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Archive for the ‘creativity’ Category

October 2nd, 2012 authors, books, creativity, fiction, Kelli Jae Baeli, Sensory Processing Sensitivity, writing No Comments »

Streaming & Quilting: Differing Methodologies in Novelwriting

My partner, Kate,  and I often discuss methodology in our writing. While in general we are very much alike, personally, we do have two completely different methods for writing a book.

Kate has this uncanny, subconscious method that seems to flow from her Muse and out onto the page, with herself as conduit. It seems amazing to me that she can start at the beginning (the beginning!?) and write straight through until the book is done. A linear stream of subconsciousness. No major tweaking of plot points or planting of red herrings {1}, rarely any insertion of missing foreshadowing or details that have to change since something else happened later… When she was working on Building Character, I was amazed to see elements reappear and figure so prominently into the events, when they were hinted at in the beginning, without her even knowing why that particle was in the text she was writing. It’s a little eerie that she seems to have a complete prescience of the story before she’s consciously aware of it, or even writes it. I find that truly amazing.

She is quick to say, however, that she is mindful the whole way through of style and technique and diction and story arcs, etc. The point is, she writes a book from beginning to end, letting it all freeflow, and somehow it comes out brilliantly rendered on the other side. I don’t know how she does that.

And she says she doesn’t know how I do what I do.

I am a more technical writer in my method. My modus operandi is analogous to making a quilt.

I start with one patch of fabric (a character, a scene, a bit of dialogue) and I attach other patches to it, repeatedly, until it becomes one whole cloth.{2}

In my previous AKA Investigations book 2, Also Known as DNA, it began with dialogue. I must have written 100 pages of dialogue before writing much else on that one. I suspect it was a way to allow the characters to tell me the story, since I was already familiar with them and they were more likely to ‘communicate openly with me’–and apparently that method was useful, because it was the quickest I’d ever written a novel (4 months).

Anyway, as I’m piecing together all these parts, I’m looking for the common thread, the repeating theme, the Happy Accidents (elements that appear unplanned, but seem to magically fit into the story). I have this pervasive belief that all things are connected in some way, and it’s my task, in writing a novel, Also Known as DNAto find those connections and hook them up in a way that is credible, and hopefully clever and entertaining as well. That’s half the fun of writing for me: discovering how all those disparate elements can possibly be connected.

In Also Known as DNA, for instance, I noticed the theme of family–those related to you biologically–and parenting, and how everyone can react so differently to what they experience from their parents. So, DNA was the thread. In the 3rd AKA Investigations book, which I am working on now, I have yet to find that common theme. I’m still putting the patches together. I have all these scenes and some of them don’t seem to belong in the same book. But I’ve done this enough times to know that it’s exactly how to create the story for me. I want to find those connections between things that don’t seem to be connected at first blush.

It’s FUN. And writing should be fun at least part of the time.

===================================

{1} have you ever tried to plant a red herring? They’re so wiggly, and won’t stay in the dirt.

{2} I know this metaphor could go much deeper, but I’d need to learn more about quilting to render it well.  Random Thought Alert: I don’t even LIKE quilts. I mean, I like them, conceptually, but because of my SPS, they just seem too chaotic and tend to stress me out. Too many disparate elements crammed together–I like solid colors. I won’t even buy striped towels. But this echoes my need to link and make sense of the disparate elements in the book I’m writing and forge it into a cohesive whole. I NEED to make order from chaos.

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October 1st, 2012 books, creativity, fiction, Kelli Jae Baeli, writing No Comments »

Springboarding

Most often, we write from what we know. We write from a place of experience and sensation, because that’s part of who we are, and so it must show up on the page in some way. But I recognize the danger in putting so much of myself into my characters…it could just become some glorified masturbation. Yet, a bit of literary self-cloning is inevitable and unavoidable. I did it today–put myself into some characters…and then I realized it’s a very effective means of getting the story written.

Partially, my initial process involves research, as I tend to be a more technical writer in the beginning stages until things take off and then the creative part floods in and fills it all out.  By research, I don’t mean tedious outlines or character sketches and full biographies of everyone in the story. I mean what I call Novel Logistics. I mean I write whatever strikes my fancy, and then I come across an unknown, and look it up, find out more about it. In that information will often be a seed for something else- For moving the story, creating an authentic setting, solving a plot problem or deepening the character.

For instance, today I was working on a scene with a character where I needed her to stall a conversation, and I looked down at my boots and thought about it, and then I thought maybe she would also look at her boots, think about them instead of the conversation, and then that led me to giving her my boots. So I had to Google them to find the name or style so I could describe them accurately, and I found a picture of another pair of boots, similar, but not quite the same. The boot style was called Fierce. I thought this character would be thinking about buying those boots partly because of the name–because she wanted to be fierce. And these were the first nice boots she had ever been able to buy for herself. And that tied nicely into the subject of the conversation she was trying to avoid. And thus, what were once my boots, became her boots, but then they weren’t the same boots at all. Just a springboard into something more.

In a different scene with another character, I used a certain idea about mediocrity, and it began to represent itself in the color grey. Then i found all these connections that fit into the story, developed both characters, and moved the plot a few steps forward. (Rough draft, but here’s that passage):

 Dr. Garrison Bonnet lived a mundane life. In toto, there was no way to make investigations more interesting when you were tailing a guy who liked to read and drink tea and feed ducks. The most interesting thing about him was the odd theme emerging. Grey. Dr. Bonnet had a pattern of grey in his life, and it was, as metaphors go, a fitting color. She wondered if he noticed the pattern of it in his life.

She had followed him from his office to the park where he perused a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, a book she tried to read because of the hype, but found the writing on the amateur side, even though the concept was intriguing. Ultimately she was too aggravated by the book’s obvious need for an editor, and dismissed it as a waste of time. She failed to understand the allure of it for so many women. Perhaps because it was aimed at straight women, and she was most notably not in that category.

Bonnet also sipped from his Starbucks cup of (no kidding) Earl Grey tea, and tossed stale bread crumbs to the (still not kidding) grey Gadwells that waddled up from the lake.

He was also wearing a grey jacket. Perhaps his damn underwear was grey too. So what she discovered about him, aside from his abject mediocrity, was that his stature seemed a fictional construct, perhaps perpetuated by the prestige of being a high-dollar psychiatrist who often worked for the police department, who lived in an upscale house on an upscale street in an upscale neighborhood, and drove a decidedly upscale vehicle—a Mercedes Benz C250—in an upscale shade of—ferfucksake—grey. It had to be intentional. Grey had to simply be his favorite color and maybe he levitated toward all things of that shade. Or maybe he had his own quirks and obsessions. Physician, heal thyself.

 I often do that. I use my own thoughts and settings and products and preferences and habits and then as the characters evolve, those things do also, and they get refined and become part of that character in a different way, and eventually it’s not myself in the character, but the character’s self. It’s very much like taking a lump of clay and plopping it on the pottery wheel. I am the clay I put there and then when the wheel spins and I start drawing my hands u p the sides, it becomes something completely new. Even though that clay came from me–WAS me. This method allows me to springboard from a familiar place into a new place of creation–of fiction. And yet on some level it is not fiction at all, just a version of something that was  true. And I believe the most effective fiction is a reflection of truth.

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September 30th, 2012 change, creativity, Highly Sensitive Person, HSP, Kelli Jae Baeli, Psychology, Sensory Processing Sensitivity, writing No Comments »

Word Count & a Teeming Brain

One writer mentioned on her blog that she hates it when other writers have word count widgets on their blogs. It was as if they were showing off how much writing they got done. She didn’t do word counts herself because there were times when she took writing out and replaced it, and then the word count stayed the same even though she might have had a perfectly good day’s writing under her literary belt.

I have word count meters on my blog, but not for the reasons the aforementioned writer says. I have a word count meter because first, it lets my readers know I’m working on something, and what it is, and second, (and most importantly), it helps motivate ME. It’s not about showing off. That becomes obvious when you realize that I have the same issue the blogger/writer said. I often rewrite from notes in the document. Once that’s done, I delete the notes, and that often makes me break even on word count. So it’s not about crowing that I got so much work done, it’s about motivating myself in any way possible toward reaching a goal. And if you do enough writing, often enough, you eventually get that word count up anyway until the book is completed. So it doesn’t matter if the meter breaks even some days. On other days, it won’t.  I also like looking down at the toolbar in Word and seeing that number rising. Again, it’s about motivation. If I see that I’ve just put down 300 words, there’s a little niggling voice that says try for 300 more…and I usually do.

Hey, whatever it takes.

I have been struggling to get back in my writing groove for a couple of years now, and that’s not something I’ve ever had to deal with before. Until now, I’ve never known what it was like to struggle with writing. But after seeing an article that came up on one of my Google Alerts, and giving it some deeper thought, it finally sunk in on a conscious level that this dilemma has a great deal to do with who I am, physiologically

As a person with SPS (Sensory Processing Sensitivity) or more commonly referred to as HSP – (Highly Sensitive Person) –a moniker I don’t care for as the connotation is misleading–I was reminded of how crucial it is for me to be in control of my environment. I need to have my routines and rituals to comfort me, free my mind from those things that would create a vortex for the creativity to irretrievably fall into (vorTEXT…there’s a joke in there somewhere…but I’m too distracted to think about it). For me, this vortex gets created by chaos, big changes, too many people, too much to do, and missing creature comforts, mostly. This is a sure way for me to become so distracted and uneasy, that I find it almost impossible to tap into either the work ethic or the creativity. And the past few years have been a circus of chaos and change. My chi has been fucked with to the nth degree for far too long.

So I acknowledge the sound reasons why my productivity has waned, while continuing to simultaneously seek solutions and be gentle with myself. It’s a precarious balance.

