This is About Mentors

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writer’s Quest is about three women who find their own way to liberation. Their liberation is spiritual and deeply internal. The thing about being human on the path toward liberation is that we often need a hand or what some may call a mentor. Mentors can feel like magic the way they show up, and maybe there is a little bit of magic in there, but what is really happening is intentional patience, compassion, and understanding. What I’m saying is that mentoring someone can mean a new life for them, not just because they gain skills to help them navigate the world, which does happen, but because they gain a wider perspective of the world and a little more hope.

I know I started this post about women, but the truth is that there are amazing mentors out there who are ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary.

Did you find an amazing mentor?
You might relate to Senta who found a mentor she adored from the moment she saw them.

If not,
Writer’s Quest: A Triptych can be your first mentor.

Psychology and Philosophy from the Mind of a Creative

Writer’s Quest is a walk through psychology and philosophy from the mind of a creative. Bad things happen; it’s tragic, but the good news is that good things happen too, and that’s a wonderful feeling. The many folds and layers we walk through bring us closer and closer to ourselves through good and bad experiences. Character comes as we learn that the horrors of this world must be accepted, and at the same time, we must give ourselves what we need to heal from them.

But let’s lighten this up.

There’s plenty of room in this world for goodness and joy among the chaos and darkness. The thing about it is that you have to give yourself permission to have goodness and joy in your life. Humans thrive best when they allow themselves permission to have a full range of feelings.

You get the honor and privilege of being your own body boss; make it a good year.

Looking to treat yourself? Give yourself permission to get yourself a little treat.

It’s Ok to have a Growing To Be Read Pile

My To Be Read (TBR) pile is getting a tad dusty, but that didn’t stop me from getting The Maidens written by Alex Michaelides. Yes, books are supposed to be read, but me and the rest of the reading community fully support books on the shelf that haven’t been read yet. Here’s the truth, you could read all the books in your TBR pile, and it will still feel like you have a million more books to read. So here’s permission:

buy the books even if you think you won’t read them!

👇🏽👇🏽speaking of books here’s mine👇🏽👇🏽

Writer’s Quest is an experimental fiction novel about a painter who’s searching for her mom and meets a mystical mentor. It’s a story told through different styles of storytelling that shares a woman’s artistic and personal transformation.

Working on My Log Line

Writer’s Quest is an experimental fiction novel about a painter who’s searching for her mom and meets a mystical mentor. It’s a story told through different styles of storytelling that shares a woman’s artistic and personal transformation.

Do you have a log line you’ve used? Share in the comments?

I found a insightful blog post written by Karen DeBonis. She uses examples and has great comparisons from book descriptions to something called WOMM or Word of Mouth Marketing. I really felt better after reading her post.

Here’s the a link if you’re interested in log lines for your writing.

My Ebook Writer’s Quest: A Triptych is available for purchase On Amazon.

A Human Story

When it comes to writer’s quest,

I’m not promising anything but a glimpse into the mind of a woman coming into herself.

Some might say Writer’s Quest is told in a divine way, but the goal was to be my own strange and authentic self. It took a lot of work to dig this woman out of my chest. That’s why this book means so much. Kafka once said, “A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Writing this book served as the ax to keep my heart from freezing over. It kept me warm and soft and beating with life.

I can’t think of anything more beautiful.

Irresponsibility, the Pleasure of Art.

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.” -James Joyce

James Joyce was an instant favorite of mine. It was like he crawled into my head and spoke my language.

I started with Finnegans Wake, what is often considered his magnum opus. Then I read Ulysses. I also found it fascinating, but I never finished either of them. After those, I read his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that sealed the deal.

He was a genius, and he made me feel like a real writer.

It’s funny because while I was in my writing cave (a short spurt of my life where I spoke to no one, just wrote and studied the greats), I thought he was one of the greatest writers in the world and that no one would ever dispute that. I came to find that many people greatly disliked Joyce for the torture he placed upon them. One woman had no shame in calling him an a$$hole in the middle of a writing group.

