August 24, 2006

FEY FOLK AND THE MAGIC OF SUCCESS

My Horoscope for the coming week: - (Cancer June 21-July 22)

“Throughout history there have been secret schools that don’t advertise their existence. To enroll, students must either be invited or else stumble on them by chance. In post-Renaissance Europe, for example, Rosicrucian mystery schools taught an esoteric form of Christianity at odds with the Church. Seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell and his cohorts had their underground School of the Night, and ancient Greek poet Sappho stealthily gathered young women at her Moisopholon, “House of the Muses.” In recent years the Sexy Bratty Genius School has periodically convened classes at 3 a.m. under a highway overpass in San Francisco. According to my reading of the current omens, Cancerian, you’re close to making contact with a similar source of teaching. Whether you end up actually matriculating depends on how you answer the question, “Do you want to learn about things you’ve considered impossible?”

Well, yeah :).

Do you think I can learn how to attract faerie dust? Because according to Tess Gerritsen, that’s what it takes to hit the pinnacle of writing success.

“Yes,” she said in a blog post a while back, “there are some things you as a writer can do to help along your success. You have to write a good book. Then you make sure you hook up with a great agent …….you insist on a great cover and a great title. You make yourself available for media. You plow into the publicity circuit with a can-do attitude. You try to be NICE to people ….. But then something else takes over, something that’s totally out of your control …

“You get sprinkled with some fairy dust. You can’t ask for it. The fairies have to decide you’re the chosen one. Your book release is scheduled during a week when no blockbusters are out. Or Oprah reads it on vacation. Or the zeitgeist is just quivering for a book of your subject matter. Or your name is Dan Brown. Whatever the reasons, the fairies have decided you are THE ONE. Your book hits the bestseller list while other equally well written books don’t. Are you better than them? Maybe. But what you really are is a whole lot luckier. ”

Oh yes please!! A secret school on how to attract the blessing of fey folk!!

Then again, I don’t really trust faeries — capricious creatures.

I prefer to think along the lines of my hero, guru Joseph Campbell, who maintained that when you find your “bliss,” your true passion in life, and pursue it with all you’ve got, you somehow become aligned with the universe and “magical hands” in the form of friends, offers, grants … or those little ‘coincidences’ that Tess mentioned … appear to help you along your track.

Or to be a little less spiritual, there’s the famous quote from producer Samuel Goldwyn who said: ”The harder I work, the luckier I get.” And there’s Benny Goodman who – when asked if luck had anything to do with where he was in the music world — smiled and said: “Practice makes you lucky.” Or U.S. president Thomas Jefferson who was a great believer in luck. “I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

It’s in the semantics — it’s all the same thing. Or not? What do you think? Do you make your luck, your magic? Or are simply chosen at random by the faeries?

I love Free Will. His horoscopes have a way of noodling into the subconscious. Check yours out here.

Posted by Loreth @ 10:53 pm | THE WRITING LIFE

3 Responses to “FEY FOLK AND THE MAGIC OF SUCCESS”

On August 25th, 2006 at 7:53 am
Toni Says:

I do believe in magic… the spiritual kind rather than spells.

Here’s to some fairy dust coming your way
On August 25th, 2006 at 9:04 am
meretta Says:

I am an open book to all possibilities. There’s gold in them there hills!!! I believe most people hardly scratch the scratch the surface of their potential having been conditioned no to. Mostly I believe in energy, though.

Great post, Loreth. Thanks for sharing and inspiring my morning!

Now I’m off to check my horoscope.
On August 25th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Bailey Stewart Says:

I believe in Karma - just waiting for it patiently.

Tired too.

Mom is making it impossible to blog.

MANHUNTER dishes up “Creepy chills” - 1st review is in!

After Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Gabe Caruso can’t save his fiancee from a sadistic serial killer, he has trouble dealing with the guilt. His only consolation is that he put the man in jail. Cutting himself off, Gabe takes a post in Black Arrow Falls, a small town in the Yukon. There, he meets tracker Silver Karvonen, a woman with secrets of her own. Both are stunned to feel the pull of attraction. Then the killer escapes, and Gabe knows that trouble is on the way. Loreth Anne White serves up some creepy chills in Manhunter (4), as a serial killer wages both psychological and physical warfare. This compelling tale, part of the Wild Country series, features two emotionally scarred people who discover that being together makes them stronger.

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White is a very gifted author and whose future novels will be sought out by this reviewer.”

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Loreth Anne White has expanded her Shadow Soldiers series, and intriguing and dynamic characters continue to make it compelling.

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From the instance THE HEART OF A RENEGADE starts, one will take an indrawn breath and continue to gasp until the explosive ending. The danger is believably suspenseful with heart-pounding threats, and how they are carried out is terrifying realistic. Just when one thinks all is going smoothly for the hero and heroine, more peril crops up and they must once again fight for their lives.

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–Amelia Richard

SEDUCING THE MERCENRY earns Cata award