Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 132
September 15, 2017
72-hour FREE access to SELF-PUBLISHING MASTERY SUMMIT ONLINE Videos!
SELF-PUBLISHING MASTERY SUMMIT ONLINE
Today's sessions will:get you one step closer to your writing goals,help you master the self-publishing process, teach you the best marketing strategies and tactics that will boost sales and visibility, take you through a step-by-step process of launching your book with 100+ Amazon reviews,show you how to write an award-winning book.
For the next 72 hours, the access to our event is FREE. However, if you want permanent access to the videos and mp3s - yes, you will be able to listen to the interviews during your commute or when you exercise on the treadmill, after the 72-hour FREE access then I recommend grabbing the ALL ACCESS PASS. You can still get it today at a huge (50%) discount! Press here for your instant access to the ALL ACCESS PASS . Only $59 (instead of $119).
More Story Merchant Books September Amazon eBook Deals!
FREE September 16 - September 20!Texas Hard by Echo Enders
In the midst of her emotional trip Adrienne meets two ranch hands and both have a lot to offer a girl but trusting the wrong man could surely spell trouble.
For Adrienne Carl, Miami is home, but jumping across the Gulf to visit family in Texas is usually a treat. Until her uncle dies unexpectedly, mysteriously, and she’s left as executor.
In the midst of her emotional trip she meets two ranch hands that worked for her uncle, Lane, and both have a lot to offer a girl. One promises to be a fantastic lay and reliever of stress; the other offers the to be the "hard to handle" cowboy fantasy of her dreams. Both are powerful and dangerous, handsome and built, and not at all shy about what they pack, but what to do…better yet, who to do?
www.amazon.com/dp/B00TKM8BUU
FREE September 19 - September 23Larry D. Thompson’s The Insanity Plea
A spell-binding tale of four amateur sleuths who must find, track and trap a serial killer before the clock clicks down to a guilty verdict for an innocent man.
A young nurse is savagely killed on Galveston’s seawall. The murderer slices her running shorts from her body as his trophy and tosses her over the wall to the rocks below.
As dawn breaks, a bedraggled street person, wearing four layers of old, tattered clothes, emerges from the end of the jetty, waving his arms and talking to people only he hears. He trips over the body, checks for a pulse and, instead, finds a diamond bracelet which he puts in his pocket. He hurries across the street, heading for breakfast at the Salvation Army two blocks away, leaving his footprints in blood as he goes.
www.amazon.com/dp/B00K60LZE4
FREE September 22 - September 26!Kenneth Atchity’s Classical Greek Reader
Scholarly commentary on the nuances of Greek writing fills library shelves, even entire libraries. Yet nothing can take the place of the documents themselves. The Classical Greek Reader marks an exciting departure from the traditional anthology approach to Greek literature and thought. By focusing not only on the big names but also on the less-familiar voices--the women, doctors, storytellers, herbalists, and romance writers--we are offered a glimpse of ancient Greece as we have rarely seen it.
www.amazon.com/dp/B00ONXTPSI
FREE September 25 - September 29Western Lights by Andrew Furst
Western Lights is a collection of essays from the viewpoint of a Western Buddhist teacher. It speaks about Eastern concepts like karma, hope, attachment, and amptiness from a personal perspective and in terms familiar to Americans. They’re grounded in subject matter familiar to Americans like politics, science, psychology, heaven, and nature.
www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTO9XJ6
September 14, 2017
JST DAVID Receives Inaugural Dan Ireland Scholarship
David Jones II, aka JST DAVIDSinger-songwriter David Jones II, aka "JST DAVID" has been awarded the inaugural Dan Ireland Memorial Scholarship by the Louisiana International Film Festival (LIFF) and the Dan Ireland Legacy Committee.
He will use the scholarship towards a private listening event for the album hosted by LIFF at the Peppermint Club in Hollywood, CA on Saturday, September 23rd. David will be performing two shows scheduled at 4:00PM and 6:00PM. Doors will open at 3:00PM. More information and RSVP online are available here, or click the ticket below:
Notable industry RSVP's include Russ Regan - former President of Motown, UNI, Polygram and 20th Century Records. Regan is one of two individuals in the music industry to ever sell over one billion records as an executive, discovering and breaking artists such as The Beach Boys, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Barry White, and many others. He currently serves as Executive Consultant to JST DAVID, alongside Executive Producer Michael Winchester - saxophonist, musical director and the creator of "Motown 45".