As I get older, I am more fearful rather than less so. I feel the creep of Age and all that comes stuffed in its pockets. I feel my mortality. Feel how tenuous life is, how precious time is and how inextricably we are caught in the linear-ness of it. I actually get PISSED OFF when I look at the clock and see that more time has passed. How dare it? It keeps ticking away and the only thing that can stop it, is the thing I wish to avoid the most. Irony, through and through.

The article I mentioned refers to a Keats poem which I somehow missed in all those literature classes…but it did speak as if from my own head and heart….

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high grav’d books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to Nothingness do sink.

(c)Isaac Salazar

I have always had a profound fear that I will never live long enough to write all the books I wish to write. I also fear losing my great Love–the One it took me so long to find. Perhaps the only thing I fear as much is just suffering some horrible illness, but even that is connected to the fear of a premature demise. It always seems doubly tragic whenever the world loses great minds, creative people who have given us so much, and as a creative person, I feel a great responsibility to put my work out there. It’s my duty, my one great reason for existence.

Keats’ paradox in the metaphor of the ripened grain–that he is both the harvest and the harvester, is true as well for me. Or for any creative person. I am essentially a book, as well as the creator of the book. I create myself each time I go through this process. The creator and the created.

As a person with SPS, it’s easy to feel apart from the world, and having someone to love is equal parts comforting and fearful. Having that one great love also brings with it the fear of losing that one great love. The proverbial double-edged sword. The sword I hope not to fall upon in my passion to avoid that which frightens me (can you say self-fullfiling prophesy?).

 

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September 22nd, 2012 authors, creativity, Kelli Jae Baeli, Philosophy, Psychology, writing No Comments »

Bloody Hands

Every novelist should sit down at the keyboard with blood on their hands.

To know what it feels like to have been wronged and to have wronged. To be guilty and innocent.

A novelist must have truly lived her life–sucked the marrow, tended the wounds, lashed out in fear and anger, in order to write a story that speaks authentically at deeper levels; that explores human nature and the human condition in all its beauty and ugliness. A novelist must have experienced life–that visceral knowledge that comes only from having felt the range of emotions, discovered the myriad permutations of challenge and question and suffering and joy. There are indeed degrees of depth in a story and in the characters that populate its pages. We can write for entertainment, and leave it at that, or we can dig deeper. I enjoy the writing most when it marries the elements of humor and drama. When I can show characters facing challenges, while also interacting in sometimes absurd or humorous ways. I love witty repartee as much as heartfelt confessions or moments of miscalculation. You can only impart this protean story if you have been in the trenches and know what it really feels like to get your hands dirty, your brain animated, your heart broken.

How would it even be possible, I wonder, for a novelist to be absent these characteristics? Perhaps she would have to be born in a remote mountain cabin and her mother die when she was young, and then continue to live there, avoiding the natural experience that just comes from living, and interacting with the world and the other people in it…but then, this isolated being would have experienced loneliness and loss, at least. So it is, as always, a question of degrees. Creative people, et al, by their nature feel things to a more intense degree than others. Not by virtue of what they do, but by who they are, which led them to express those things in what they do. You can learn vicariously through the stories of others, through television and literature, but this is no substitute for the experiences themselves.

While I can lament the sometimes painful history of my life, I know that I would not be nearly so well-rounded, would not have much wisdom to share, and would not be able to solve as many problems so effectively, nor communicate myself with any clarity, had I not journeyed through those challenges that so pained me, yet created a stronger individual.

This all begins, of course, with childhood, and the parenting we did (or did not) receive. I was not physically abused, but I was emotionally abused and some psychologists say (one actually said to me, specifically) that often emotional abuse is more difficult. If my parents had hit me (other than the slaps I received from my mother) then I would at least know they knew I existed. But I had an overweening sense that I was invisible. My parents ignored me for the most part. They were apathetic. Their sin was a sin of omission. I was always trying to exist. Trying to be noticed and acknowledged in some positive way, and given some indication that I mattered.

But this, I recognize as the reason for my attachment to my identity markers…the activities, thoughts and expressions that make me who I am. I am defined by those things I do, those things I create…I feel invisible without those identity markers. And this brings me back full circle to the writing. I am grateful that I have something to say when I sit down to write. I am chagrined that those words stem so often from loss and disappointment, and so rarely, from a place of hope and happiness. I am a writer. It’s as much a part of me as my skin. I can say that, even amid this writer’s block I have struggled with for the last few years. I know the delicate balance of identity was overturned, and it will take righting it again completely before I can return to my usual voluminous production. This is where discipline comes in. And I have dedicated myself, now, to sitting here and writing something every day. Anything. Even if it isn’t what I would prefer, nor quite yet what it was before.

But I know that because I do have blood on my hands, I am able to, with some measure of authority, say that I know what I write is real. Because it was hard won, and there were casualties.

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September 14th, 2012 authors, creativity, humor, Kate Genet No Comments »

Dorkish Glory

Once I open my eyes in the morning, it’s pretty much guaranteed I won’t close them again. Unless I’m just ruminating inside my head, to avoid visual distraction, while still remaining awake.

The problem/blessing is my brain. It starts functioning almost in tandem with consciousness…though I suppose that’s what brains are supposed to do. But I do envy those people who can wake, have a thought, or go to the bathroom, and then just go back to sleep.

For instance, I woke the other day with this blog post in mind, thumbed it into my iPhone notes, and that should have been the end of it…but then I thought of how nice it would be to have a patch of Velcro on the head board for my iPhone, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it being lost or damaged, or having to contort myself to get it on and off the nightstand, which then led to other conveniences like having a remote control for the coffeemaker so I can turn on coffee whenever I decide I’m ready to get up and let it brew and the smell wake me. So much better than an alarm…which segued nicely into how good a cup of fresh brewed hazelnut would taste right now, and then how I’d like to share it with Kate, while we discuss what we dreamed last night, and then I started thinking about the weird Stephen-Kingish dream I had, and how it would make a good story, and then on to how I should be writing more, and cool it on the home renovations….and then my bladder was awake, and I began to become paranoid that if I went back to sleep, after an hour of thinking about everything in the world, I might be so exhausted that I would wet the bed…and….add to that the fact that Kate usually rises early to get the youngest off to school, and I miss her and want to go track her down so I can swoon at her lovely countenance, and….as you can see, there’s just no easy way to slip back into slumber.

She returned to the bedroom that morning soon after those thoughts, to find me thumbing into my iPhone, and wants to know if I’ve had a productive morning thumb-fest.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m about to solve Pi in a minute.”

I’m lucky to have her for many reasons, not the least of which is most women have simply not understood the nature of my brain. I will often discuss what’s in my head if there’s anyone nearby–and now, of course, there IS SOMEONE NEARBY every day, but this time, she gets me. Some women I’ve been with didn’t like my morning brain-purge. They have looked at me like I’m insane. Or an alien. Or an insane alien. (I drew this cartoon of that experience)…

I realize I’m a dork, and I own it.

To which Kate says, “That’s because no one will buy it from you.”

Except her, of course.

She adds, “And that’s fine with me, because you’re mine in all your dorkish glory.”

And after I laughed, I thought: that would make a good title. Dorkish Glory.

And I promptly thumbed it into my iPhone notepad.

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April 13th, 2012 authors, books, creativity, fiction, Kate Genet, New Zealand, writing No Comments »

Cosmic Giggle

It’s been a busy and eventful few months. The biggest news I have mentioned, but it only gets better. Against all odds, against all logic, I have managed to meet the woman of my dreams. She is from New Zealand (who knew that my soulmate would be hiding on the opposite side of the world? Kind of a cosmic giggle, there, though I would prefer she had been nearby when this started. Like in the same country).

But be that as it may, the more time we spend getting to know each other, the more we see this magical kindredness; this inexplicable bond that can only come from two people who are meant to be together. We have many challenges ahead, but we are both sickeningly happy about the whole thing.

She is, like me, an author, and this is how we initially crossed paths. She wrote a review on one of my books and I wrote to thank her, and we exchanged some communications, and then eventually, she send just the right email, said all the right things, and a set of possibilities was born.

Now, we have become so close, so connected. I have never felt so understood, so appreciated, so adored and so loved. We are the very cliche of a whirlwind romance, and of two people who have fallen hopelessly, irretrievable in love. We have all the usual symptoms: constant, obsessive thoughts about each other, a constant need to be together (like Velcro), physical reactions to each other that are powerful even when we are not in the same room–a mere photograph or thought can engender the same response as if we were touching.  I miss her MADLY right now. She is currently at her home in New Zealand working on that book, and will be back here in July for a while.

How did I manage to get so lucky? She is intelligent, funny, witty, genuine, sincere, ethical, sensitive, creative…and it is icing on the cake that she is also incredibly beautiful. She is feminine, just quirky enough to delight me, and I have to say that the New Zealand accent is sexy as hell. (Think Lucy Lawless/Xena). She is not just some things on my list of the Ultimate Partner, but ALL THINGS on that list. I can scarcely believe my good fortune, after a life of cursing the luck fairies. Perhaps there really is some force in the universe that evens things out. My only regret is that we didn’t meet earlier. Even one complete lifetime with her would not be enough.

As many of my readers know, in the last year I have been suffering, for the first time, with writer’s block. My last two relationships sucked the creative life-force out of me somehow.  And that was capped off with betrayal and abandonment by my best friend, when I needed her the most. I still don’t understand how any of that made sense to her, but I had to find a way to move on, as painful as it was. I had not succeeded in doing that, and was circling the drain when Kate appeared. She managed to spark my creativity again, give me back those things that make my life worth living: Hope, Love, and Purpose. I knew that if I went much longer without them, I would likely not survive. So in a very real way, she has saved my life. And she has given me so much more than that. More than I ever dreamed possible. I am so proud to call her mine. She is my soulmate.

