Thursday, December 19, 2013

Do you want to read a few of my emails from fans?

I don't have any big ideas tonight and I don't really have anything to say. But I played Touch Rugby late tonight and I can never get to sleep before 3am when I do that. Therefore I have decided to write an update on my new life direction.

In my previous post I discussed how I was going to start asking myself what I can contribute to others and various situations instead of simply thinking about what I can get out of a situation. Well, I have to say that it has been a lot easier to make that transition than I thought.

What's hardest about making these types of changes is remembering that you have made these changes on a day to day basis. But, so far in every situation, I have found myself asking what I could selflessly contribute to this person's situation. So far it hasn't led to anything too drastic. But it is beginning to change my attitude in a way that is undefinable at this point.

Also, I had mentioned how I got that message to contact that person who I shouldn't have contacted. Well, I contacted that person, and they ended up responding really well to my message. They didn't know what the hell I was talking about, but it did seem to make them feel good that I had reached out to them in this way. So if nothing else, I was able to bring a little joy to their life by following through with the message.

And I really thought that after contacting that person I was going to turn into the kid from 'The Sixth Sense' and I would have a line of dead people waiting to deliver their messages. That hasn't happened. I have gotten no new messages. I'm quite pleased with that fact. Yes, I'm at 'their' disposal, but let's not over due it, right?

The other that was going on with me right now was that I had decided to write a book series that I didn't think would sell. I was going to write it for the sole purpose of becoming a better writer. My plan was to give myself as much time as I needed to finish the stories. I write erotica for the money, so that means I need to get them out ASAP. And I was hoping that more time would allow me to write a fuller story.

I'm not sure whether that has been my experience. In fact, I'm not sure if this series is improving my writing at all. Tomorrow I will finish the 2nd story out of 4 and I almost feel like these stories cover even less story-ground than my normal stories.

I think that I have really gotten the art of the short story down pact. You get in, get out and you're done. Now, I don't know. The series that I'm working on now is a werewolf romance and the first book is more than twice as long as any of my recent stories, yet no where in these 20,000 words does anyone transform into a werewolf... except the last chapter... as a cliffhanger. That's really weird.

The second book has it's own oddities. For example, I like to put at least 3 sex scenes into every story. The 2nd book has only one. Now, the character do spend almost the whole book walking around naked and aroused... it's the wolf in them... but there is only 1 sex scene.

The other odd thing is that after spending the whole first book focused on certain characters surrounding the protagonist. The protagonist spends the whole 2nd book trapped on an island with a whole bunch of new character who were introduced in book 1, but were barely given any face time. I mean, these are just really odd things.

Maybe my subconscious has some sort of plan for this series that it hasn't informed me about yet. That happened with the first erotic series I ever wrote. I started off writing really graphic sex stories. But, by the end, some readers actually cried.

I don't think that this new series has that sort of emotional weight because these characters are less sympathetic. I think that this is much more of straight forward Twilight sort of romance. I could be wrong though. I have noticed a strange fixation on race in the first 2 stories. It could end up being some sort of commentary on race in the Bahamas (the books are based in the Bahamas). And it is about a full-figured ugly duckling who, when turned, transforms into the object of every wolfman's affection. So there is a whole self-esteem subplot that might be developing that I don't realize.

But I guess I'll have to wait to see what happens with the story just like my readers would. I've learned to not second guess my subconscious on these things. But I'm saying that I don't think that I'm learning how to write a fundamentally better story by doing this. And that was the only goal for doing this. I need to become a better author so that I can change the world with my "big 5 book series". Remember?

Anyway, it has felt good giving myself time to write. Apparently, writing can really be enjoyable sometimes. And even though this story is erotica, it's actually kind of fun to write. It does get me all hot and bothered while I'm writing it... especially this book... god damn I find this book hot... and I'm not a big fan of getting aroused at work. I mean, how many times can you change your shorts in a day. But still, writing this series has been kind of enjoyable. I'm very gratefully that my life is currently gives me time to write.