JST DAVID has been involved with LIFF and the Mentorship Program for several years, performing at LIFF's annual film festival in Baton Rouge in 2016 & 2017. His debut album "Day One" is slated for release in October, which was co-written and produced by Grammy nominated, multi-platinum producer Preston Glass.
Dan IrelandDan Ireland resided in Los Angeles, CA, and was a revered mentor to a countless number of acclaimed actors, directors, music composers, producers, writers and more, serving as Artistic Director of LIFF from its inception in 2012 until his untimely death in 2016.
In celebration of his legacy, the Louisiana International Film Festival & Mentorship Program (LIFF) along with generous Patrons created the scholarship commemorating Ireland's dedication to new talent, storytellers and visionaries. Louisiana artists and filmmakers are eligible for consideration, and funds from the scholarship are dedicated towards an event, showcase or internship in Los Angeles on the recipient's behalf.
For sponsorship opportunities for brands & businesses for the September 23rd event in Los Angeles, call Peggy McDonald at 310-709-2851, or email peggy@lifilmfest.org.
The Louisiana International Film Festival & Mentorship Program (LIFF) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 2011 dedicated to the development of Louisiana's film, music and innovation talent and representation of that talent to the world via the annual Louisiana International Film Festival & Mentorship Program (LIFF), Louisiana Film Society and Special Events. LIFF aims to provide a platform where talent can foster ideas, skills and relationships that enable them to fulfill their full potential as artists and innovators.
LIFF has hosted luminaries in the industry, such as Academy Award-Winning Actress Renee Zellweger (JERRY MAGUIRE, THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD), Vincent D'Onofrio (FULL METAL JACKET, BROKEN HORSES), Academy Award-Nominated Actress Sally Kirkland (ANNA), Christy Turlington Burns (GIVING BIRTH IN AMERICA), Kelsey Grammer (FRASIER, BREAKING THE BANK), Academy Award-Winning Cinematographer Maro Fiore (AVATAR, TRAINING DAY), Princess Shaw (PRESENTING PRINCESS SHAW), Bernard Rose (CANDYMAN, IMMORTAL BELOVED, FRANKENSTEIN, THE DEVIL&'S VIOLINIST), Xavier Samuel (THE TWILIGHT SAGA, FRANKENSTEIN), Leslie Zemeckis (BOUND BY FLESH), Academy Award-Winning Documentary Short Team Jeff Consiglio (LIFE ACCORDING TO SAM, INOCENTE), Library of Congress Photographer Bob Adelman (1963 Retrospective Exhibit), Emily Best (CEO Seed & Spark), Chris Garrity (Head of Innovation for Superbowl), Iman Sadeghi (Google), Scout Raskin (Comedy Central) and many more.
LIFF 2018 is scheduled to host a showcase of world class film, music and educational programming April 12-15, 2018 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
September 13, 2017
What do you get when you give a design tool a digital nervous system?
Computers that improve our ability to think and imagine, and robotic systems that come up with (and build) radical new designs for bridges, cars, drones and much more -- all by themselves. Take a tour of the Augmented Age with futurist Maurice Conti and preview a time when robots and humans will work side-by-side to accomplish things neither could do alone.
September 11, 2017
Fran Lewis: Just reviews/MJ magazine Reviews Rat Pack Party Girl: Jane McCormick with Patti Wicklund
From her 1960s sexcapades with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Vic Damone, to sex-trade survivor and women's advocate the former Rat Pack high-roller tells a wrenching story of endurance!
Some stories are told with passion, heart and feeling. Some stories need to be told in order to enlighten the world about events that might not always be in the headlines of a newspaper or a newscast but need to be brought to the public. This story needs to be told and retold so that women, children, young boys and girls, young adults become aware of the pitfalls of falling for the lies, deceits, deceptions and unsavory behaviors of those that would prey on the weaknesses of others.
In 2007 Jane McCormick's perspective on life took on a different turn and Jane would decide to write a book called Breaking her Silence: Confessions of a Rat Pack Party Girl and Sex Trade Survivor. The title was Patti’s idea and a good one. Printing over 2000 copies and things changed greatly as the interviews came and Jane met with FBI agents, law enforcement agencies and more hoping to help other women. Jane explains how she and Patti have helped other women, dealt with her adversities and had the courage, bravery and forethought to come out and tell this story.
