The best follow up with cookies or a thank you note.

I suck at all that follow uppy stuff. I’ve felt so jealous just on principle.

Today, I figured this out.

I don’t bake, wrap and deliver cookies.

I follow up with stories.

I bake wrap and deliver meaning.

So, that’s what I’m up to.

No cookies for you.

Search and Rescue You

You find you

There and in here you find yourself

It’s them stories

They find you

They find you where you find them

Instant recognition maybe

There’s you

So, that’s who you are

I didn’t know it was you

Looking like me

Normal?

Normal

What’s normal?

Who’s normal?

When normal?

How, why, normal?

Who says what’s?

Mine’s as mine as my foot size.

Defined, solidified by National Geographic

Boxes and shelves of people who almost must exist, sort of, because there are pictures

They sorta exist

You know, to be in here, to strike me

Look at that!

So I can dig in the boxes for the most shocking naked, huge, wrinkly, big bright feathery, tiny, adorable or sinking bony.

Curious dark friendly eyes slanting behind skins and furs

Naked painted long breasted moms

All that stuff on their heads taller is than they are

funny expressions

why would anyone move like that?

And in public.

Measuring the world with my foot.

Where Am I When I Need Me?

I’m just want to name, own, describe, and get what I do.

I’m pretty clear who I am.

My gifts are part magic part audacity, part art

Lots of ever kind of composition, strings of intuition, mostly listening, while taking things apart.

Mostly, I just pay a fresh attention, wonder, do research and thought experiments, maybe try a few things, cuz I really do wonder about that, then wonder aloud. Tweak my own perspective if something’s really stuck. Mostly, my client winnies out then names what’s going on. She comes up with answers , then figures out how to see it, feel, think and act. While I just sit there and wonder.

I sit there openly wondering about one thing and another. While also in Wonder and jaw dropping amazement as mere becomes super.

So, you think shifting that this way will cut out the friction over there?

Huh?

Why can’t I see how that’s working then?

Oh, so you say you just needed a cog there, then, yeah I totally see how that works.

But that’s not the magic.

I guess I market their ideas dreams and themselves to them.

So by the time it’s done, they own it, made it, believe in it. They believe in themselves are right in the middle of their purpose.

I think I sorta allow people to reinvent themselves, their relationships, goals, purpose, system, then I market what I see to them.

They buy themselves and walk away rich.

I think the hardest thing for me is to admit that this is so easy and joyful for me that I’d get on buses just to sit next to someone to see one small part of a life turn around, a brightness, a bounce, a stunned or contemplative look, maybe an aura of joy, before one of us reaches our stop. An addictive time sensitive game. I wouldn’t do it in pursuit of just a smile. Smiles are like snow flakes. Unless my victim hasn’t smiled in a decade. Then, they’ll be smiling when they step off the bus. That would be a win.

The other, and more terribly hard thing for me about thing is the awkwardness of charging of people for a gift that feels kinda magical cuz describing how it’s done in unimaginable and duplicating it is dead.

Also, what if I commit to help, and gasp! charge, and then the genie that actually does all the work doesn’t show up!?

I fear. No, dread and deal dead having to do the same thing every day. I know there’s no magic or future for me in attempting rote magic production. Yet, for some irrational reason I can’t stop feeling it’s to be my fate if I dare put my name out there to get paid for this.

I have this fear of ending up like the farmer’s daughter. The one who got locked in a cellar after her father boasted that she could spin straw into gold. She gets locked up and cornered into weaving more straw into gold, every night. Suck might happen to me too, till I end up promising my soul and my firstborn to to Rumplestilskin. Letting people who are counting on me down is just as terrifying.

I guess when you live in a magical world you have fairytale fears. And just because it doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean I don’t keep backing away from some invisible thing in my imagination.

I need someone like me to help me out. I’m dang good at helping folks kick imaginary shit they’ve been backing away from’s ass.

So?

Where am I when I need me?

What You Don’t Know You Believe Can Hurt You

And why I adore dialogue with you on here.

Your insight is dramatically helpful in the monumental process that is a story teller turnings shame into vulnerability.

Your points give a clear much needed out for when us writers doubt what we are really doing.

We need this way out of our maze of fear and lies we believe feel and react to. Believing I’m exposing my friends makes me feel defensive and small like a weasel. I often suspect myself of something that makes me just like a

Writing a good story is big work.

It’s heavy lifting to process reality into an uplifting story that makes sense and creates meaning and change.

Figuring out how we got out of a tricky spot and how and why we succeeded who and what where the problems and what we learned worked or works is an art. Sharing it is brave.

Finding a way out of lives that won’t bring joy or flow properly no matter what you do or hide is priceless.

I think your points do something to help bring my personal imagination out of the bone yard. A place where I feel like I’m betraying and hurting rather than helping. Hurting isn’t my nature. So I feel paralyzed. So, I fight back.

tabloid producer and accuse myself mercilessly. So I figure the whole world is gonna see me like what I am, some Rita Skeeter, that horrid witch reporter for The Daily Prophet let’s her magical green feather pen stretch butcher and molest the truth about Harry Potter and his friends without a spark of conscience. She’s one of my least favorite fictional characters, ever. So, I’m ready and on the offensive and the defensive, when just like Rita Skeeter, I make this crap up about myself. Then, like the annoying Wizarding community I go and believe the whole thing.

So, then I’m defensive as heck.

I am not like Rita Skeeter!

While I am the only one in this “conversation”.

Only trouble: I wonder if all great writers must have this stupid “conversation” and find a way to end it every time and move forward.

You’re list did something lots of books on writing I’ve read didn’t do.

I’m not sure what it is, but I feel a little bit quenched. In a good way. : )

All the best writers write about what they know with a terrific purpose that’s got nothing to do with exposing their friends. For me, its It’s about helping myself. My friends are part of my life, and lots of what I learned is from my not-so -friendlies. What else is there to write about? How else than to tell my own experience of myself and how my friend’s and family’s crap has affected them and me and the rest of us?

But “Who do you think you are to judge you big meany!?” Still needs to be dealt with regularly. It’s gotta be dealt with. I have to do it. And I have to do it regularly, the way some other professionals have to build up their confidence regularly.

I believe the majority of great story tellers, have to do this. And your words are helping me now. And maybe, it’ll never get as bad as Rita without me knowing where the attack is coming from again.

I wonder if my inner critic identified with a sensationalist tabloid producer. I feel aversion to. I don’t know anything about tabloid writers, and don’t consider them great, or story tellers.

I guess I feel like they are infections. When we are not immune the rest of us wonder if we are also being paid to be contagious pernicious judgey gossips with no right to feel good about our calling.

Huh. I just realized something.

I guess I haven’t figured this out. I don’t know any sensationalist gossip writers at all. Not one person I know thinks I’m that way either.

I just realized. Me trying to avoid being that way is ludicrous. I spin in that cycle rather than just realizing I am not that way. Huh.

Well.

There’s really nothing to talk about.

Note: May get permission to use the points that sparked this. Gotta post my response there first and see if I am nuts after all.