Steven Barnes's Blog, page 39
November 8, 2017
Join me for Lifewriting Live tomorrow!
I conducted the first Lifewriting “Inner Circle” teleconference Sunday, with the people from the “Five Minute Life Hacks” program. While only members participated directly, I think there were valuable things for everyone, and wanted to make the recording available:
http://recordings.talkshoe.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/TC-137903/TS-1218948.mp3
Enjoy!
Steve
(if you haven’t signed up for the free “Week long mental diet” course, you can get it at:
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The Seven Day Mental Diet
“Make up your mind to devote one week solely to the task of building a new habit of thought, and during that week let everything in life be unimportant as compared with that. If you will do so, then that week will be the most significant week in your whole life. It will literally be the turning’ point for you. If you will do so, it is safe to say that your whole life will change for the better. In fact, nothing can possibly remain the same.”
–Emmett Fox, “The Seven Day Mental Diet”
Some tim...
November 7, 2017
“Right” hand, “Left” hand
Artists create something they love, and hope they can sell it. Businesspeople find an existing market and create something for it. These two positions feel antagonistic. It is why Producers often feel that Writers are children, and Writers feel that producers and publishers are philistines. They speak different languages.
The trick is to see where the circles (what you want, what the audience wants) overlaps, and write there. The luckiest among us do this instinctively. But if you d...
Healing a Family
About a year ago, I worked with a student who had messed up his relationship with his family, and felt deep shame and fear about his perceived failures in this arena.
The ANCIENT CHILD was part of my advice to him.
1) Focus on the Heartbeat Meditation, listening and “feeling” your heartbeat for 15-20 minutes at a time. This helps him work on loving and forgiving himself, necessary to begin the healing.
2) Bring the “Child Self” into focus, and with your non-dominant hand, write down whatever...
November 6, 2017
Psychology as Quantum Sociology
I think one of the worst things about child abuse is that the child is neurologically programmed to love their parents and family. Abuse is intertwined with that imprinting, so that they cannot focus anger at its rightful target in a healthy way. It turns inward, destroying the victim, creating patterns of ugly relationship choices. The victim can hear the abuser’s voice in their mind, and mistake it for their own. They can become self-destructive, while still trying to be a “good boy” or “g...
November 5, 2017
“Brawl In Cell Block 99” (20017)
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The American film that comes the closest to “The Raid” might well be “Brawl on Cell Block 99” starring Vince Vaughn (!) as Bradley Thomas, a small-time criminal and former boxer who has to commit an impossible assassination of a man in a maximum security prison or his wife (Jennifer Carpenter) and unborn child will suffer horribly. The movie, by “Bone Tomahawk” director S. Craig Zahler, is a slow-burning stick of dynamite, a genuinely nasty piece of work that is beyond “R” level in terms o...
November 4, 2017
Crossed the finish line!
Wow. I just put day 102 into queue in the “Five Minute Life Hacks” (hey, who knows what the program will be called eventually? Labels aren’t as important as content. “Five Minute M.A.G.I.C.” perhaps? Hmmm.) program. I can finally take a deep breath, slow down and focus on other aspects. Yes, I have about fifty more subjects I want to evaluate, but unless I was doing a Year Long program, I don’t think more than 120 is useful. People need to see an end to the process, so 101-110 will probably b...
November 3, 2017
What Can I do?
When I was a kid, (almost) everyone told me that EVERYTHING I wanted was out of reach.
My parents were divorced: I wanted love.
I was small and weak: I wanted to be a martial artist.
My father had failed in his artistic career. There WERE no black people in SF (so far as I could see). I wanted to be a writer.
No hope. No role models. No support.
But my mom played “Think and Grow Rich” and “The Power of Positive Thinking” and “Psycho Cybernetics” and on and on in endless loops and it got i...
How Do You Know If You’re A Snake?
I saw a thread discussing intellectual property, and file-sharing. As always, there were those who defended file-sharing, and their allies, those who pretend not to defend it, but attack anyone who attacks it. Cute.
One suggested that there is a twelve-year-old boy who can’t afford to read a Steven Barnes book, and that that is a legitimate arena with fuzzy morality. Isn’t it all right if that twelve year old downloads and then becomes a fan down the road…
He’s not hurting anything...
October 31, 2017
It Isn’t Always Fun
(continuing to put five days of Five Minute Life Hacks into queue every day. Whew! Re-purposing the original 101 program, now that its been tested for a decade, is both challenge and opportunity. The following is from day 60)
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A writing student once asked me:
“I find it extremley lonely to sit in a room – alone – and write anything. I feel I am missing something, soemwhere, I should be doing something else – anything: TV, surfing the internet.. It’s as if I will do anything to avoid...
