The Divining Wand - A New Spell is Cast

Back in February of this year it was my pleasure to introduce Larramie, who was in the process of launching her second blog. Through a series of serendipitous events, two blogs have sparkled into something even more remarkable...a site that feeds the passions of the literary set. For readers it's the place to find out about books before they hit the market, and for authors it's a great way to promote their work and gain a wider audience.

Now, let's see what Larramie's been up to....

You are creator of Seize a Daisy and the original Divining Wand. Please tell us how those sites became the impetus for the NEW Divining Wand?

Seize a Daisy's purpose encouraged visitors to try something fresh and new found on the Internet, including books written by debut authors. Even before the site launched I found Allison Winn Scotch's blog where she shared how her writing life and real life were affected by the upcoming publication of her first novel, The Department of Lost and Found. Fascinated in "getting to know" an about-to-become author, when Allison announced that friend/fellow debut author Kristy Kiernan had designed a grog -- The Debutante Ball --, I clicked the link and met six more genuinely talented and wonderful women. Presenting these writers and their books on Seize a Daisy felt as thought it was meant to be, yet I hadn't anticipated the snowball effect of discovering even more new authors. After I presented Therese Fowler and Souvenir, she honored me with the title of "a debut author's Fairy Godmother."

Since the title partially fulfilled my childhood dream to grow up to be a Fairy Godmother -- i.e. granting others ideas and options to find their dreams --, I developed the original Divining Wand where anyone could request help in realizing what they were seeking. However, for whatever reason, there were not enough requests/wishes to maintain interest in the blog on a regular basis. And then Seize a Daisy was implanted by a virus, deemed an "Attack Site" and confiscated by Google/Blogger.

One blog was gone forever and the other was certainly gasping for breath, so I came up with the idea of combining the best of both by hopefully giving writers and readers what they both want.


What is your goal for the Divining Wand?

It's based on the quote: "Choose an author as you would a friend."__Wentworth Dillon
From personal experience I know how it feels to read an author/friend's book and as an authors' Fairy Godmother I'm trying to allow every reader that same opportunity.


How does this create a new platform for authors and readers to connect?

Kristy Kiernan (author of Catching Genius and Matters of Faith) and a friend who believed in this venture described it perfectly in the following paragraph:

"The Divining Wand is, and always will be, a work in progress. New authors and books will be added as Larramie discovers them and shares them with readers. This is one of the few sites in which the information is not driven by authors themselves. It brings together everything you want to know about authors: all of their various social networking contact information, book reviews, interviews, excerpts, Q & A's..a one-stop-shop for dedicated readers rather than putting it all together, piecemeal, from a search engine."
Then, for good measure, she added:

"Please check it out at The Divining Wand subscribe to the RSS feed, and prepare to discover everything you ever wanted to know about your present, and future, favorite authors. "


Tell us about the authors you have gathered at DW? Are you focusing on a specific genre?

Initially I sent out an invitation to all the authors who had been presented on Seize a Daisy, explained the site and asked for their all their contact information -- from websites to Facebook page -- and the urls where their books could be purchased online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders or IndieBound. I also requested that they Forward the letter to any of their writer friends who might be interested. All of those writers are alphabetically listed on the Authors page at the site.
The Divining Wand is wide open to genres and gender, after all every reader usually enjoys a variety of reading material.


Are there any favorite/dream authors you'd like to feature or review at The Divining Wand?

My second all-time favorite novel is The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, in fact I read the book at its release and reread it again four months later. The movie adaptation debuts in a few weeks, on August 14th, and her new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, will be available September 29, 2009. But Ms. Niffenger -- in addition to being a writer -- is also an artist and professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. And, from the one TV interview I watched on her, she appeared rather shy.

However back on March 10, 2006 at the blog, Writer Unboxed, there was the terrific interview with Audrey Niffenegger by Therese Walsh (debut author of The Last Will of Moria Leahy to be published October 13, 2009).

Audrey Niffenger will be busy and certainly the object of enough attention in the coming months (with a new book Her Fearful Symmetry due on September 29th)...I don't think The Divining Wand would fit into her schedule. ;)


Larramie, I've had the privilege of knowing you for over a year, yet your identity remains as elusive as a famous restaurant critic...please share an interesting tidbit about this person of literary mystery!

