Better Living Through Storytelling

Good, Gooder, Goodest

Let me tell you a story about a writer at work. He or she rises early or late, changes into clothing or stays in pajamas, and sits down at a computer/legal pad/coffee shop to pen the masterpiece of the century. While he sips coffee, she outlines her next attack. While she's planning and plotting, he jumps in to provide backstory for the newest character.

Coffee or tea, scratching from time to time, rubbing of the forehead in frustration.

Grandiose, no?

Hygienic? Hardly.

Every day I work on my own writing, and some days, on other people's as well. I have no preconceived ideas about how the day will go. Sometimes, I'm freaking Dorothy Parker, wittily cutting down every threat to intelligent thought, and others I'm leaning over the keyboard crying, because a character I've created (and grown fond of) has died, through my actions, the strokes of the keys.

On any given day of the week, it's challenging, not to find words, or create worlds in my imagination. It's challenging because I live in my mind and the real world, with a foot in each. Sometimes, the world I'm writing about is more beautiful, more comfortable than my "real" life. Sometimes, I can't wait to shut off the computer at the end of the day, so terrible are the people I'm getting to know.

And then there are the days in between, when it's humming along fine, emotionally speaking. The challenge there? To find words everyone else isn't using, or to string them together into breathtaking, beaded finery.

I've spent 18 years as an editor; I've done my time. So who says you can't push against the boundaries of language a little, or make up a brand new word?

I propose gooder, or goodest, or goodier, for today at least. Tomorrow will probably be a different story.

August 6, 2008 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment

Been Awhile

Why is it when you're just starting out, writing feels like an enormous chore? Every word feels as if it's pulled out with some kind of blunt-tipped instrument, and your head is more like the remnants of a Saigon bombing campaign than actual human tissue.

Then, when you've been at it for a few decades, returning to it after time spent doing other things, it feels like returning to a friend, or a lover, or a friend who might become a lover, if you say and do the right things.

I've been teaching a new workshop, called Releasing Doubt, which ended on July 23rd), and will be on to the next on August 6th (on The Wisdom of Transformation). Meeting lots of new people, and hopefully helping some to find a new way of looking at their personal stories.

In between, I have to decide what to work on next. I'm doing lots of interviews for Wake Up to Your Weight Loss (see this link for one I did on Monday with Sedona Talk Radio: http://sedonatalkradio.com/content/view/118/213/), and playing around with the ultimate choice: another non-fiction book, a novel, screenplay or play? I have outlines for all four sitting on my computer's hard drive.

Not a bad problem to have, I suppose.

As I get older, and hopefully more experienced, what I work on becomes so much more important. I don't know if other people experience this, but my writing is not just work I can leave behind when I shut off the computer. It affects me personally, forms the basis for whatever growth (or lack thereof) I will experience for the next year or two of my life. So between now and the 6th, I'll ruminate. I'll woolgather. I'll talk to as many people in the press as I can before my brain turns to mush.

And I will decide. Eventually.

July 30, 2008 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment

My New Best Friend

It must be the old days -- the leftover memories of blasting through those doors on the last day of school. The smell of pencil shavings and my teacher's coffee breath fading away.

I have no idea why it happens, but as soon as summer rolls around, all I can think about is what I'm going to read.

It's not as if I'll be sunning myself on the beach for the next three months. I live near enough, but am not that good at sitting still, or lying still, while slowly baking from within. I miss the roof of my old building in New York, where I used to sit in a beat-up old lawn chair, reading anything I could get my hands on.

And right on cue, just as summer was about to start, a friend told me about Book Mooch.

Have you seen this web site? Where you give away old books you don't want anymore and list the ones you want to read?

Every time you send one out, you get a point towards obtaining a book you want to read. The only cost is postage for sending books back and forth.

At first, I wondered if this was kosher, given I'm a published author, and make my living from the sale of new books only.

But finally, I realized that the endless circulation of books not only kept the spirit of reading alive, it may actually spur more sales. After all, I won't stop buying new books just because I may be able to get one for free some day.

I'm not that patient a reader, and not that patient a person.

June 19, 2008 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment

Summer Writing Workshops (with a Little Healing Thrown in For Fun)

Anyone in the mood for a different kind of summer writing workshop?

