The Beautiful Answer

Searching for Sassy’s First Award!

Super excited to report that my book Searching for Sassy: An L.A. Phone Psychic’s Tales of LIfe, Lust & Love has just won its first award, as a finalist in the Indie Excellence Book Awards! 

Yay and double yay! 

The response has really been great, and I am so grateful for all the reviews I’ve already received. 

Onward and upward, to see what’s next. :) 

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

I think it was Tom Petty who drawled about how difficult it was to sit around the wait for things to unfold, to allow the natural course of events to take shape. I, like many people, would prefer to shape my own life, and sometimes I’m not that good at waiting, even after 15 years of steady meditation practice.  

I got my final proofs of my book cover, which I’m pretty sure I’m gonna go with: 

Not bad. Not bad at all, and that’s part of it. I’m excited for my new book to come out. Though it’s largely a story of my own life, with a few other things thrown in for good measure, I actually feel like other people might enjoy it or even be able to benefit from the struggle with being different, trying to fit and finally embracing your difference as something inescapable and even positive. But I have to wait until April 24th for it to come out, so I have to get used to that. Sigh. No use wishing time away. 

I also have something pretty important happening tomorrow, something pretty big for the book itself, and for me as its writer. I’ll write more about how it goes tomorrow, but for now, the waiting really is the hardest part. 

You know how your mind just starts to do the weirdest things, creating all kinds of positive scenarios, reaching into the future to see what will happen, and then reaching back into the past to see if you can really trust what might happen? And never staying around much in the present moment? I suppose I should be used to this after watching my mind for 15 years. But maybe you never get used to what it does when you’re lot looking. 

To reframe my need to wait, yet my desire to do nothing of the sort, I did some yoga. OK, part of that was fitness-based, but I wanted to see if it also had a bit of a patience boosting effect. It did, a little. Then, a few hours later, I still had some energy, so I went to a Pilates class. These are hard, as anyone who’s one them will tell you. But I wanted to see if moving my focus to my body would get me out of my head. 

This actually worked. And I’m ever so slightly fitter in the process. My body is sore, but I’m sure I’ll sleep tonight, which will come in handy. And from there, all I can do is watch my mind, work with my thoughts and cross my fingers for a good result.

Wish me luck. 

Let The Right Ones In

What an amazing day it’s been. As I wrote about yesterday, friendship has been an important theme during the past few days, and I’ve begun to examine mine in a way I’ve never done. Far from being angry or motivated from a place of comeuppance, these hours have been about focus, which I’m getting better and better at, due to my daily reframing work.

The good news is that my book — Searching for Sassy: An L.A. Phone Psychic’s Tales of Life, Lust & Love — is going to be published by an imprint of Hay House. Incredible, right? I was so excited talking with their editors and production staff on the phone that I felt like I was talking to friends. They’re that cool, and I can’t wait until it all takes shape. Release date is late April 2012.

Since the book is a memoir of my time as a phone psychic trying to accept my abilities while trying to mend a broken heart, it’s also something that translates well to TV and film. So I may get my butt to New York in October for a pitch fest to media professionals, thanks to Hay House’s media person. I mean, most publishing houses (I know, I’ve worked in a lot of them in New York and other places) have no idea about extending your work into other media. Seriously. They don’t even think about it. Hay House is on it like Nellie Olsen’s bonnet.

So it’s been interesting that so many new friends are coming in to replace the ones kind of drifting out of my life. The ones today are both personal and professional in nature, which is also kind of cool. And me? On the way home from an appointment today, I heard a little voice in may head say, “Look to your right.” And when I did, there was a gorgeous silhouette of a tree cast in shadow on a wall, almost as if it were etched there centuries ago. I thought of the tree analogy I wrote about yesterday and smiled, knowing that in some ways, I’m on the right freakin’ track.

And So It Goes

Not 24 hours after I took down my “writing for other people” web site, I’ve been besieged with requests for, yes, writing and editing projects. I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I’m pretty done with that part of my life. I have been published in over 30 publications, I’ve released two books with my name on them, and edited and ghostwritten dozens more. I’ve won awards and learned a great deal about how the industry works, and now I want to concentrate on my own projects.

See, almost everyone I’ve ever met wants to write a book, Not that they all should. They just want to, and feel they’re somehow entitled to it. Most people want me to get them on Oprah, not seeming to know the show doesn’t exist anymore. They say they want to be on her next show, whatever that is. Many of them have nothing to say in a book, but need the platform to speak to others, to let them know how to live their lives. I tell them to try Facebook or MySpace. But none of my advice, honed over more than 20 years of doing this, seems to stick. Sometimes, I feel like I’m trapped in the movie Groundhog Day, talking to the same client over and over and over.

I didn’t want writing, which has been so magical to me, to be robbed of its joy. I didn’t want it to become workmanlike and boring, and it had definitely started to be that. So I pulled the site, and stopped accepting jobs from others to write or edit their books (the latter part happened weeks ago), articles, essays — whatever. I won’t even consider giving advice to someone who I don’t think is trying to add to the planet in some way. The world has enough books. What it needs are people with points of view, and something to actually say. Life’s just too freakin’ short.

But I wanted to reframe this, since the universe seems to be trying to continue sending me good fortune, and recognition of a sort. So I saw all the incoming energy not as an annoyance, to be answered in so many no-based emails, but as a wave of applause and a final bow. As this part of my life is coming to a close, another part begins. I’ve written a few plays, am moving towards getting them staged, and have finished a memoir about the time I spent working as a phone psychic in Los Angeles. My business continues to flourish, and I have so many new ideas it will take me years to write them all. So none of this is bad. Thank you for all the projects and the chance to hone my craft. Now it’s time to open a new door and walk through it.