I laugh at this mysterious persona label because in real life you could probably read me like a book. It's true that my blogs are not about me but, having been trained as a counselor and a sociologist, I'm a natural observer who remains puzzled as to why most people find it easier to look at life negatively rather than positively. It's such wasted effort and I'd like to try in some small way to change that, even if it's only to "introduce" readers to a writer and gather more friends for an author.

I'm incredibly curious, though not nosy. As much as I love to read, it's always been one-book-at-a-time for me and I read every word as the author wrote word-by-word. I miss unbiased newscasts, interviews, articles and quality TV/movies. My entertaining real life drama comes from watching sports where the ending is never known until the competition is over. And, as much as I LOVE the feel and smell of a new book, I did purchase a Kindle Deluxe about three weeks ago. However it's yet to be used, there are ARCS to be read one-at-a-time!


Now that you've read the interview, stop The Divining Wand and say hello!

The Divining Wand : http://thediviningwand.com/

Start Where You Are

March is the last time I reviewed a book of note and quite honestly I've become so absorbed with navel-gazing that I've forgotten to look outward. That was until a recent stroll through my blogging neighborhood revealed that some of my friends seem to be on the same-searching for meaning or a new direction or a new career or a new home-path. So in the interest of multiplying the wealth and spreading good karma, allow me to recommend a book...

Regular readers know that for the past six months I've been recording my journey to find a mountain home and a new career on my other blog: Every Day Do One Thing. I've also been reading or listening to the classics and newcomers in the motivational / career advice / find your purpose genre that alternatively offer to make all your dreams come true or at least get you started on the path away from the doldrums of your current less than satisfying life. Many of these books are sincere and helpful in their efforts to offer encouragement to those who have put their dreams on the backburner or simply turned off the stove altogether. Surprisingly, though, it seems that some authors are simply repeating what they've read in their colleagues books down to using the same inspiring stories and tried and true techniques. To an extent I suppose this would be expected since there are only so many happy stories to go around.

I nearly reached the point of motivational burn-out when I began listening to Start Where You Are by Chris Gardner, author of the inspiring Pursuit of Happyness (yes, the book that became the wonderful tear-jerker movie starring Will Smith). Mr. Gardner's book is by far the best I've read in the genre. Perhaps because he is speaking from hard-won experience and has a real passion to help others, his words ring true. He literally started with nothing, was homeless while working his way through DeanWitter's brokers' training program, was fired from Bear Stearns which inspired him to start his own firm, and which ultimately made him a very rich man.

Unlike other books that promise everything is possible if we just visualize what we want, Mr. Gardner takes us through the not often discussed, and less glamorous steps of the journey and demonstrates how to take that initial vision of what we want and make it a reality. He is an advocate of single minded focus and hard work, what he calls, 'hitting the anvil'. And while he offers as many inspirational stories as the next person, his are less fantastic and rely more on the results of hard work and persistence in the face of defeat.

The book is divided into six sections and 44 brief lessons each focusing on a single trait of success. He is a no-nonsense advocate, who while encouraging makes it clear that there is no substitute for getting started today and working with single-minded devotion until you obtain your goals. He also discusses the importance of persisting in the face of failure. Or the need to take 'baby steps' when paralyzed by fear. I credit this book with helping me to overcome my fear of revising my resume, getting it distributed, and then getting my career search into overdrive. The great draw of the book is that with the breadth of topics covered, everyone will find an area of inspiration that suits their needs. One lesson that made an impression on me was this: if you really want to succeed, work for yourself. Be an entrepreneur. That's the lesson that resonated most powerfully with me and the one I am now working to implement in my life.

So if you're stuck, or need an inspirational boost, get a copy of this book and read it before bed or listen to it in your car as you drive to that job your no longer love. I promise you'll be impressed with the results.

A Difference in Perception

Can you see what I see? When I wrote last week's post about 'Nothingness' I wondered if anyone else would really understand what I was trying to say, or even understand the mental quicksand that I sometimes sink into staring off into that alluring patch of blue sky. Until that sickening moment when I realise that it's the same blue sky I've been staring at for years.