Another perk that I would have considered a scary specter, is that I am going to New Zealand at the end of the year, and will likely move there for awhile, where she has a house. I have always been fearful of getting on a plane, even more so of going out of the country. But I would board a hundred planes to be with her everyday. We will be getting married there (where it’s LEGAL), and after things are wrapped up there, we plan to return to Colorado and get a house in the mountains.

All very romantic and idyllic, and the stuff of dreams. But this is no dream. It is very real, and we both feel that we are in each others’ marrow. It’s as if we have known each other through several lifetimes, and have been searching for each other. The placard above the Door of my Life used to read, Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Now it says Dreams really do come true. I have never felt a connection like this in my life. I adore her with every cell in my body. I finally know what it is to be truly happy….24/7. I have never felt joy like this. It has colored every other thing in my life and made it so beautiful.

Another thrilling aspect of this scenario, is that we both share the same passions–the strongest of which is the writing. We will be forming a Indie publishing business to handle all our books, soon, and are looking forward to that process.

We are also writing a book together, as well (Hanging the Moon–one that we think will be a series)…the process of which will begin in earnest after she finishes her current project, called Building Character. I managed to come up with the title for it, and she came up with a brilliant cover idea, which I rendered in anticipation of the project completion. The book is in first draft, but already, it is brilliant, and I feel it will do really well when we get it out in both print and digital form.

So, having moved to a new apartment for another year here, I will then be moving to another country–to be with my Kiwi girl, the love of my life. And the future is not just bright, but blinding–somewhat like a quasar.

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February 3rd, 2012 creativity, Highly Sensitive Person, HSP, relationships, writing No Comments »

Nietzsche, Relationships & the Creative Abyss

One of the more useful lessons I’ve learned in my life is that we often have habits about how we deal with things, based on a set of information that may not be applicable anymore.

This is why I have to do revisions. I have to re-vision something—look at it again—in order to discover whether or not the method I’m using still applies. Life is about change, and sometimes things change just enough, so that what you have always done is no longer a solution to the new situations and conditions that you are now experiencing.

I might be squishing around in the mud of a prime example, right now.

I didn’t think anyone or anything could ever steal my muse. I even have mantras and mottos based on this well-tested truth. I am “used by the muse” I say. Or “I don’t suffer from writers block, it suffers from me.” Yet, somehow I have been unable to write creatively—meaning novel writing—for a year, now.

Unheard of. Disturbing. Unacceptable. It’s quite analogous to losing the use of one arm for me.

The only clue to this burgeoning mystery, is that it coincided with the previous relationship that ended badly, (to be guilty of under-statement). I spent 9 months in a situation that tested my resistance to stress in the most unimaginable ways. Being an HSP, my brain architecture is predicated on Sensory Processing Sensitivity, and that means that I am hyper-aware of stimuli. In my environment and in my head. I see, hear, feel, taste and smell everything. It’s easy to become overwhelmed when you’re this way, and I have to say that situation was fraught with every type of challenge in every type of manifestation. I am a little amazed, frankly, that I didn’t lose my mind completely. So why wouldn’t I carry the residual effects of an experience like that? Though I often put too much credence into my own coping skills, it would be remiss of me not to recognize that I—even I—can come eye to eye with the beast of my undoing.

One result of that domestic milieu was the loss of my own individuality. I became only the sycophant for my partner’s needs and dramas, and lost touch with the importance of my own identity, my own desires and sustenance, emotionally, psychologically and physically. And this resulted in having the creative juice sucked out of me, for the duration of that relationship. I can only surmise that the effects have been more lasting than I anticipated they ever could be. And I was a willing subjugate to some degree, simply because I walked into that house of horrors under my own volition.

Why? I suspect it was because I was fearful. Fearful of being alone, fearful or growing old without a partner, fearful that I was such an oddball that should I find someone who wanted to share a life with me, I ought to dash inside before they changed their mind and closed the door in my face. What sort of absurd insecurity was that?

Nietzche said, “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

So I drew a line in the sand, and when that line was crossed, I had enough self-respect left to open that door and walk away. I soothed and reassured myself by the idea that once I was free of this creativity-killing nemesis, I would again regain my individual identity, land on the path of my usual prolific literary self, and crank out another three books in no time at all. But in the year hence, that hasn’t happened, and now I must seriously investigate the reasons for this.

I know my writer’s block is not the usual variety. I have been writing voluminously for 25 years, with no indication of it ceasing without a brain injury or getting hit by a bus. Or getting hit by a bus which results in brain injury. So, there must be some ditch in my psyche that I must figure out a way to get over or around. Perhaps I should look into that ditch and see what’s there, but Nietzsche also warned us that if you stare into the abyss it also stares back into you. Depending on which translation you use, that quote from Beyond Good and Evil, in context, is “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”(trans., Helen Zimmern).

To me, this means that close proximity to a monster, (or monstrous behavior) might mean taking a piece of that monster with you when the struggle is over. I’m not being facetious when I say that I fought with several monsters at once in that last battle. And I suppose I ran the risk of becoming exposed to the contagion of their damage, simply by virtue of sharing space and energy with them. I would like to think the armor of my ethics and the cloak of my goodness was not tainted by this viral venom—that I had, at some point, developed the antibodies to deal with any infections arising from close quarters with the duly infected.

But who knows? Perhaps I overestimated myself. Perhaps the toxins got inside me and are now feasting on the cells of creativity that used to swirl around blithely unfettered for so long. Are they swirling anymore? Or are they coagulated into clumps of diseased apathy?

What is this subjective infection, and how do I eradicate it from my afflicted creative cells?

All I can do is what I have always done. Read. About creativity, and stress and individuality, and commentary from the masters who so eloquently inform our existence. Write. About all of the above. Keep priming the pump, talking to friends and others about it, and just continuing to trudge forward. Even if it is only an essay about not being able to write. The act of putting my fingers to the keys might remind some synaptic connection to start firing again.

Again, Nietzsche said, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Unless it instead snaps my spine. Then it makes me a paraplegic.

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December 26th, 2011 books, creativity, Highly Sensitive Person, HSP, humor, Kelli Jae Baeli, Philosophy, politics, Psychology, Sensory Processing Sensitivity, writing No Comments »

Creativity, Intelligence & Depressive Realism

From a Facebook post I made, a thought-provoking subject emerged.

Jae Baeli : “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

Tina Harada likes this.

Amanda Gulledge
I frowned when I read that so I would feel more intelligent.

Candace Lynn Breaux
Is that why I am unhappy so much of the time? LOL

Jae Baeli
LOL. Amanda–you crack me up.

Candy–probably, yes.

Victoria Bard
love it…so true!

Sandi Partee
hmmm…so does that mean I’m not intelligent? Cause I’m happy as a lark! LOL!

I understand Sandi’s reply was meant lightly, but let me just address the topic of Intelligence and Happiness…

I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, no. There are types of intelligence and there are always variables that affect outcomes. So I would say the quote is a rule of thumb, not an absolute. There is enough data to suggest trending toward intelligent people being unhappy. It has to do with logic, pragmatism, conceptual relativism and other concepts both in and out of the purview of philosophy and philosophical thought. In the most common, if not colloquial sense, though, unhappy intelligent people are more fact-based in their ideation. There is, as such, a condition known as Depressive Realism, where seeking the truth of things–including ugly things–can cause hopefulness and positivity to wane when it becomes apparent that survival is indeed hard, people are indeed cruel and evil, and life is indeed unfair. It’s about rejecting the cognitive dissonance of optimism in the face of negative data.1

The human brain understands the world through patterns. When a new experience appears, the brain wants to match it with a previous experience in order to understand it. Paradoxically, that’s why there is a pervasive belief in society that creative and/or intelligent people are at least partially mentally ill. The pattern does, indeed, exist. But it can just as easily be based on a chicken-or-the-egg paradigm as any other. Does creativity come first, and then depression? Do depression-oriented people seek creative expression? Do intelligent people tend toward a need for creative expression? Clearly, creative people need expression of that creative impulse, they are compelled to communicate it. They also crave freedom and the leeway to think out of the box. Business people with regular white collar jobs, tend toward logic and pragmatism, and have to punch a clock and strive to fit in. This flies in the face of a creative psyche, and so more creative people are drawn to artistic endeavor than more sterile, clinical, restrictive lifestyles in the mainstream. So it might not be that artists are depressed, so much as depressed people fare better in the arts.

The newest research in this regard points to this connection being myth. However, perhaps it is a question of semantics. Which type of intelligence are we referring to? Creative intelligence? Spatial intelligence? Emotional intelligence? Since there are also a great number of divisions in the intellectual paradigm, it becomes a bit convoluted when making an emphatic statement one way or another. For instance, historically, we have known that prolific and gifted writers, artists and musicians have a tendency to self-destruct, either through escapism behaviors like drug use and alcoholism, or, tragically, through suicide. (And this is rather frightening, considering I am an artist, writer, and singer-songwriter. But i think i dodged that bullet pretty well). Many have sought these counter-productive coping mechanisms due to some aspect of being overwhelmed. Whether the “overwhelmedness” is due to the aspects of creative processes, or the realism that reveals ugly truths, is debatable. I think if you have a combination of realism and sensitivity, which usually goes hand in hand with highly creative individuals, you have a Molotov Cocktail of potential destruction. If you know how ugly things are, how unfair, and you are also very sensitive, this can lead to the inability to cope in a healthy way. The burden becomes too great.
Additionally, creative individuals are often alone, since acts of creation generally take place in isolation, so loneliness is a feature within the social psychology of the paradigm. And new research published in the online journal Genome Biology has shown that loneliness can actually make you ill.2 In research of 20,000 genes of both lonely and nonlonely people, the chronically lonely individuals showed 209 changes that resulted in immune changes, inflammation and adversely affected response to infection.