And since one of my task today was to reply to fans' emails, I thought that I would share a few of them with you. I think they mess with my mind because I know I'm not that good at writing. It takes kind of a effort to read them and then immediately forget them. But here are a few lines from the ones I read today:

Dear XXX,
You are a great writer and I love you books, especially the menage books.
B-

Dear xxxx,
I would love to give you feed back. I love to read [your books] I'm a fan fan fan fan fan. lol
thanks
N-

XXXX,
I also left you a five star review for your complete set of xxxxx series on Amazon. (They are talking about the first erotic series that I ever wrote)  That series was sooooo good,   I found myself crying at times during the books because I was rooting for them to get together.   The ending was priceless.   I love it!   I just wanted to let you know.   That series was so good!   Thank you for your talented writing.
T-

I truly love reading your books. They take me to another place and I get lost in the characters. I wonder at their decisions and why they made the choice they made. I can lose myself in them for that short while.
J-

I have reviewed this book. Again, absolutely amazing.
M-

Those are the emails I responded to today. My god I love these people! I so wish that I was as good of a writer as they think I am. But I can tell you this, I feel so exceptionally privileged that they, and others, allow me into their lives and their imaginations in this way. It is an honor that I never forget.

Sometimes I think about taking a writing class somewhere so that I could truly live up to their praise. But I fear that the demands of a class would take me away from actually writing. Maybe it'll be worth it, though. After all, I do need to get a lot better if I'm going to do justice to that non-erotic series. I'll have to think more seriously about the idea.

Saturday, December 7, 2013

I've decided to give up and give in

I might be punch drunk tired, but I just had a crazy thought. What if I stopped looking at situations and people and thinking what I could get out of it or from them, and instead considered what it is that I could give to them? And I'm sure that you're reading this and saying, yeah, no kidding. It's called being generous you self-centered bastard. But is it such an automatic thought?

It is one thing to look at a person and situation and not want anything from them. And it's a completely different thing to actively look at a situation and say, "what is it that I can contribute to it."

This is kind of an old thought for me. This is the way I used to live my life back when I was "good". I was such a giver. But then life beat me down pretty handily and I shifted my focus on just trying to survive. The result was that I shut down that generous aspect of  my spirit and just looked after myself for a while. It resulted in a few nice personal achievements that I'm proud of. But what if I returned to that generosity of spirit for a while to come?

And I'm not talking financially. Lord knows that that will never happen. But, there are other things that are much more valuable than money. I have written about how I believe there is a flow to the universe. To me, the universe is a big Rube Goldberg machine and things affect you to bring about a certain action in you that affects others in a way that will in turn create another affect in others still.

I've experienced this in my life a number of times. A simple example was the time when my dead grandmother told me how she would use the fact that she was dead to give me something that I had asked her for. I thought it meant that nothing but good things would happen. But what instead happened was that a series of events occurred that pretty much destroyed me emotionally. Those events caused me to act irrationally and I packed up my clothes and took a crazy trip.

But it was on that trip that the thing that I had asked my grandmother for had happened. I would not have gotten what I had asked for if I hadn't entered that crazy mental state. Something had to force me out of my comfort zone and my near emotional breakdown did exactly that. And if it didn't happen on the exact day and time it did, I wouldn't have ended up in a certain spot 500 miles away when the other specific event occurred. It was like I was living in a giant Rube Goldberg machine. It's sort of like the thought that a butterfly flapping it's wings in America could cause a tidal wave in Japan.

So, since I know that this is how the universe works, since I have experienced these Rube Goldberg moments numerous times, and since I have these "psychic" impressions which have proven themself to be correct time and time again, maybe, instead of thinking that every psychic impression that I have is meant to benefit me in some way, maybe I need to ask myself, how can I contribute to the situation. Maybe I should ask myself how I could play my small part in someone else's Rube Goldberg machine.

And since I have had incident after incident that tells me that the world works like this, maybe I should not worry about how crazy people think I am when I play my part. Maybe I should just let go and give in to my crazy knowing that I'm actually pretty sane.

I remember right after that same grandmother had died. One of the first things that that grandmother said to me post-life was that she wanted me to tell my aunt, the woman who took care of her until her death, that she, my grandmother, had visited her after she had died and that my aunt had seen her. Well, for a long time I refused to relay that message because, you know, I'm not a crazy person.