I'm offering two this summer, easily accessible from anywhere in the world. More details can be found by going to http://wakeuptoyourstories.com/Online_Workshops.html or checking out the press release below:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Becca Hornbuckle
Becca@AStoriedLife.com – email

A STORIED LIFE PUBLISHING ANNOUNCES NEW
SUMMER WORKSHOPS ON STORYTELLING & WEIGHT LOSS

(LOS ANGELES, CA)—(June 2, 2008)—A Storied Life Publishing announced today two new online workshops, conducted by Alyson Mead, bestselling author of Wake Up to Your Weight Loss.

“It becomes impossible for an author to travel everywhere to conduct workshops, especially during the summer,” said Noel Brinkerhoff, executive director of A Storied Life Publishing. “So we wanted to facilitate the availability of additional information for Alyson’s readers through the media of the Internet and teleseminars. We believe she’ll be able to help a lot of people to effect health and healing in their lives for years to come this way.”

Using a combination of guided meditations, follow up exercises and instruction on how to identify the internal stories people tell themselves all the time, usually without knowing it, Mead’s program helps readers identify emotional problems behind overeating, provides motivation for exercise and even helps them completely rewrite the story of their lives.

“Working with your stories not only provides an excellent opportunity to effect healing in all areas of your life, but makes any self-help program that much more personalized,” said Alyson Mead, author of Wake Up to Your Weight Loss. “I try to make my workshops fun and light-hearted, but also leave room for participants to discover something new about themselves. If I achieve that, I feel I’ve done my job well.”

The workshop, “Releasing Doubt: You Can Achieve Your Best Body,” will be held during four Wednesdays in July.

The next workshop, “The Wisdom of Transformation: Rewriting the Story of Your Life,” will be held on four Wednesdays in August.

All workshops are conducted using teleseminars, with participants calling in to a common phone number, and inputting a special code.

The cost of each workshop is $35. More information can be found by visiting http://wakeuptoyourstories.com/Online_Workshops.html.

June 4, 2008 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment

A Bestseller? Cool!

Wow, it's been a pretty eventful week. As writers, we know that most of the action normally takes place in our heads. Most of the ones I know seem to be waiting for the world to catch up to whatever's going on in their imaginations that week.

But when your second book comes out and is a bestseller before it even hits the warehouse? That's pretty cool -- the fulfillment of a longtime dream.

It's humbling, and all I can say is thanks, over and over and over.

Wake Up to Your Weight Loss has been a labor of love -- the culmination of work I've done with clients and in small groups over the past few years. I never expected to be on anyone's bestseller list for it. Not even in my wildest dreams.

Hey, we writers can be a hard-drinking, cynical bunch. We create, and other people get most of the money -- most of the time.

We shouldn't live for accolades just as we shouldn't live for bestseller lists. But to celebrate, even briefly, gives me a reason to go back to the blank page tomorrow.

A novel and then a screenplay -- that's what's next for me.

May 14, 2008 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment

Wake Up to Your Weight Loss Out Tomorrow

Just wanted to let you know that my second book, Wake Up to Your Weight Loss, will be released tomorrow, May 6th. It's available at Amazon, Target, as well as your favorite local bookseller (if you harass them gently but persistently).

It's been a labor of love in working with my own issues, as well as those of my clients over the past few years. The book combines meditation, follow up exercises and development of a personal storytelling practice to root out old, negative patterns related to food and eating, provide motivation for transformation as well as exercise, and help readers completely rewrite the stories of their lives. (More information is available at my web site: http://www.wakeuptoyourstories.com).

I'll also be holding two storytelling workshops over the summer by teleconference, so people can live literally anywhere in the world and still participate. One will be specific to weight loss and body issues, while the other will focus on welcoming transformation into your life.

Now you know why I've been so busy over the past several months!

May 5, 2008 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment

What the Fudge?

Say it ain't so. Tell me I'm dreaming.

After editors of several Lonely Planet guidebooks, said to be plagiarized or fabricated outright by writer Thomas Kohnstamm, now say he didn't lie as badly as he'd claimed, I'm not sure how to feel. The books are still valuable to travelers, or not? They're really savvy businesspeople, or they're not? In other words -- huh? Might want to address this issue going forward, folks.

Has publishing, once thought to be the bastion of taste, sunk this low?

Has the Paris Hilton Effect, a loose form of Borderline Personality Disorder, taken over every single aspect of our cultural lives?