In relation to intelligence, it can be surmised that individuals with high IQ experience a type of ostracization from society, in that they don’t feel like a “normal” person. This can lead to depression, since feeling different and misunderstood can become a divisive aspect between an intelligent person and the less intelligent majority. Intelligent people also ruminate more, and analyze information more, so that it becomes easy to impose feelings of isolation on every situation and interaction. If you combine the conditions of being both highly intelligent and highly creative, the potion becomes a catalyst for depression on a larger scale.

Critics of this correlation among intelligence, creativity and depression will say that studies done have been largely retroactive in that they diagnose well-known creative people of antiquity after the fact. And yet, we understand so much more about symptomatology in the psychological vein than we did when those creative and intelligent people were alive. There is some merit in applying new understanding to the previously misunderstood.

While there are exceptions to the rule, such as intelligent creative people who ARE happy, this condition is ameliorated, in my understanding, by some other coping mechanism; usually, in the form of some voluntary belief system that allows the creative and intelligent individual to ignore the farther reaches of edification–those that would suggest more reason for unhappiness. As a coping mechanism, this is usually very effective, though it could not be characterized as completely entrenched in stark reality. Thus, the individuals who can live behind the cloak of voluntary self-deception are at once more capable of maintaining contentedness. And often, their ability to do so is predicated on the lack of biochemical imbalance that makes positive mindset difficult if not impossible. Yet, there will always be those who cannot accept this postulate, simply because they are not able to experience it. Those who do experience it, will be the ones who have to accept the melancholy that comes with the package: intelligence, creativity, and the propensity, genetic or otherwise, for depression. These individuals might also be unable to reach that rose-colored-glasses posture, no matter how much they would prefer it to be otherwise. This is the quagmire of what is commonly termed Intellectual Honesty. The truth hurts, and some individuals will always be able to choose that mitigation over the often harsh verities of existence.
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1this concept is addressed partly in one of my current books “Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology” Videos on that blog.
2 http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/why-loneliness-is-bad-for-you

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December 20th, 2011 authors, creativity, HSP, Psychology, relationships, Sensory Processing Sensitivity No Comments »

Why not Me?

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author, Pearl S. Buck  said,

“A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create~ so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off…They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.”

And we now know Buck was an HSP – A Highly Sensitive Person, as it is colloquially called by the pioneer in this research, Dr. Elaine Aron, PhD. Perhaps ironically, HSPs also have the ability to be more adaptable than the average person, if for no other reason than we HAVE to be to survive, and I suspect that the HSPs who aren’t able to, for whatever reason, end up being overwhelmed to the point where they can descend into isolation or even suicide. Especially if they have little support from friends or family.

But HSPs are uniquely qualified to problem-solve. They have a unique brain architecture known in the literature as Sensory Processing Sensitivity. There is a difference in what they feel, as opposed to most others in our society. If two people are being poked in the leg, and one is an HSP and one is not, the one who is not HSP will interpret that as a finger poking them, the HSP might interpret this as an ice pick. So while they might be feeling more pain, they are also more motivated to make it stop, and because HSPs tend to be analytical and creative problem solvers, they are the ones most likely to find the solution.

With the Holiday coming up this weekend, I’m having to deal with many of my least-favorite things. No, I’m not talking about shopping or relatives. I’m not doing either. I’m talking about that dreadful set of decisions I have to make, which I not only want to avoid, but wish I could just sleep through.

I am in that mode where I’m fighting off depression and sadness because the holidays are always a source of pain for me. I can’t even recall the last time I had one I enjoyed, and most of them, I’ve spent alone. It’s made worse when I look around me and so many other people I know are all glowing and happy because they have someone who loves and wants them…it makes me feel sad. I’m happy for THEM, but sad for me, because I don’t have that, and haven’t, for a very long time. Even worse, is when one of those happy people is someone you recently fell for, and they didn’t fall for you, but then went immediately into another relationship and DID fall for the other person; and you watch as they say things about that other person you only wanted them to say about you, and they post happy pictures and remove the ones that had you in them. I want to be happy for them, and I am, but it always comes with a sadness. Why couldn’t it have been me? Why can’t I ever find love? And then the tears come, and the scar on my heart gets opened up again, and I sit and bleed…wondering when I’ll find a spark of hope or inspiration again.

So it’s helpful if I can be social with the friends I do have during the holiday season, since I don’t have any family, but it’s often difficult to catch them on holidays, because they have families and established friends to do that with, and I still don’t know that many people here. I’m not going to be on the list of first chosen to spend time with. Am I having a pity party? Hell yes. I feel pitiful. It feels unfair. And I’m once again feeling terrible about it all. Thanks to the wretched holiday season.

Here’s the crux of my dilemma. As an HSP, my Sensory Processing Sensitivity means I’m easily overwhelmed and stressed by certain situations. Some of those are chaos, loud noise and too many different types of noises, crowds of strangers, all crammed together in a small space, driving and parking downtown, drunk people. Now, tell me, doesn’t that sound like your average holiday party at a pub? So I am always forced into this awkward position: I don’t want to disappoint any friend I might have who invited me, but I also don’t want to put myself through it, especially since the holidays are already really difficult for me. And sometimes being among drunk strangers just makes me feel more alone (and there’s the added insult that they are all straight people, and I’m gay–another source for feeling like an outcast–why would I want to pal around with a bunch of drunk straight men? Especially when they’re usually putting their hands all over me–or trying. I have had moments when they run the risk of pulling back a stump).  And then, there’s also the parking issue. The last two times I went downtown to socialize, I got two tickets and also got my car towed (and of course this was after I had to spend 300$ on a brake job–so 550$ later, I’m aware of my aversion to going downtown). Driving downtown is also very stressful to me because there’s too much information pelting my senses–

Turn here? [looking at GPS on iPhone]…oops BRAKE LIGHTS!  Nearly rammed someone…Crap! I need my reading glasses because I’m wearing my contacts…what’s that sign say? I can’t read it! oh, take off my reading glasses…. my hands are shaking…oops, I should have turned there…I’ll turn here OH MY GOD THAT’S A ONE-WAY STREET….[backing up]…STOP HONKING AT ME! I CAN’T have an accident….I finally get a decent vehicle and if I have a wreck, I’ll be so upset…I smell something burning…I hope it’s not something under my hood….SAME FINGER TO YOU BUDDY!….plus worrying about paying for it, and being trapped with no transportation….that screaming Serpentine-belt I need to get fixed…so embarrassing when someone hears it, need to get that fixed, but it’s going to be a couple hundred dollars to do…the noise of it is so irritating…is this where I turn? fuck!  I nearly ran over someone on the cross walk…STOP HONKING AT ME!! Did I bring my wallet? What if I have to park in the street? Do I even have change? DO I NEED CHANGE? Stop Honking at me!!

Welcome to my head. That’s a mild version, too. And only about a minute of time in that experience, but it’s what my head is doing.

Now, compare that to a low-impact or pleasant sensory experience….

Wow…the snow is so pretty and there’s so many trees….know where I’m going…it’s three blocks down on Vance, turn right  then into the free parking area. Got a good space up front….walking into the shopping district…it’s so clean, here… the air smells clean, too…yum, this Juicy Fruit gum smells and tastes so good….it feels good to walk, the rhythm of it is soothing to me…I love all the holiday lights strung on everything here…people look happy, walking along…my life is good….I smell barbeque…and popcorn…mmmm……now I’m hungry, but this place has really good food too, so I’ll just order something delicious….the theater is right there…maybe we could catch a movie matinee tomorrow…oh, that’s my favorite Xmas song…..[singing] “have yourself….a merry little christmas….” just around the corner, my friend waits and we’ll have a drink and conversation, and enjoy our connection…maybe we can sit in front of that fireplace…I love fireplaces…so cozy…I love it when she laughs and smiles…she’s a good friend, I feel lucky to have her in my life…this time, I will hug her and not let go first….I’ll just have a nice relaxing drink or two…if we’re there a while, and I drink more than two drinks, I can just walk home…this is my neighborhood, and it’s familiar and safe…what a beautiful night it is tonight….

See the difference? Having that sensory sensitivity might be bad sometimes, but it can also be extremely pleasant other times. That’s why HSPs are generally highly creative, and spend a good deal of time doing creative things–music, writing, art–all three of which I ACTUALLY DO. And HSPs also need to have some control over their environment and their schedules and their social lives., so that they can create a balance of sensory experience.

So, when I am invited into chaos, I always try to make alternate plans so I can see the people I DO know and care about; but they don’t always want to sit in a quieter place and have a cocktail and talk . I guess I really am odd, because that’s one of my favorite things to do. I want to connect with those I care about or am interested in getting to know. Can’t do that in a loud bar where you have to shout at each other, or when the goal is to get hammered.  And by the time I even GET to that location I’m stressed out. Then I can’t have more than two drinks, because I have to drive home, and I just DON’T drink and drive.  And just when I needed a drink the most. Not to mention I’m really nervous because I know that a lot of people DO DRINK AND DRIVE and I’m afraid one of them will hit me.  Call me a party-pooper, but it’s just not the sort of interaction I enjoy. Some HSPs can handle it better because they’re Extroverted HSPs. For the most part, I am an Introverted HSP. I love interaction like conversation and communion in a soothing atmosphere, watching movies, playing a game…but the more chaos and the less control I have, the more stressful it becomes for me. And I’m so weary of having to explain it, and so tired of being made to feel guilty for being who I am. Is it any wonder that it’s easy to become isolated? Or depressed? Is it any wonder why I question the reason for my existence?