But after a while I broke down and relayed that message. And instead of my Aunt looking at me like I was crazy (a look that I have gotten quite familiar with) my Aunt said that my grand mother had come to her as a cat that wouldn't leave the window sill of the window of the room that my grandmother lived and died in. My aunt said how it was so like my grandmother to come as a cat because my aunt was allergic to cats. And my aunt said that at the time, she had spoken aloud to the cat acknowledging that the cat was my grandmother.

So not only did my Aunt not think I was nuts, but I validated her so that she wouldn't think of herself as nuts. And now that I don't really have to live my life in fear of not surviving, maybe I could be this vessel which I have often gotten the impression that I should be. And as I think about it again for the first time in years, maybe I should have delivered the message that my dead father wanted me to relay to my brother. If only I could now remember what that message was. Oh well, hopefully it wasn't important.

The reason why all of this is coming up now is because yesterday I got the very clear message that I should contact someone that everyone in their right mind would tell me that I shouldn't contact. But I know what I was told by that voice in my head. I was told to contact them. I did and I understandably got a very cold response. And reading it tonight I thought, why did I even contact this person?

Well, now I'm starting to think that perhaps I wasn't supposed to contact them because I was supposed to get something out of it. Maybe I was supposed to contact them because they were supposed to get something out of it with no emotional payoff for me. Maybe what I should do is ask them if there is something that I could do to contribute to their life and just accept the fact that I will come off sounding like a crazy person. After all, shouldn't I be used to that by now? I pride my self in being completely nuts. So why should I lose my courage now?

And maybe this should be my policy moving forward. I really have accepted that I have failed at what I wanted to accomplish with my life. So, now that I know that I won't accomplish it, maybe it's time for me to give in to my life. Maybe I should just stop trying to be the man I wanted to be and just make my life about others. Wow, I can feel a part of myself dying a little just thinking about it. But maybe that's what I should do.

Hmm... I think I'll start with the situation in front of me and then take it from there. Maybe I'll again embrace the dude that I used to be. Well, I did really like that dude, so maybe it won't be all that bad.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

I remember that time I was taken hostage

I just came back from watching Hunger Games: Catching Fire. It's better than the first movie. Where as the books got worse and worse to the point that I could barely stand them, the movies started out pretty good and is only getting better.

And walking home from the Grove I walked around a little. Man is that place beautiful this time of year. I kept thinking how lucky I was to be living near there. And for some reason, it reminded me of the time that I was held hostage. I'm not sure why I thought about that for the first time in years, but I did. It's an interesting story.

When I was 25 I was living in Dallas, Texas. It was just before my move to Los Angeles and I was working at an AT&T telephone directory distribution headquarters. I was doing data entry, but my boss really like me so she kept giving me more work.

At one point she is complaining about how people are falling behind. I'm sitting outside her office and I heard her talking to her right hand woman about how she's withholding payment to certain people because they're behind. I don't think much about it until one day when she asked me to take a trip with her out to one of the distribution centers that was behind.

I'm in the minivan and as we're arriving she says to me, Cristian, I want you to do something for me. I need someone to seem intimidating, so I want you to stand quietly behind me. I'm going to introduce you as an efficiency expert that we brought down from California and I'm going to use your presence to get them back on schedule. She tells that I'm not to saying anything, just stand there looking unimpressed. I agree.

We get there and I play my role and they seem a little intimidated. But at one point, they leave me alone in their office as the two women I was with went off to chat with someone. Alone in the office, the distribution center's assistance tells me that what we're doing is right. I ask her what she means. She tells me that they haven't been paid in 4 weeks and that her trailer is about to be repossessed. I don't say anything. Someone else tells me how they are months behind on their mortgage because of how slow AT&T is paying and the bank is calling them threatening to foreclose on their home.

I'm listening to this and I'm a little shocked because I overheard my boss talking about how the money is sitting in their account but she is withholding payment. I start to understand that I am on the wrong side of this battle. I begin to understand that my boss is the bad guy.

I leave the office thinking about what I was told. My heart completely went out to those people and I come up with a plan. I call aside the manager of the facility. I say to him, "I want you to do something, and I promise you you will get the money to pay your people. But you have to do exactly as I say." He agrees.