Kohnstamm's clearly no dummy. He's just published a new book, courtesy of Three Rivers Press, detailing his victimhood as an underpaid (and apparently unmotivated) writer. Heck, maybe it's even good.

Under other circumstances, I might pick it up and laugh along, in the spirit of missing Hunter S. Thompson. But even he, it seems, would have had a problem with something this shamelessly ... icky.

After all, why did the "news" of this plagiarism break weeks before the book was to come out, not when it was originally discovered?

I think Anthony Bourdain is funny, too (so many in the media are comparing the two these days). But are the only stories worth publishing those of liars, cheaters and fabulists of all stripes?

I mean, what's really different between this and, say, Donald Rumsfeld's upcoming memoir, sure to be filled with convenient and self-serving recollections?

April 29, 2008 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment

Has Anyone Else Been Following This Story?

As a relatively rabid travel reader (and Travel Channel junkie), I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when Thomas Kohnstamm, co-author of a dozen Lonely Planet guides to Latin America and the Caribbean, admitted that he had plagiarized his work, and never even visited one of the locations he wrote about.

I've always wondered how travel writers, or even a small team of them, could cover so much ground, pay for semi-decent meals and hotel stays, and still make a profit on the book's release. Now it seems inevitable, especially in light of the seemingly daily admissions of made-up "facts" and misremembered "memories" by published authors, that it was all made up.

I'm trying not to take this personally (I mean, obviously it's not), but in a world where truth seems as malleable as one of those bendy straws, I started to wonder:

Is travel so unneeded as to warrant no system of checks and balances to fact-check writers' work? Has it passed into the "buyer beware" realm, along with various other luxury goods? And are books themselves such "product" that we've forgotten how they can move our insides, change our outsides, and give us enough perspective so that anything, really anything, is possible?

God, I hope not.

Here's a link to the original story, if you haven't read about it yet:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/14/usa.travelleisure?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

April 14, 2008 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment

Wake Up to Your Weight Loss Release

I'm way behind in mentioning this, but thought I would put it out there. My second book -- Wake Up to Your Weight Loss -- springs from workshops I've held in the past, with people looking to combine storytelling, healing and weight loss. It's coming out in about 6 weeks, on May 6th, and will be available from most booksellers. (If not, ask them to order it for you!)

Here's the press release from my publicist. Thanks for listening.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Becca Hornbuckle
Becca@AStoriedLife.com – email

A STORIED LIFE PUBLISHING ANNOUNCES RELEASE OF WAKE UP TO YOUR WEIGHT LOSS

(LOS ANGELES, CA)—(March 26, 2008)—A Storied Life Publishing announced today the release of Wake Up to Your Weight Loss: Using the Art of Personal Narrative to Achieve Your Best Body on May 6, 2008.

“There are truly no accidents,” said Noel Brinkerhoff, executive director of A Storied Life Publishing. “Just as the news about record levels of obesity was hitting the newsstands, Alyson Mead’s Wake Up to Your Weight Loss crossed my desk. Personally, I know dozens of people who are trying to lose weight in a conscious manner, without buying into all of the crazy diet myths out there. I believe this book can really help people achieve the body that works best for them, no matter what their circumstances.”

Using a combination of guided meditations, follow up exercises and instruction on how to identify the internal stories people tell themselves all the time, usually without knowing it, Mead’s program helps readers identify emotional problems behind overeating, provides motivation for exercise and even helps them completely rewrite the story of their lives.

“Overall health is important to me for several reasons,” said Alyson Mead, author of Wake Up to Your Weight Loss. “It’s the baseline from which we all operate, the place that has to be OK if we’re going to achieve anything more. It’s clear to me, from personal experience, that diets just don’t work. Only by dealing with the emotional aspects of weight gain, and eventually weight loss, in conjunction with healthier food choices and exercise can there be real and lasting results. I believe that’s how the Buddha would approach dieting, if he were around today.”

Mead is the author of the critically acclaimed Wake Up to Your Stories. Her fiction, essays and articles have been published in over 30 publications, including Salon.com, In These Times, The Sun, Whole Life Times, Spirit and the New York Daily News. She has received the Columbine Award for Screenwriting, the Roy W. Dean Filmmaking Grant and a Writer’s Digest Award.

The book will be released through Amazon and major book retailers. Review copies are available by email request to Becca Hornbuckle at Becca@AStoriedLife.com.

Mead is available for interviews.

March 28, 2008 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Add Comment