Creating Darkness

My actual cake was prettier!

It's been nearly a month since my last blog. Where DOES the time go? In that month, both my dog and I added a year to our chronological ages. My dog is now 6 years old (42, in dog years), and I am nearly twice that. I don't mind in the least admitting that I just turned 72 and I can say with absolute truth that, when I get up in the morning, absolutely nothing hurts! And, as my mother predicted, this new decade, my seventh, sees me even happier than did the previous six! I'm delighted to be able to make both of those claims.

And this decade has already seen a sea change in my life. I tossed that phrase off, and then decided I wanted to be sure I was using it properly, so I wiki-ed it. It's defined there as a gradual transformation that winds up with the object looking the same on the outside but substantially new inside. That is exactly what I meant by the term. Yay, me! Dictionary.com defines it as "a striking change in appearance," Merriam Webster calls it "a marked change." But both of those definitions imply the outer form has taken on a new look, and that's really not true for me. It's all been internal.

Can't resist showing you Cheo en pointe!

Inside, I'm almost all novelist now. Which is to say, I'm thinking and analyzing as a novelist. I do not imply that the outer world sees me as a novelist, for that is definitely not the case. In almost two months, I've sold around 30 books and given away 400 for free. That's one of the ways Amazon.com promotes your book cheaply but fairly effectively: they allow you to offer it for free five days out of 90. Both of us hope that will get more people aware of the book, so that sales will increase. We'll see. . . ..

So what does it mean to be a novelist internally? It means everything that happens out there, whether in a book I'm reading, a TV show or movie I'm watching, or a live interaction I'm having with someone is fodder for my pen. I talk to myself about what I experience in grammatically correct sentences, with modifiers, subordinate clauses, and parallel structure. If I detect an error, I go back mentally and write over it. And I think in paragraphs. It truly is a new way to think about the world I live in.

Creating darkness is part of creating a novel

And (here's where the title of this blog comes from) I imagine bad things happening to my characters. This has been a problem for me, and that's why I'm writing about it here. I'm a great believer in the Law of Attraction, and one of my characters (not the main one) speaks a dialect of LOA. The gist of this Law is that like attracts like. Physically true, right? Well, mentally true as well. If you seek happiness--all who do not, please step back three paces. Hmmm, no one moved. Point made!--then you can attract it most easily by BEING as happy as possible, by focusing on things that give you at least some joy, by remembering or anticipating things that were or will be pleasurable. Not necessarily hedonistically pleasurable, although there's nothing wrong with that, but, say, a world of no physical pain for myself and all who wish to join me in that world. Or a world of abundance, of fulfillment, for myself and all who wish to join me in that world.

You get the point, I hope. And the corollary is that, if I focus on things that do not make me happy, then I will attract more of the same. Of course, we all have problems, even the most Pollyanna-ish of us occasionally spills chocolate ice cream on our blouse or steps in doggy do-do or worse--you get this point, too, I'm sure. Well, to practice LOA, you find something to focus on that makes you feel better than you do when you're pissed off thinking about that chocolate stain or those smelly shoes. You do not ignore them; rather you focus on the blouse with the stain completely gone, the shoe smelling like new-mown grass, the body without the infectious disease raging through it. You do what needs to be done to fix things, but once you've done what can be done, you move your attention to something that makes you feel better.

One thoughtful reviewer--so far.

Yet, here I am, as a novelist, creating those stains, that "sole-ful" mess, dangerous life-threatening situations for my main character. Doesn't that seem to go against the LOA? Isn't there enough darkness in the world without my adding more to it? Only one person who has read my book has written a review of it--so far--and her review was complementary except that she said my violent scene went farther than she liked to see in novels she read--though she understood why I wrote such an intense scene. That is actually one of the things that brought me to write this blog--and the blog that will follow this one, because I want to explore my answer to the questions I've raised here.

So, tune in next time--and it won't be a month before I get back to this, I promise.