Writer Unboxed

We’re gonna get a little cosmic today, my friends. Care to go out on a limb with me?

Ever since I was little I’ve had this sense that things are way bigger and more complex than surface appearance might lead you to believe. I’ve been fascinated with that idea my whole life, it seems. As a kid, I believed in everything – the Loch Ness monster, UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts, psychic phenomena, and those crazy Easter Island statues. I read the nutty monster comics published by Marvel in the early ’70’s. In one of those, the statues proved to be stone monsters buried up to their necks in fertile Rapa Nui soil.

Hey. It could happen.

My guiding star was a TV program hosted by Leonard Nimoy called “In Search Of.” If it was worth being interested in, it was on that show. Later, it was Ripley’s Believe it or Not – first the books, then the show, with Jack Palance revealing – and reveling in - all manner of crazy anomalies of man and nature.

Things changed. I grew up - and “out,” I thought - of my belief in everything. After college, I began a twenty-year career in the military. I published fantasy and horror fiction while serving, but, ironically, my true beliefs narrowed to the pragmatic, the practical, my energy consumed in the things I needed to believe to deal with day-to-day life in that environment. I wrote crazy stories, and shared lots of crazy stories with my co-workers, but my days of considering ghosts and critters a possible reality were over. I had to work, maintain discipline, manage large numbers of Airmen, be a husband and father.

I’ve been through a lot of profound changes in the last five years, including the deaths of my two oldest friends, both my parents, and my second marriage. I also retired after twenty years of military service. I went from being married with kids and owning a home to living alone in a rented one-bedroom apartment, trying to build a living through an online business that is completely dependent on me for its success or failure.

I’m not trying to make this sound like a pity party. I’m happier than I’ve been in years. My business is doing well. I grieve my losses, and move on without those people, as we all do.

And in the face of all that’s new in my life, all that’s uncertain, I’m not afraid. I have occasional anxious moments, but when I do, I just get back to work. Crank out some more pages. Write an article and submit it to another newsletter (I must have a hundred of those things floating around at different sites by now). Jump up and down, shout and scream. Make my presence known.

I’ve always loved the title of Marsha Sinetar’s book, Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. I knew it was true, but for twenty years I didn’t do it. I stayed in the Air Force. The safe bet.

I would amend the title slightly: Do What You Believe In and the Money Will Follow.

For those years, I never really believed in my writing enough to ditch the safe bet. I didn’t make a lot of money writing short stories. I wrote four novels, none of which sold. It was pretty clearly not a good idea to quit my day job.

But now I have. I’m taking chances I never expected to take. If you’d have told me two years ago I’d be doing this today, I would have laughed.

I’ve gone back, you see. Full circle.

I believe in everything again. Mostly I believe that, as human beings, we are capable of virtually anything.

In Michael Talbot’s book The Holographic Universe, he describes numerous cases in which people cure their own cancer, heal broken bones, or – conversely – make themselves sick through their beliefs. He cites the known placebo effects of numerous drugs and medical treatments. The drugs don’t do anything, but the patient gets better anyway. In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield tells an incredible story about a railyard worker trapped in a refrigerator car over a three-day weekend. The worker, aware that the temperature in the car dropped to -20, froze to death – unaware that the car’s refrigerator unit was turned off. The actual temperature inside the car was 55 degrees, but the man had all the physical signs of frostbite.

The guy froze to death because he believed he was going to freeze to death.

I didn’t make much money writing, and I never sold a novel. Did that happen because I didn’t believe I would sell my novels? Or did I not believe I would sell my novels because of the first couple of rejections?

If you believe some of the new paradigms being thrown around these days, effect precedes cause. You might think it’s a lot of new-age hokum – until you find out that Einstein espoused the same theory in his heyday, but dismissed it as impossible.

Maybe he was right, but didn’t know he was right. There’s a great bit of dialogue between two observing scientists at the end of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

First Scientist: Looks like Einstein was right.

Second Scientist: Einstein was probably one of them.

Einstein’s revolutionary work notwithstanding, science is no yardstick. Remember, I was a pragmatist for twenty years. But I’ve been reading about science for thirty-five years. It’s always wrong. It’s constantly being reinvented. Ideas come and go. Concepts that used to be considered gospel are now overturned. Quantum physics contradicts classical physics. Now quantum theory is undergoing sea changes. And so it goes, Kurt Vonnegut tells us. So it goes.

What’s the new wrinkle? Yes, there was a Big Bang. God caused it. We are the result. Now it turns out we’re not even solid matter at all. We’re a bunch of energy fields at different rates of vibration. We’re made up of particles that decide to become waves under observation. Or waves that decide to become particles, depending on who’s watching.

It’s crazy. It’s enough to give you a headache. But shouldn’t you be able to make the headache go away once you realize you don’t really have a head?

Weird, yes. But true: our most basic notions concerning the nature of reality are in flux. We live in very interesting times.

Perhaps I should assure you at this point that I am not going to form a cult, start a religion, or begin proclaiming (loudly, and with benefit of television cameras) that I have seen the Way, and all should follow. Hey, I live less than thirty miles from Waco, okay? They still don’t like it when you talk about David Koresh.

However, I am going to carefully consider what I believe. Rather than believe I can’t make a living as a writer – as conventional wisdom would have it – I choose to believe that I can write a bestseller.

I know for sure that if I don’t believe I can write one, I won’t. If I believe I can, and my brain knows it, perhaps it will compute one, draw it out of the quantum hologram and throw it up on the subconscious movie screen for me to write.

I have an idea for one. It’s a pretty good idea. An idea is not a novel … but an idea, plus belief, plus three or four months of 1500 words a day? That might just do it. Alas, I have not yet mastered the technique of simply pulling the completed book – printed, bound, even autographed – out of the implicate order. I still have to write it and send it to a publisher.

I’m out on a limb. I’m not diving off, but I believe. If what I’ve read is true, it could affect more than just my career.

I plan to be very careful about what I believe from now on. It’s 95 degrees outside, but I could still freeze to death.

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