Can we expect others to really understand our perception of events? Earlier today I read an essay by Ana Menendez in which she describes the genesis of her latest novel (memoir?) The Last War, which details the dissolution of a marriage, and was inspired the dissolution of her own marriage. While it is not uncommon that authors draw from real life experience for inspiration, after reading her essay I wondered at how thin the veil between fiction and non-fiction might actually be.

And then I thought about how fiction might be used by an author to explore one's life from the safety of the omnipotent narrator (even if written in first person) which comes with the psychic distance of transferring our thoughts and emotion from mind to keyboard. It is a double-edged sword, the safety of re-living an event, manipulating it perhaps, but viewing it from arm's length so we can savor or dissect or heal.


Which brings me finally to my original point. It is a pleasure to share one's thoughts with a reader. The risk is that what we wish to share is doubly limited by our own ability to convey and our reader's ability to understand. And I wonder if that makes the experience any less useful or cathartic to the writer?

The Peace of Nothingness

Here are the moments. I am at the beach or walking down an empty street in my neighborhood and then looking up at the sky, I am overwhelmed by stillness. I am engulfed in the timeless void of the moment, how the sky looks the same as it did years before in a similar moment and as it will years from now here or miles from here. In this timelessness I bob contentedly in a sea of nothingness where present and past and future are simultaneously before me and everything seems possible from the safe perspective of doing nothing.


I may tarry here too long because it is effortless and peaceful. This place could be a refuge of rest or healing, in the past it has been both for me. Yes, sometimes we need the luxury of this space that exists between time and commitments. It's comforting and comfortable, the elixir that helps us to forget our anxieties, the seduction of safety we never want to leave. There's nothing to be afraid of here, because nothing is ever undertaken or completed. The march of days continues on around us and we barely notice except to put on or take off our coat with the change of seasons.

The Peace of Nothingness becomes a place to hide from our fears of doing, like Dorothy's field of poppies in the Wizard of Oz. We fall into the trance of sameness and remain in the loving embrace of stupor until one day we wake to realise that months or years have passed and we have forgotten our purpose or where we were on our journey.

Like Dorothy, sooner than later we must rouse ourselves and return to the Yellow Brick Road if we are ever to reach Oz.

Waiting

This weekend I met my best friend for coffee and we spent a couple hours talking as we do a couple times a month. This friend and I have known each other for years so we have a comparative history upon which our current conversation casts its reflection. Our meetings are comfortably the same, we meet for coffee at a local bookstore and flip through magazines while chatting about whatever pops into our minds. At some point in the conversation things will veer into deeper waters and we'll check in with one another about ongoing dreams or projects each has underway. Her adoption, my move.

Since we're both single, 40-something women, our perspective on these things tends to be a bit different than our married friends or our friends with children. The decisions can be made in a vacuum, without consulting another for their recommendations or objections, there aren't the needs of another to consider. Which should make the decision making process or the project undertaking easier, but somehow it doesn't because while we don't have to gather another's approval, we also don't have their support. And as we get older, we start to think in terms of facing the rest of our lives on a solitary path.

During our conversation my friend said, "I feel like I'm waiting for my life to begin." And I immediately nodded in agreement, yes I know exactly how you feel because I feel the same way. My life will begin once I move to my house in the mountains, once I find that career in books that I've longed for, once I get married to that wonderful man, once, just once, upon a time....so begins the fairy tale.

And then I realized that while we are waiting for our lives to begin, days and weeks and years and decades are passing us by and we have not understood that our lives have begun. That moment that we are waiting for is already here, we are living it now in this moment and all our plans are part of that life that has already begun. We must stop waiting and start doing, somehow we must overcome our lethargy or lengthy preparations because the circumstances will never be just right, there will never be enough money saved or the perfect job secured or all our ducks in order, at some point we must simply dive in to the already swirling current of the the life that has already begun, that we are in fact in the midst of.

I've plucked a few lines from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to underscore the anesthetic seduction of waiting any longer, he says it so beautifully....


There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
...
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

I now believe it doesn't matter, as long as we just begin.