhardy, the responsible one, who believes she is a human doing and not a human being. There is Mary Melon, the vulnerable child who gets scared by the risks of taking a leap of faith and following intuitive wisdom without knowing where it goes. And, of course, there is the rebel who doesn't want to even follow her own gut feelings like it's some kind of scam. There's more too. Figure out who yours are. The inner critic and the perfectionist make my life a living hell if I don't tie them up and put duct tape on their mouths.
So far I haven't seen any big changes in my life. I still spent two hours researching and writing a book proposal project bid yesterday only to have the Linux Live Knoppix CD crash and the letter disappear, although I spent hours looking for it. If I had intuitively known that was going to happen, I wouldn't have written the damn letter in the first place. I guess turning a business book into a fable is not the job for me, although I sure thought it sounded like fun.
I am currently helping my brother edit his book for teens, "A Fairy Tale Life Is No Fable," by Michael Grady, and he has done a bang-up job incorporating fables in his book that he plans to publish on his website. It definitely will be of interest to teens. He is a CPA, retired, and a professional speaker, who used to travel the world doing the accounts for Dun & Bradstreet. He knows about things teens will be helped to learn and that should hold their interest like how to give a good speech, investing, money management, learning to write well, staying healthy, taking responsibility for yourself, sex, drugs, and some rock 'n roll. I made up the rock 'n roll. It seemed to go with sex and drugs, at least it did in my generation.
Yeah, I saw some decent jobs at Elance.com, the agency I use to get my freelance gigs. For a while there I felt like I had walked into the wrong place. Suddenly articles were being priced at $2-$4 and shit like that by clients, where they had been going for up to $50+. They seem to be running from being categorized as a content mill like Demand Studios, and now AOL Seed, and Bright Hub, and now there are jobs for $500-$1,000. I was invited to bid on some "Course in Miracles" type articles and to bid a healthy amount. I was also invited to bid on meditation articles for good money, but I felt like too much of a hypocrite since I haven't been able to make myself meditate any more recently. My mind is like a wild monkey. I just want to get going on making my dreams a reality and learn grant proposal writing so I can start my own business doing that, write my self-help book on adult AD/HD (ADD), and edit my brother's book.
Oh yeah, and I also want to learn website design so I can freelance at that as well. About.com offers free courses in that as well as the other stuff you need with it like HTML, css, java, I think, and cascading sheets. All of it might as well be in Latin for all I know, but I figure there are a lot of hotdogs that have taught themselves how to do it and I am a good learner, I hope. I think it would be fun to have another creative outlet.
Today I went to the thrift store and bought a stack of dime magazines to get new pictures for my vision board I want to make. I need to update one according to my current five-year plan of dreams. I finally found a how to do it article that didn't suck with materialism and phoniness. My idea of my future does not revolve around a built-in pool and owning three houses, and I'm not about to glue gleaming materialistic pictures of crap and call it my dreams. Here's the article I was looking for. I wanted something to help me do some creative visualization on my dreams and some affirmations work. This article came from Oprah, where else. Here is the dream board made by Martha Beck that they refer to:
Let me know how it goes, and how you felt as you were making it.
Is anyone joining me in the 1,000 words a day challenge? Just a reminder: It could be your daily discipline that will end up being the springboard for the e-book you always meant to write, or the novel, play, non-fiction book, memoir, or blog. Get going. I spent a lot of time at college studying creative writing. I wanted to know what the secret was that would make me a good writer. I finally heard it from one of my professors who simply wrote on the board: "Writers Write." That's the secret. No one gets good at writing by trying to drink like they're one of the American writers in Paris during the 20's like Hemingway or Fitzgerald. You don't become a great writer by talking about writing in bars, clubs and every chance you get to impress somebody. Writers write because they must. It's a drive. If you are a writer and you don't write, you feel funky, even depressed. Follow writer Julia Cameron's advice from her book "The Artist's Way," and this website, and write your morning pages when you wake up and aren't yet sure what's on your mind and in your heart. It's so much cheaper than therapy. I get more out of it than I do therapy too.
I journaled for a couple of hours today. I did some journaling exercises from the Joy book I told you how to get for free yesterday. I wrote lists. I love lists. I wrote ten things I love about my life, ten things that are unique about me, ten things I could fix or change in the world, and ten things I'd like to share. Do those and you'll have your 1,000 word challenge met for the day, and it will be therapeutic. I learned some things about myself and my soul's mission/life's purpose from doing these lists.
Time to go see how many words I've got here: 1,176.
See you tomorrow.
Maryellen/MsRefusenik
No comments:
Post a Comment