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November 7th, 2011 Arts, creativity, Highly Sensitive Person, HSP, Kelli Jae Baeli, Philosophy, Psychology, Sensory Processing Sensitivity 1 Comment »

Too Much World: A Look at Highly Sensitive People

In an article in Psychology Today,* I again found comfort in the knowledge that there are others like me out there, and my particular brand of weirdness is not “damage” but an inherent brain architecture I am born with. Just like others are born with blue eyes or musical ability.
I speak of those in our species who live with Sensory Processing Sensitivity, which is the scientific term for this trait. More colloquially, it is known as HSP- Highly Sensitive Person, a collection of traits that was identified in pioneering research by Elaine Aron, PhD.
Regarding the nature of HSP’s, Aron tells us:
  • Your trait is normal. It is found in 15 to 20% of the population–too many to be a disorder, but not enough to be well understood by the majority of those around you.
  • It is innate. In fact, biologists have found it to be in most or all animals, from fruit flies and fish to dogs, cats, horses, and primates. This trait reflects a certain type of survival strategy, being observant before acting. The brains of highly sensitive persons (HSPs) actually work a little differently than others’.
  • You are more aware than others of subtleties. This is mainly because your brain processes information and reflects on it more deeply. So even if you wear glasses, for example, you see more than others by noticing more.
  • You are also more easily overwhelmed. If you notice everything, you are naturally going to be overstimulated when things are too intense, complex, chaotic, or novel for a long time.
  • This trait is not a new discovery, but it has been misunderstood. Because HSPs prefer to look before entering new situations, they are often called “shy.” But shyness is learned, not innate. In fact, 30% of HSPs are extraverts, although the trait is often mislabeled as introversion. It has also been called inhibitedness, fearfulness, or neuroticism. Some HSPs behave in these ways, but it is not innate to do so and not the basic trait.
  • Sensitivity is valued differently in different cultures. In cultures where it is not valued, HSPs tend to have low self-esteem. They are told “don’t be so sensitive” so that they feel abnormal.
So each time I find an article about it, I read it with hunger, because it serves to validate me as a worthy human being with special skills that are often misunderstood, but are also responsible for providing the world with some of the greatest, art, music and writing we have ever known. It tends to concentrate itself in creative people, or perhaps more accurately, creative people are more often than not, HSP’s.
In regard toWhy it�s hard to be a highly sensitive (HSP) introvert then, I felt I could have actually written this article–meaning, the author echoes so many of the particular idiosyncratic things about myself that are so hard to explain to others. Some of my reactions are not quite as extreme, but this has only been true in the last ten years, since finding a balance in certain areas; but overall, she describes ME in this article. Like:

“As a highly sensitive person who needs to minimize auditory stimuli, I don’t do well when another person likes having TV or loud music on all the time as background noise. I’m extremely sensitive to other people’s moods; when someone is angry, judgmental or irritated, those emotions come through my skin and into my cells, making me even more uncomfortable. Worst of all, if I don’t have my own space to retreat to and recharge, I’ll eventually have a meltdown.”

I recall one incident at my best friend’s house where I was trying so hard to hear the TV over the other stimuli in the room. My friend was talking on the phone, her ancient, diapered, toothless poodle was walking back and forth in front of me making a smack smack smack nose along with a sound that was like hoo-hoo followed by some grunt one would normally only hear an old man with dementia. Perhaps ironically, I kept turning the TV up louder because I couldn’t understand what was being said in the program I was watching. I even drew a cartoon of this event, and gave it to my friend, which to this day, she laughs about.
The reason for this is, as an HSP, I have a hard time filtering out stimuli. I hear all the sounds at once. For me, this tends to blend into one droning dirge that becomes some version of auditory torture.  Add to that the other senses of sight, smell, tactility, and include being empathic and sensing the emotions of others, and it’s a cocktail for that meltdown she mentions. Dr. Biali continues,

“As an introvert, being around other people drains me (as opposed to extraverts, who gain energy being around other people). That doesn’t mean I don’t like being with others, in fact I love it – but I can only do it for so long before I have to go into my cave and refuel.”

I am this way as well, but it does depend primarily on who those people are. If they are people I know well, who aren’t energy-vampires, then I absolutely ADORE being with them. But even so, I do need recovery time after a highly social event. It’s a precarious and delicate balance and I have had to learn to read myself well, and know when it’s time for me to make my exit, curl up on the sofa in front of the fireplace with a book or magazine, or watch TV. I don’t necessarily have to have silence to recharge. I just have to have control over the content and do something that relaxes me. Often, the best thing for me is to watch a program I enjoy, or journal or paint a picture, or get out the clay and sculpt something.
Biali also nails it with her comments about phones….

“I don’t like being on the phone. The only exception is talking to my husband while we’re apart, or someone else who I’m so similar to that there’s an effortless endless flow of conversation. I dislike awkward silences or pressure to come up with fascinating conversation topics, even with people I know well…What they don’t realize is that I really don’t call almost anyone “just to chat”, unless I have a specific reason that I need to to talk to them – it’s not personal, and I keep asking Armando to explain that to them! Email and Facebook are completely different, I love to communicate that way…”

I can talk for hours with my best friend, but she knows me so well and our conversations are effortless and they flow and they are full of interesting and entertaining things. I do, however always have to have a headset or Bluetooth, because I can’t bear the sensation of being trapped by the phone. It took a while for me to realize that part of my problem with being on the phone was because it was usually plugged into a wall, and I didn’t have my hands free, either, and couldn’t move around. Now, with cell phones, and headsets and blue tooth, I can clean house, or go refill coffee or whatever, while talking, so I don’t feel trapped. I also prefer emails and Facebook and texts most of the time, because I have complete control over that, and it’s not a demand, like a ringing phone can be. Though my first choice will always be a one-on-one interaction with someone whose company I enjoy.Curiously, I am also weird about knocks on the door, or the doorbell. I actually have a stress-response to that, to include a pounding heart and a little trouble breathing, because it’s a sudden, unexpected sound. And it also represents a demand; someone trying to get in, and I don’t know who at that moment…and I have tragic fantasies about it being a robber or a rapist. This is why (since i live alone) I always answer the door with my gun behind my back, if I don’t know the person knocking or ringing.

“As an HSP, I also pick up all kinds of subtleties in people’s voices or comments that make me uncomfortable if they have personal (negative) significance. This intuitive sensitivity works really well when I work as a personal coach over the phone, as I’m able to pick up what’s behind a client’s words and use it to unblock them or help them move forward, but in personal conversations it can be too much information.”

I have the same experience, here, as well. I prefer one-on-one communication, because I have a better chance of picking up on body language and visual cues, so that it’s easier to discern meaning accurately. And even then, if I sense any negativity directed at me, personally, it can feel very much like a wound. That old childhood chant, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me” just simply isn’t true for me as an HSP. Words do just as much harm to me as a physical assault.

In an article by Dr. Aron, she quotes Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, on the creative mind. I believe that Buck was, herself, an HSP, which is easily seen by her understanding of how we think and feel:

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off…They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.”

That is the very quintessence of what it’s like to be an HSP. There will, of course, be variants within any group, because humans are highly individual and influenced by their surroundings and experiences and various other biological and genetic precursors and tendencies, but overall, I feel it is a trait that can be identified quite readily.I believe also, that many, of not most, of the greatest, most influential creative minds throughout history, have been HSP’s. It would explain the propensity toward depression, isolation, oddness but also their ability to zero in on the subtleties of our existence, and create artful representations of what they see and feel below the surface of things. Those creative people for whom we have personal detail are often the ones who could be identified retrospectively as HSP’s. Before I knew about this particular trait, I wrote an article which I posted on this blog, that touches on many of these correlations, called Intelligence, Creativity & Depressive Realism.

The list of notable and historical HSP’s is impressive, and it does tend to draw the highly sensitive people out of the ranks of oddity, and into the light of human contribution. People like:

Steven Spielberg, Dalai Lama, Harry S. Truman, Martin Luther King, Leonardo Da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keefe, John Coltrane,  Beethoven, Mozart, Morrissey, Tori Amos, Bjork, Jewel, Alanis Morissette, Leonard Cohen,  Kurt Cobain, Michael Stipe, Chris Isaak, Neil Finn, John Lennon, Sir Thomas Moore, E.E. Cummings, Hermann Hesse, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsburg, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Woody Allen, Judy Garland, Jim Carey, Mira Sorvino, Adrien Brody, Melanie Griffith, Kim Basinger, Anthony Hopkins, Drew Barrymore, Glenn Close, Mr. Rogers, Andy Kaufman, Jon Favreau, Greta Garbo, Joaquin Phoenix, Elijah Wood, Kevin Kline, David Hyde Pierce, Anton Chekhov, James Baldwin, Kahlil Gibran, DH Lawrence, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Tennessee Williams, Janis Joplin, Billie Holliday, Moby, Natalie Merchant, Bob Dylan, Franz Kafka, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Sarah McLaughlin, Celine Dion, Enya, Neil Young, Janis Ian, Picasso, Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt….
With only a partial list like that, it’s easy to see the contributions that HSP’s have made in this world. And thus, more difficult to dismiss them as different, introverted, eccentric, crazy, or in the pejorative sense, too sensitive. Being an unwitting HSP is most likely the cause of many tragic stories in the creative community, and I believe that many of those creatives who escape through drugs and alcohol and extreme behavior, or who attempt or commit suicide are probably HSP’s, simply because they can be so easily overwhelmed, and without healthy coping skills to live in this world, it becomes too much for them.