That moment fascinated me.

Because what I experience as brilliance, others experience as torture.

The way Joyce writes makes me feel like he narrows in and develops the ability to listen intently to the world inside his head, almost like Daredevil, but his own internal universe.

If you consider Jungian concepts, it’s almost like he tapped into the collective consciousness. That’s something I say with fantastical excitement. Jung’s concept of the collective consciousness is that there are inherited “thoughts” not from our own lived experience but handed down from those before us.

It took me much longer to appreciate Jung, and I really didn’t connect with him until after I finished his Red Book. But once I did, something clicked. The world of Finnegans Wake that Joyce seemed to hear suddenly had a place.

My novel absolutely holds both Joyce and Jung at its roots.

If you’re interested in Joyce or Jung, let me know; you can see their influence on Writer’s Quest.

The Value of Writing Consistently

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” — Joan Didion

There’s a part in Writer’s Quest where Senta, my main character, explodes into her notebook and experiences a great release from finally unloading all the weight she has been carrying. I think one thing that is important for us as writers is to avoid explosive writing.

Writers should write so consistently that they don’t explode; they consistently flow through their own unfolding.

As writers, we are consistently taking in new ideas, working on stories even without the document in front of us. As humans, what we take in, we must also sit down and sort through. When we don’t sort through all the information we’ve been collecting, we can lose track of ourselves. And when we lose track of ourselves, we lose track of all the things we value.

But when we write, we allow our brains to run the way they are created to run. We allow them to acknowledge and feel and observe and learn and explore and connect. As we learn our characters, we learn ourselves. And that’s the value of unfolding.

Writing, for me and for Senta, is our lifeline to a more peaceful inner world.

If you’re ready to explore the world of Senta and
her writing journey,
today’s a great day to purchase the ebook!

Tell Your Story

Writer’s Quest took courage

It’s time to tell your story how it works for you. There’s no limit to the way you can tell a story. They may make you think there’s a right way; it’s a lie.

If there’s a form that makes you feel seen, do it. If there’s a style that makes you finally hear yourself, do it. E. E. Cummings said, “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” That goes for becoming who you are as a writer too.

Writer’s Quest is that book for me. I showed up boldly to the page. The hard part now is that I’m struggling to find ways to talk about my novel. It’s always been challenging for me, but now I’ve reached the point in my writing journey where it matters.

On the plus side, I’m practicing.

Building Faith Through Storytelling

A Writer’s Quest

“To leap across an abyss, one is better served by faith than doubt.” -William James

This quote makes me wonder how we give our readers the faith that together we will make the leap or the journey from the beginning to the end of the story. Is it inspiration that fans the flames of faith? Is it consistency? Is it giving them a familiar plan but a good plan?

It really could be all of these. Joseph Campbell believed that there had to be a clear journey, and that journey included Carl Jung’s archetypes. E. E. Cummings believed that feeling can come across in poetry even when it didn’t “obey” traditional forms. And from the writer’s perspective, Julia Cameron believes that we, as writers, need to journal in order to grow our faith throughout the writing process.

The thing is, as writers, we’re responsible for two faiths: our own and our readers’. Carrying our own faith can be quite the load on its own. What we learn is that if you tell a story well enough, faith carries the reader through the abyss. And how do you tell a story well enough? Well, you find what you have to say and say it in a way that makes people want to listen. The tricky part is remembering what it is you want to say through the entire writing process.

Exploring Jung’s Divine Feminine

“The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.” -Carl Jung

Writer’s Quest was inspired by a lot of Carl Jung’s work. Most of Jung’s influence can be seen in book one, where Senta meets Anie-Ma. I don’t want to give too much away. The focus was on Jung’s idea of the divine masculine and the divine feminine, with Anie-Ma being the divine feminine. I wanted to personify Jung’s divine feminine, and I wanted her book to unfold in that way as well. That part of the project was something I connected deeply with. It was something that stayed through all the edits.

I think it was meant to be.