I tell him to take his van and block our van in. After that he is to come back to us and tell my boss that he blocked our van in and that he won't let us out until she takes him to the bank and gets the money that they're owed. I told him to tell my boss that they would be keeping me there until they came back, and afterwards they would let me go. I asked him if he under stood me and I could practically see his heart stop. I asked him again and he shakes his head. We both walk back to the group separately and I could see his hands shaking as he lights up a cigarette and walks away.

About 10 minutes later he walks back up. The poor man is practically crying. His hands still shaking he delivers his message and my boss is just shocked. She yells for a second and he doesn't budge. I could see her mind swimming because she had just dragged me, her temp, to this place and now I was being taken hostage. She began to think about how I could potentially sue AT&T over this. So very quickly she relents. She asks me if I'm ok waiting there and do my best to reassure her that I am.

The group leaves for about 20 minutes while I chat with the workers in the office. It's all pleasant and when my boss gets back, they collect me and we all leave. My boss apologized profusely for that and later on bumped my pay. She said it was for my hard work, and I certainly was working hard, but it probably also had something to do with being held hostage.

I'm not sure, but I think that was the thing that I've done which I'm the most proud of. I don't think that I'm that good of a person anymore. It seems that as the years go on, I get more and more jaded and self-centered. I really used to be a good person, but ever since I decided to see what it would be like to live my life if there wasn't a god, I've never quite been the same. Certainly I've taken more of an ownership of what happened to me, but I think that I've also been a little more protective of what I have and have been less willing to be generous of spirit.

As I think about it, it was probably the theme of self-sacrifice in the Hunger Games books that made me think of that. Self-sacrifice that doesn't count as martyrdom isn't easy and doesn't happen very often. I guess that I used to be a better person than I am. And I guess the truth is that the longer I live, the worse of a person that I'll become. Luckily, I probably won't notice the difference. And since the majority of the people I know only know this current version of me, they won't notice much of a change either.

Hmm... I guess I'm just grateful that there was a time that I was a better person.

But, you know what? I was thinking the other day that it's possible that my journey of spiritual evolution didn't stop when I stopped meditating and believing in god. Some of the most profound psychic experiences that I've had have been since I've "lost my spiritual way".

What I was thinking the other day was that maybe spiritually has nothing to do with meditating and acting moral. Maybe spirituality has solely to do with a person's ability to connect with the secret workings of the universe.

I have long believed that the "spiritual path" that religions speak of and that connects to the god that they speak of, is actually more about connecting with the flow of the universe. I've always believed that we are all swept up within current of the universe and like an insect floating on top of it, we could choose to fight the current, swim to the edge of the cosmic river or let go and go where the universe takes us.

Granted, if we let go, we are still going to get sick and hurt and die. There's no preventing that. But if we are flowing at the same pace of the universe, from where we float everything would seem to stand still and there's wonder to be found in those seemingly still moments. I've always believed that knowledge becomes more easily accessible in that seeming stillness. And the universe seems much more open with that knowledge if we just stop fighting the flow.

So, having said all of that, I'm starting to believe that it's possible that even though I no longer meditate and I no longer go looking for things that i can do to change people's lives for the better, maybe all of the things that I do now have put me in better contact with the universe than I have ever been.

That's a tall order though, because at my peek, knowledge seemed to flow to me like a tidal wave. I was talking to the dead and simple meditation made me feel like I was high every day. I don't feel like that now. But I seem to have a much more open channel, not to the dead people I spoke to, but to the secrets hidden in the natural folds of it's spaces. At least that's what I'm starting to think.

Certainly meditation has various physiological changes on your body that can't be overlooked. But my ability to learn things that only an outside observer could see about what's going on in the lives of others, has increased dramatically. At least it seems that way. But perhaps it only seems like that because I've forgotten the details of my life, much how I had forgotten about the time I was a hostage.

Hmm... That's a tough one. One day I have to re-read 'The First Day After Life'. Something tells me that I will remember a number of things about my life that I had forgotten. I wonder if it would be an interesting read or if it would just make me cringe. Well, maybe one day I'll find out.