I have a foot in many creative things. I am an author (I write in 14 genres, but love writing books, and have authored 24 of them to date), an artist (painting, sculpting, pottery, mixed media, photography ), singer-songwriter (over 200 songwriting credits and formerly co-founder and member of two bands). If being HSP means expressing myself creatively, I am definitely a prime example. But long ago, I realized that  this world would kill me, if I didn’t figure out how to exist here within the parameters of who I am. In my younger years, I tested almost exclusively right-brain dominate. So I developed my left-brain over many years, and even elevated my IQ. (For a long time it was believed that you are born with a certain IQ and it couldn’t be changed, but now, with all the research into the neuroplasticity of the brain, we know that intelligence can indeed be increased. I took myself from a 120 IQ to 149). I learned about philosophy and logic and disjunctive reasoning, so that today, I test whole-brain. And I think it’s what saved me. This did not suffocate my creativity, however. In fact, it served to inform and expand this area. But it comes with its own sets of issues. For instance, I can feel one way emotionally, but also feel another way intellectually.  While this can often be a battle of wills inside my mind, and make me feel I have two personalities, overall, it serves to temper me; it offers me some balance that keeps me from falling into the sensitivity void.  It didn’t make me any less of an HSP. It just allowed me to survive. It’s still a challenge to be who I am. As I have said before, Am I too much for the world, or is the world too much for me?

 *If you think you might be an HSP, take the self-test to find out.
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[1] Why it�s hard to be a highly sensitive (HSP) introvert. Highly sensitive (HSP) introverts – misperceived by a noisy extraverted world. Published on August 23, 2010 by Dr. Susan Biali, M.D. in Prescriptions for Life

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September 15th, 2011 creativity, Highly Sensitive Person, HSP, Psychology No Comments »

Creativity, Intelligence & Depressive Realism

 From a Facebook post i made, a thought-provoking subject emerged.

 Jae Baeli : “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

Tina Harada likes this.

Amanda Gulledge
I frowned when I read that so I would feel more intelligent.

Candace Lynn Breaux
Is that why I am unhappy so much of the time? LOL

Jae Baeli
LOL. Amanda–you crack me up.Candy–probably, yes.

Victoria Bard
love it…so true!

Sandi Partee
hmmm…so does that mean I’m not intelligent? Cause I’m happy as a lark! LOL!

I understand Sandi’s reply was meant lightly, but let me just address the topic of Intelligence and Happiness…

I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, no. There are types of intelligence and there are always variables that affect outcomes. So I would say the quote is a rule of thumb, not an absolute. There is enough data to suggest trending toward intelligent people being unhappy. It has to do with logic, pragmatism, conceptual relativism and other concepts both in and out of the purview of philosophy and philosophical thought. In the most common, if not colloquial sense, though, unhappy intelligent people are more fact-based in their ideation. There is, as such, a condition known as Depressive Realism, where seeking the truth of things–including ugly things–can cause hopefulness and positivity to wane when it becomes apparent that survival is indeed hard, people are indeed cruel and evil, and life is indeed unfair. It’s about rejecting the cognitive dissonance of optimism in the face of negative data.1

The human brain understands the world through patterns. When a new experience appears, the brain wants to match it with a previous experience in order to understand it. Paradoxically, that’s why there is a pervasive belief in society that creative and/or intelligent people are at least partially mentally ill. The pattern does, indeed, exist. But it can just as easily be based on a chicken-or-the-egg paradigm as any other. Does creativity come first, and then depression? Do depression-oriented people seek creative expression? Do intelligent people tend toward a need for creative expression? Clearly, creative people need expression of that creative impulse, they are compelled to communicate it. They also crave freedom and the leeway to think out of the box. Business people with regular white collar jobs, tend toward logic and pragmatism, and have to punch a clock and strive to fit in. This flies in the face of a creative psyche, and so more creative people are drawn to artistic endeavor than more sterile, clinical, restrictive lifestyles in the mainstream. So it might not be that artists are depressed, so much as depressed people fare better in the arts.

The newest research in this regard points to this connection being myth. However, perhaps it is a question of semantics. Which type of intelligence are we referring to? Creative intelligence? Spatial intelligence? Emotional intelligence? Since there are also a great number of divisions in the intellectual paradigm, it becomes a bit convoluted when making an emphatic statement one way or another. For instance, historically, we have known that prolific and gifted writers, artists and musicians have a tendency to self-destruct, either through escapism behaviors like drug use and alcoholism, or, tragically, through suicide. (And this is rather frightening, considering I am an artist, writer, and singer-songwriter. But i think i dodged that bullet pretty well). Many have sought these counter-productive coping mechanisms due to some aspect of being overwhelmed. Whether the “overwhelmedness” is due to the aspects of creative processes, or the realism that reveals ugly truths, is debatable. I think if you have a combination of realism and sensitivity, which usually goes hand in hand with highly creative individuals, you have a Molotov Cocktail of potential destruction. If you know how ugly things are, how unfair, and you are also very sensitive, this can lead to the inability to cope in a healthy way. The burden becomes too great.
Additionally, creative individuals are often alone, since acts of creation generally take place in isolation, so loneliness is a feature within the social psychology of the paradigm. And new research published in the online journal Genome Biology has shown that loneliness can actually make you ill.2  In research of 20,000 genes of both lonely and nonlonely people, the chronically lonely individuals showed 209 changes that resulted in immune changes, inflammation and adversely affected response to infection.

In relation to intelligence, it can be surmised that individuals with high IQ experience a type of ostracization from society, in that they don’t feel like a “normal” person. This can lead to depression, since feeling different and misunderstood can become a divisive aspect between an intelligent person and the less intelligent majority. Intelligent people also ruminate more, and analyze information more, so that it becomes easy to impose feelings of isolation on every situation and interaction. If you combine the conditions of being both highly intelligent and highly creative, the potion becomes a catalyst for depression on a larger scale.

Critics of this correlation among intelligence, creativity and depression will say that studies done  have been largely retroactive in that they diagnose well-known creative people of antiquity after the fact. And yet, we understand so much more about symptomatology in the psychological vein than we did when those creative and intelligent people were alive. There is some merit in applying new understanding to the previously misunderstood.

While there are exceptions to the rule, such as intelligent creative people who ARE happy, this condition is ameliorated, in my understanding, by some other coping mechanism; usually, in the form of some voluntary belief system that allows the creative and intelligent individual to ignore the farther reaches of edification–those that would suggest more reason for unhappiness. As a coping mechanism, this is usually very effective, though it could not be characterized as completely entrenched in stark reality. Thus, the individuals who can live behind the cloak of voluntary self-deception are at once more capable of maintaining contentedness. And often, their ability to do so is predicated on the lack of biochemical imbalance that makes positive mindset difficult if not impossible. Yet, there will always be those who cannot accept this postulate, simply because they are not able to experience it. Those who do experience it, will be the ones who have to accept the melancholy that comes with the package: intelligence, creativity, and the propensity, genetic or otherwise, for depression. These individuals might also be unable to reach that rose-colored-glasses posture, no matter how much they would prefer it to be otherwise. This is the quagmire of what is commonly termed Intellectual Honesty. The truth hurts, and some individuals will always be able to choose that mitigation over the often harsh verities of existence.
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1this concept is addressed partly in one of my current books “Supernatural Hypocrisy: The Cognitive Dissonance of a God Cosmology” Videos on that blog.
2 http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jan/why-loneliness-is-bad-for-you

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June 4th, 2011 creativity 2 Comments »

Tell Me About Yourself


When I’m single, and meeting new women, dating and searching for that special someone who will fit harmoniously into my life, I often come across women who say “Tell me about yourself.”

I hate that question.

Not because i can’t talk about myself, or am not self-actualized enough to be able to communicate my identity, but because it’s like standing in a library and someone asking, “What’s in all those books?”

I usually have the urge to refer them to my books, or blogs, or music or art.

Then they say, “I don’t want to look at your art, or listen to your music, or read your books or blogs, I want to get to know you on a real level…” 

What they fail to understand is that anyone can get to know me almost utterly, through my creative outlets, and probably in a more detailed fashion, than they could ever imagine. My real level is manifested in what I create.

I put so much of myself into my music and art and writing. Even when it’s difficult, or embarrassing, or unpleasant, or painful. This is what I mean when I say I am HONEST. Honesty is not always a ride on a pony. But honesty has its own rewards; some of which are, I don’t ever have to worry about contradicting myself, or apologizing for who I am, nor about feeling guilty, or being accused of deceit.
So often, when faced with probing questions about myself, I say, “Just listen to that song, or read that blog, or just read this or that book.” –Because after going through the process of shoveling and pick-axing my way down deep and unearthing myself so completely, it’s a source of dread and even tedium to have to relate it all again, when I’ve already plumbed the depths of my psyche and shared it in the artistic, written or musical form.

This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy long, meaningful conversations. It just means there is such a legion of data in my head and heart, that I never know which things to select for sharing with an inquisitive new friend. It’s always helpful if they can ask me something specific. Not “What are your politics?” but “What are your thoughts about immigration?” Not, “What do you think about spirituality and religion?” but “What do you believe in, and what’s important to you?” 

Because if they ask me something general, my first thought is well, that depends...and then my brain explodes with a thousand different possible responses, and I don’t know which one to pick. And then I come off like someone who has far too much to say about far too many things, and their eyes glaze over, and they are then just as overwhelmed as I was when they asked that question.

