And how does that make you feel?

Ever have the feeling the universe is trying to stuff something into your big, fat, ugly head? Maybe it’s not so much a “woo-woo” experience as it is your inner mind focusing on something before it tells your everyday mind about it. Sort of like I kept seeing pregnant women right before I decided I wanted to have a baby. (And what was I thinking then?) I don’t like subliminal messages from myself. I rely on my normal shallow nature to protect me from deep emotion.

This week, Cricket McRea, author of the Home Crafting Mystery series, posted a blog about Splat. http://tinyurl.com/43dshyl This is a technique for discovering the inner workings of your own mind so you can plumb the depths of your fear and anxiety to create more complex and interesting characters.

Now doesn’t that sound like fun?

Less than a month ago, at Rocky Mountain Fiction Writer’s Colorado Gold Conference, I attended a three-hour workshop given by romantic suspense writer and amazing writing coach, Laura Baker, of Story Magic fame. The workshop was entitled The Fearless Writer: Discovering Your Story. Among the eye-opening and light bulb-illuminating tidbits in this workshop, Laura walked us through a bit of psychoanalysis all in the name of finding a good story. Talk about stepping out of my six inch deep comfort zone.

At the most basic, The Fearless Writer course is about discovering what made you begin writing. Before you learned you couldn’t write because you didn’t know about stimulus and response and point of view and voice and character arcs and turning points, what gave you the passion to tell the story inside of you?

Before we can answer this question, we have to go through a series of exercises, dredging up all the good, bad and ugly we’ve squirreled away throughout our lives and find out what our purpose is in storytelling. Like cats, some of us are particularly good and burying our, ahem, “unpleasantness.” And like Methuselah, some of us have enough years on our bones to have accumulated a lot of said “unpleasantness.”

Laura had us look at stories and characters we found easiest to write and those we couldn’t complete. Using our own life experiences, we drew links to our stories and can then discover what our strengths are as writers. The exercises took the pain and joy in our past and associated that emotional gunk (that’s my technical term) with our stories to find themes we return to.

I’m not about to tell you all the personal dysfunction I discovered in just three hours of this workshop. It’s embarrassing how much of my therapy has been worked out in the pages of my books. But it makes for some particularly flawed characters with lots of growth potential. Obviously, Laura’s workshop is way more involved than what I’ve plastered here and I urge you to check it out. www.fearlesswriter.com

When I fearlessly and foolishly decided I wanted to be a writer, no one told me I was going to have to pull out all the nasty little bugs hiding in the dark recesses of my brain. Like spiders in my house, I’m way happier if I don’t see them. I’m not all that into self awareness, we shallow people shy away from that. I have honed the art of denial until I’m a true master. And now the dagnabbed universe is banging me on the head with a sledgehammer and telling me to dig deeper. Fine, okay, I’m not stupid, I get the message. But if I have to cry to write this next book, somebody is going to be in trouble.

What about you? Do you enjoy the process of baring your soul, even in disguise, in your work?

Tis the Season

Does anyone else get flat-out emotional during the holidays? Remember the old Folger’s Coffee commercial where the guy surprises his family by coming home at dawn… “Peter, you’re home!” I cried every time. Each Christmas program my kids performed in--even year after year when they sang about the inebriated grandmother getting run over by a reindeer—had me weeping. I don’t know if it’s the solstice, shorter days with not enough sunshine, memories, expectations, or what, but I am a puddling, sniveling mess all season.

Today I went to a book signing event hosted by our Frontier Market. They had several local authors at tables throughout the store. Mostly, they looked bored and lost and wondering how to attract organic food lovers over to their tables to sell them romances, children’s books, or books on tough love. I wanted to show support and generate good authors’ karma by buying books and hoping it comes back to me. (Does karma work if there’s a mercenary element to it?—a topic for another day.)

I started chatting with an author of several books about speaking to animals and plants and generally being one with the world. I might be a skeptic about just how far the intuitive mind goes with respect to, say, the family goldfish. But the author drew me in with answers to my questions about just how she asks animals questions.

Bottom line: with her talk about dogs and how they react to their human, combined with my seasonal emotional imbalance, tears filled my eyes and I ended up buying a book I’ll probably never read just to get out of there. You see, our old dog “crossed over” this summer and I miss him. It’s also the first Christmas I won’t see either of my grown children and that’s the tough part of this year. I pretty much melted in the middle of the supplements aisle.

I love Christmas. Trees, presents, decorations, cards, lights, tinsel—and tears.