Integrate!

Welcome to the I C Publishing Summer Blog Tour on navigating our writing paths from start to finish. I was delighted when Sheri Andrunyk invited me to be part of this Summer Blog Tour. Sheri dedicates energy, expertise and deep, wide passion to helping people find their best writing selves and take their books from hope to publication. It’s always a pleasure to take part in one of her tours. You can read Sheri’s post that launched the tour here. But first, here's a peek at the cover of my latest book: How do you start your (writing) projects? I think of writing as a conversation, and I begin by “listening,” by imagining readers and thinking about what I can contribute to a particular state or situation. When I’m writing a short piece, this is enough to get me started. Just as I am always glad to talk to someone in person, I am glad to take what is happening in my thoughts or work and introduce some aspect that I think will help a reader smile or pause to think dif...

I'm always getting tripped up by terminology. We all know that there is more to us than the voice in our head that's always complaining about our inadequacies or daydreaming about just one sunny day on the beach without our smartphones. The voice in our head is called consciousness. It's our running account of the way we want to impact the world versus the way the world is impacting us. It's also been called reason, and for a period of time, most of the western world assumed that reason represented our highest, best way of interacting with each other and the planet (and whatever you believe is beyond the planet).  Of course, there have always been dissenters who believed in faith or spirituality as a way of knowing and making decisions, but for the most part, we like to think that the familiar voice in our head is good at knowing what to do so that we can be more or less safe and happy. Of course, we depend on a lot of awareness that never makes it into the voice in...