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February 20th, 2010 books, creativity, fiction, Kelli Jae Baeli, writing No Comments »

The DNA of DNA

After completing a novel, I always arrive in this abstract place where I can’t focus on anything right away. Some might construe this to be a type of recovery, a vacation from thinking; but in my case that wouldn’t be accurate. I am unfamiliar with the experience of not thinking. And Recovery implies that something has been negatively altered in you. Writing always alters me in a positive way.

What happens for me, is more like this: I have created something wonderful that took a long time, was sometimes difficult and even painful, but which has produced something beautiful. It’s very much like childbirth. But then, there is the afterbirth (pardon the image). But there is a big mess to clean up. Things need to be wiped down, put back where they go and the room tidied up again. Except all this takes place in my head.

So I ruminate about that book, and several others, think about how it felt, wonder what might be the next thing I do from scratch, consider the possibilities of marketing, that I might want to read someone else’s book now, and generally organize the scattered thoughts in my head into a functioning unit again. Once that happens, I can begin anew, to create something else.

~ DNA ~

At the heart of any novel, is the stuff of life. The details are what gives it its uniqueness. Often, the hardest parts about writing a full-length novel are those maddening details.

In my most recently completed book, Also Known As DNA, there was another level, in that it was a sequel. These were characters who already existed in my fictional world. I had to take them through another series of challenges, but also keep track of the facts that existed in the first book, to make sure it remained consistent in the second one. When you write a sequel, there is an amazing amount of detail that has to be recalled or accessed. You have to juggle those details together, and yet be able to separate them and not confuse them with each other.

There is also the usual attention to detail in the plot and character developments that are unfolding in the book you’re writing.
Examples:

  • That destroyed or lost cell phone in one chapter, cannot magically appear five chapters later.
  • The camera someone has cannot have magically been transported into the hands of another character.They have to have made the exchange at some point.
  • That character who had three guns–they have to be accounted for later, when guns are being used.
  • That character could not have been at Point A, when she was just at Point B a few minutes ago.
There are other myriad considerations as well. One of them has to do with the psychology of characters. For instance, the villains. There’s a hair-thin line between creating sympathy for a character and creating understanding, while still loathing them. I was worried about that one. I wanted to show a theme throughout the story–how everyone can have bad parents and some people will deal with it well, and some people will become psychos, and this result depends on what’s organically/ psychologically in place in that person, to begin with.

I don’t want to excuse the bad behavior–but I do still explain how, if they were already unstable–experiences can be responded to understandably, but still in a messed up way –(in Character A) or the experiences distorted until the lie becomes the truth in their minds (in character B).

Kahlil Gibran said, “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” My friend Emily C Jones said, “the rest of the quote is And the remaining 98% of sufferers are either dead or traumatized – hard to tell which is which from the massive amounts of scarring.
[laughing] Fair enough.

~ HOW I BEGIN ~

When writing a new book, I will often start with whatever scene inspired me to write it in the first place. Then I will begin to write dialogue between the characters until I get a feel for them (or in the case of this sequel, until the reader gets a feel for them, since I already understand who they are. New characters, excepted). The story becomes largely a running dialogue, with very little description, unless it’s some scene that comes to me later. I believe wholeheartedly in the ability of characters to tell you their story. I am often as surprised as a reader would be when a character says something. But what they choose to say, often guides the plot.

I will also use bits and pieces of notes I’ve taken about people and places, and filed away. One of these scenes I used in this book. I shared it with another writer-friend at the time i wrote that odd scene, and she said,”Who is that guy and why is he chasing her?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, what’s the point of her climbing through that window?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered.
“Then how do you know what you’re writing about?”
“I don’t.”
That’s the point. I knew that scene would be useful at some point in one of my books.

I write organically, and I want to experience the story as it unfolds, so that I can enjoy it just as a reader would. That way, I have a clear idea of how it might affect the reader, by knowing how it is affecting me. And this method also insures that I will never tire of the process, or get bored with the story because I don’t really know what’s going to happen, or where it’s all going to end. This doesn’t mean i don’t clean it up and make everything work in concert later, but I just save that for one of the editing passes.

On this book, I initially jumped ahead to a halfway point and wrote a few chapters and then ahead again, to the end. I actually got to the end of the book. I usually don’t like that, because, as I said, I don’t want to know what happens that quickly (though, having finished the book, the ending took place elsewhere and was slightly different, so it was still quite satisfying, even though i had an idea of what would happen. For this story, it was more about the journey than the end).

Writing to the end gave me only around 100 pages, and naturally that’s not enough to make it a book–and it’s tempting to say “maybe this is just a long story…or at best, a novella.” But I know from experience that it only indicates I have not fleshed it out enough, haven’t done the hard work. The story will fill out after I find all the right components to make that happen. I research and I use details about places and people that are largely authentic, as much as possible. In those researched details, more ideas usually emerge. For instance, I found a location, that quite by accident, had the same name as a meaningful word in the previous book. What I call a Happy Accident. And I used it, allowing the character to notice that synchronicity. I wrote about using Google maps when I write my books. There’s a reason for that. I can get all the details I need for moving my characters around, and in the process, I gain grist for the creative mill. I trust that process because I’ve done it so many times.

So–the initial problem, after that first 100 pages, was that the first-person point of view was limiting the story. Somehow it worked for the first book, but this one seemed different. I still did not want to lose that POV, though, because it was such a integral part of the first book–that voice. That main character. So I used first-person with that main character, and when I needed to show the other characters without her in the scene, I would tell their story in third person omniscient, always cuing the reader by using a different chapter each time I did that. That opened the story up immensely, and solved the problem.

Then, I had to start looking for several things:

  • were there enough characters to fill out the story? Did I need to add a few new ones? Yes. And I did.
  • where are the gaps of time? When that character spoke of the two weeks that had gone by, I had to ask, what did she do during that time?
  • How did the new characters interact with the main character, and what’s their backstory?
  • Can there be an unexpected alliance between two characters? What’s that dynamic like?
  • are there any Happy Accidents in the text just straining to be explored?

This is, of course, not the complete picture of what goes on in the process, but it is a portion of it.

~ AFTERGLOW ~
So, after I have completed a book, I am beset with a sensation of afterglow. I feel I have just had sex. Good sex. So far, I’ve copulated 15 times.

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March 13th, 2008 Arts, authors, creativity, fiction, humor, Kelli Jae Baeli, Philosophy, politics, writing 2 Comments »

My Birthday Legacy Rumination


Today is my birthday. I’ll be 44. (yes, i will! shut up!).
And since today is my birthday, I thought I’d do the obligatory ruminations. Who, what, where, when, and why…and how.WHO: My big three identity markers are, Author, Artist, Singer-Songwriter. I’m also an avid blogger, a therapeutic touchist, a webmaster, an armchair philosopher, and….I like cheese.


WHAT: Fiction and non-fiction–I have 12 books in print with about 5 more available (I hope) by the end of this year. I like to paint, and do sculpture and pottery. I record CD’s of my original music in my paltry home-studio, and give them away to those who want them, and some who don’t. I am in the process of migrating my previous blog here to Blogspot/Blogger, and continue to write new blogs.
The therapeutic touching thing I don’t do as often, partly because i don’t have a girlfriend right now. (Any woman want me to massage warm oil all over you while you lie naked and trusting under a flannel sheet?)

And as soon as I get my kiln fixed, I’ll be doing sculpture and pottery again. I’ve been saying that for a year. Something always gets in the way of that expense. Like…groceries, dammit.

WHERE: Everything I do, I do at home. Except Going out. That would be…um… not at home. But I spend an unhealthy amount of time by myself. Come over. We’ll have some cheap blackberry merlot. And maybe if you’re female and really hot, I’ll therapeutically touch you.

WHEN: From the minute I wake, until my head is lolling into the keyboard, and I simply CAN’T make a higher score in that nightly damn Kyodai Mah Jongg game anymore.
WHY: why does anyone do anything? Two reasons, usually. Because they have to, or because they want to. If you’re lucky (Like me) you get to do only what you want to. Although I don’t want to pay bills, but I still have to. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to do what I want to every day because it’s hard to have stability when you live in your car. So while I don’t WANT to do that, I HAVE to. (See? I have it rough, too). So bills. Necessary evil. Other than that, I’m pretty lucky. I get to do what I love everyday. Now if I could just figure out how to find a vampire so I can offer my one-year-older neck to her lovely fangs, and thus live forever… Christ on a cracker! I’d get SO MUCH DONE.
HOW: On a wing and a prayer (though I don’t pray, unless something life-threatening is happening and I need to hedge my bets–so that’s out); okay, HOW is with great determination. And skill. And amid way too many conversations with my cats.
So yes, I’m thankful that I’m here, and by extension, that I was BORN. (Though i wasn’t born with extensions). Today commemorates that day. (Hazah! Hazah!). It’s a time to look back on all I’ve accomplished, and get pissy about the things I haven’t. I am often asked, with a measured degree of disdain, why I put so much of myself on the Internet. It’s dangerous, they say. It’s…maybe even…vain? No. Nothing so dramatic as that. My take on it is this: I must leave something behind that can be accessed by anyone who wishes to, or for anyone who is seeking some kindred, some validation, some encouragement, a pretty song, an enjoyable read, a thought-provoking or sensual piece of art, or a good laugh that sends Dr. Pepper through the nose. I put it all out there because it is my legacy.
The always inane and vacuous George W. Bush said, “There’s no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy, but I’ll never see it.” He’s wrong. And stupid. His legacy as the WORST PRESIDENT IN HISTORY will live on in the poverty and oppression of billions of people, (and many others in other countries)….but i don’t want to talk about Dubya on my birthday. Stop ruining it, you gravy-sucking pig! (Here, hold this.) Anyway…I tried to find a more inspiring quote about a legacy, but there were few to be had. I suspect because those who might have recorded this bit of wisdom, found that they were already dead. And dead people don’t jot down pithy quotations about having a legacy; even if you’re one of those gifted few who “see dead people.”

So i guess I’ll never know what mine is, really. I just suspect it might have something to do with what I do every day. And I hope my legacy isn’t posthumous. I’d like to know what it is before i croak.

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October 8th, 2007 creativity No Comments »

Put THAT in Your Pipe

What with all the new age channeling going on, (allowing non-physical entities to speak through them) I’ve had to decide how I feel about it. . .because, you know, there can be nothing in my experience left misunderstood. . .

Aside from the Channels who are obvious charlatans, I believe there are some who are authentic (a truth that crosses over many boundaries and into many situations). In my endeavors to understand this phenomenon, I’ve had to take the beliefs I had in place and add any new beliefs I’ve come to; and I’ve come to this:

I am a channel, too. But I don’t channel Abraham or Ramtha, The Enlightened One. I channel my Muse. Each time I embark upon a creative endeavor, I channel. Each time I have an inspiration, I channel. Each time I understand something on a profound level, figure out one of life’s great mysteries, or make a decision at the grocery about “paper or plastic,” I channel. (okay, the last one was added for levity, I don’t consider my choice of grocery bags an enlightened epiphany. . .)

But I channel. And you channel. And everyone CAN channel.

When I set about creating the things I createwhether in the area of music, art, or writing, or giving a massage, or helping a friend figure some conundrum out, I am tapping in to that channel that we all have as spiritual beings, having a human experience. When I get any inspiration, it comes from SOMEWHERE. Call it inspiration or Muse or non-physical energy or collective consciousness . . . it comes from higher selffrom collective unconscious, from God.

Abraham or Ramtha or just smartness from a human brain or mind. . .are all pulled from the same Source. It is often referred to, as a matter of fact, as “Source.” The only difference is its manifestation; how the information presents itself. If someone is seeking and meditating, and some other consciousness appears and introduces itself or names itself, that is Source. If someone is seeking and meditating, and has the experience of epiphany, that is also source. There really is no fundamental difference, other than how it manifests itself, and in what form.

For instance, I might take a lump of clay on a potter’s wheel, and make a large vase or I might also make a plate; it really depends on what the inspiration isit’s still the same clay, taking different forms. It’s still Source.

If this is so, then we don’t need those “middle-men”those ‘tweeners who try to make us believe that we can have nothing of God or higher consciousness without them. In other words, a priest is not a conduit to God. WE are the conduit to God. We are, in a very real sense, GOD. We all come from the same Source, the same essence, and so we are all portions of that Source, manifested in physical form, in a particular time-space continuum.

Put THAT in your pipe, and smoke it.

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August 22nd, 2007 creativity No Comments »

My Muse Still Breathes

 

All authors get to a point in their writing life, where they feel they have plumbed the depths of the well the Muse provides, and begin to doubt that they have anything else to offer. This is usually a case of stagnation within the milieu of new experience. Without new input, new contrasts in our day to day lives, we can only reiterate what we have already learned.

I had reached this point a few weeks ago. I feared that the 12 books I have in print and the 2 I’m almost finished with, were to be the last. I couldn’t imagine having another fresh idea, even though I had just completed an entirely fresh novel from start to finish (Baggage). This book wasn’t based on anyone I knew, and it had no personal experiences in it. I want to have an equal number of mainstream books as I do “gay” ones, to increase my chances of finding a mainstream publisher or agent.

So I’ve been trying to break away from the need to write about only gay characters. I also needed to write without the temptation of including numerous sex scenes. It can sometimes be a cop-out to do that. So Baggage had no Gay characters, none of them inspired by anyone I knew, including myself, no scenes that were based on something that happened to me or anyone else in my life. It was entirely new. So I was pleased to have accomplished that goal.

But then, as I was about to complete the other few I had not finished, it occurred to me that I had no more tidbits after that, in my writing files, from whence to nurture and develop a new story. I spent so many years writing portions of books and then putting them away, that I had plenty to work with.

The day came when I was nearing completion of all those old projects, and was faced with the impending task of creating something entirely new.

As the days wore on, I still couldn’t think of anything, still couldn’t find inspiration that would give me the new book. So I let go of it. Not for long, just a few days, and asked my subconscious mind each night to provide something in my sleep. Dreams have always been a rich source of material for me. From the odd short story, The House of Escher, (included in the collection,Brainmatter) to any number of springboard scenarios that became various novels, my dreaming mind could always serve up something new and interesting.

I knew I needed to focus on other things and other people, and try to break out of my routine for awhile. I created about 7 new paintings, (Shown on left) having been inspired by the work of Russian artist, Wassily Kandinski, and watched a lot of TV and movies, and read about 3 new Koontz novels, since he has been such a mentor to me. I have studied his writing for a long time, because I wanted to understand how he managed to provide so much reading pleasure. I have actually figured out how he accomplished this on many levels, and that has been helpful to my writing in many ways. I hoped that reading him again, and getting all this other input, would stir something up.

It did.

My best friend and I had been talking about the concept of Walk-ins, and I had read some material about it out of curiosity. Then, after having headaches everyday lately, and some blurred vision, I had a tragic fantasy that my eyesight might be in danger. That led me to consider that I hadn’t ever written about a blind character.

After that, I had this image in one of my dreams, of a woman standing on a precipice. She is shot in the shoulder and falls into the void. That was not a dream that was much fun to wake up from, since the woman was myself. While I suspect it was some subconscious fear that my love life has been killed by the lack of hope, and I feel I am about to descend into some romantic void, I ignored this in favor of using it for fodder.

Then, I used a method that had worked for me before: taking previous seedlings of unrelated ideas and putting them together to see what happened. It’s kind of like creative cooking. You know that certain things go together, but then you throw in a few things to see if it tastes different or better.

From this collection of disparate ideas, my muse baked me something new.

I now have the seedlings for a new book, and am working on it along with completing the two novellas in progress. (Those–Quintessence and Another Justice–should be available in November). The new book, is as yet untitled, but that always reveals itself in the writing, unless I have begun with the title itself.

The blurb I have so far, concerning what the book is to be about, is:

“A non-physical walk-in soul makes an agreement with another incarnated soul to take over her body. The Walk-in, perhaps too fearless, and too hungry for the pleasures of the flesh, discovers she has inherited the life of a Mormon goody-two-shoes who is live-in caregiver for two men–one blind, the other wheelchair bound.

And someone is trying to kill her.”

My Muse still breathes.

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November 18th, 2005 creativity, Entertainment, humor, relationships, writing No Comments »

Insomnia, Sex, Guilt & MahJongg

There are several things that have kept me from writing lately. So I thought the only way I was going to get back to writing, was to write about what’s been keeping me from writing.

One is a good reason that most people wish they had. I’ve been having lots of sex. I’m in the throes of a new relationship and everything is fresh and exciting. And the sex just happens to be really great, and that makes me want to continue to have it–especially since my self-imposed two year celibacy, where my only lover had a high and low switch and plugged into the wall. But now our hormones have calmed a bit. Well mine has. Hers is still uncannily like those of a 19 year old boy. I fear she has testosterone poisoning. She would throw me down at least five times a day if I let her. But I’m satisfied, and so I don’t need to be thrown down quite that often. My hormones, I suppose fall into the “normal” range. I only require sex an average of 5 times a week. (wink wink). I think it’s good to nurture the other aspects of a relationship, and if you’re just doing the nasty all the time, you miss out on getting to know someone, heart and soul. And it makes it exciting if you wait a while between the slap and tickle sessions. My current partner assures me that it feels just as good no matter how many times a day I do it. Ironically, not too long ago, I was wishing that I had more than zero sex life. I won’t say “be careful what you wish for” because that implies that I’m suffering some sort of punishment, when really I am basking in the sincere and passionate favors of an attentive lover. I shall not for an instant insinuate that this is a bad thing.

Another reason why I have been remiss with my literary endeavors, is directly due to insomnia and indirectly to guilt and obligation. I have been going through my usual phase of sleeplessness, and this leads to sleeping all day. When she comes home from work, I feel it is my duty (as well as my pleasure) to spend time with her. So when I am waking up, she is returning home and thinking about passing out from exhaustion right after I serve dinner. That means I’m wide awake, and ready to write and do other various and sundry things, to include, but not limited to moving furniture around, creating a painting, or filing that stack of papers that have accumulated on my desk. I’ve tried taking that prescription sleep-aid my doctor gave me, but all that does is make me sleepy for 14 hours after I take it. But if I don’t take it, I don’t sleep. I’ve tried the more holistic solutions of warm milk, herbal tea, and such-even alcohol. But none of them make me go to sleep. Some have sent me to bed long enough to lie there and think about the bazillion things I could be doing, but none of them deliver me into the loving arms of the Sandman.

The other culprit is MahJongg. That maddeningly addictive tile matching game from the Orient that has me glued to my computer monitor-click-swish-click-swish-until my eyes feel like they are made of bamboo. My theory on this addiction is that the game appeals to my great need to make order from chaos. And what could be more orderly than matching up symbols and clearing a page?

Because of this odd schedule, I am also off my schedule for taking my thyroid meds, and that can lead to all kinds of nasty side effects like. . . lethargy in the daytime, brittle nails, dry skin, easy bruising, poor vision and the loss of large amounts of hair (although, I have yet to see any hair fall off my legs. . .i suspect it’s some cruel ironic joke from the Universe that the hair I wish would fall out, never does).

All of these things have resulted in a guilty, sleepy, hair-losing lump of nocturnal protoplasm.

So, to recap: insomnia, sex, guilt, and MahJongg. Heed well, my children. These are instruments of the devil.

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