This is a story that although some of the scenes are graphic and the language strong should be read by young adults and adults starting out in life teaching them what never to do. Never let anyone own you body and soul. Never become someone you are not. Never let anyone tell you that you are worthless and never stay silent when someone abuses you. Schools need to be more vigilant, parents need to be more aware and Jane your story needed to be told.
Some women wind up with STD’S, AIDS, and other communicable diseases some just give up. Jane chose to stand tall and look herself in the mirror and be able to realize she is special, she counts and most of all deserves the admiration of so many for telling this amazing first hand account of what happens when you have to do anything to survive. Told in narrative form and told with heart and soul this book deserves
FIVE GOLDEN STARS.
Fran Lewis: Just reviews/MJ magazine
Some stories are told with passion, heart and feeling. Some stories need to be told in order to enlighten the world about events that might not always be in the headlines of a newspaper or a newscast but need to be brought to the public. This story needs to be told and retold so that women, children, young boys and girls, young adults become aware of the pitfalls of falling for the lies, deceits, deceptions and unsavory behaviors of those that would prey on the weaknesses of others.
In 2007 Jane McCormick's perspective on life took on a different turn and Jane would decide to write a book called Breaking her Silence: Confessions of a Rat Pack Party Girl and Sex Trade Survivor. The title was Patti’s idea and a good one. Printing over 2000 copies and things changed greatly as the interviews came and Jane met with FBI agents, law enforcement agencies and more hoping to help other women. Jane explains how she and Patti have helped other women, dealt with her adversities and had the courage, bravery and forethought to come out and tell this story.
This is a story that although some of the scenes are graphic and the language strong should be read by young adults and adults starting out in life teaching them what never to do. Never let anyone own you body and soul. Never become someone you are not. Never let anyone tell you that you are worthless and never stay silent when someone abuses you. Schools need to be more vigilant, parents need to be more aware and Jane your story needed to be told.
Some women wind up with STD’S, AIDS, and other communicable diseases some just give up. Jane chose to stand tall and look herself in the mirror and be able to realize she is special, she counts and most of all deserves the admiration of so many for telling this amazing first hand account of what happens when you have to do anything to survive. Told in narrative form and told with heart and soul this book deserves
FIVE GOLDEN STARS.
Fran Lewis: Just reviews/MJ magazine
September 9, 2017
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Discusses Dennis Palumbo's Therapy Practice with Writers in the Latest Issue of the Authors Guild Bulletin
The Writing Life The Enemy Within 
Most writers I know, from rank beginners to seasoned professionals, give themselves a hard time one way or another, at one time or another. We’re not good enough writers, we procrastinate too long, we worry over how what we’re working on is going to turn out. When we get notes back from friends we asked to read our drafts, our hackles go up and we experience everything from shame to embarrassment to anger. Sound familiar?
Los Angeles psychotherapist and author Dennis Palumbo has heard it all. Writers make up 80 to 90 percent of his practice. The rest work in other creative fields, so he deals with these issues every day of his working life.
Palumbo is a former writer for screen (My Favorite Year) and TV (Welcome Back, Kotter) and the author of Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within (Wiley). He has published a collection of short stories, is currently working on his fifth Daniel Rinaldi mystery novel for Poisoned Pen Press and writes a column for PsychologyToday.com.
Palumbo was a successful screenwriter having his best year financially when he decided to leave screenwriting to become a therapist. While in Nepal working on a Robert Redford film on mountain climbing, he had what he calls “a little bit of a Razor’s Edge experience.” He returned home, started seeing a therapist and began taking psychology classes. He had no intention of becoming a therapist, he says, but decided it wasn’t a bad idea for a writer to have a master’s degree in psychology. As part of his training, he ran a group therapy session for schizophrenics. He was meeting with a producer about a movie the producer wanted him to write when his thoughts drifted to his patients and triggered a second insight. “I had a Road to Damascus moment and thought, I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Twenty-eight years later, he’s a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in creative issues and has no regrets. He continues to write, but only what he loves. He spends most days with patients and their issues: writers’ block, procrastination, anxiety, the inner critic, author envy and more. During his lunch hour, he writes fiction.
It will likely come as no surprise to hear that writers’ block is the most consistent of patient concerns. No matter how many successes writers have, he says, they suspect their success is a fluke. “With the next thing they write,” he says, “they’re sure they’re going to be found out.” He tries to impress upon patients the fact that writing is hard — very hard — and he encourages them to resist making themselves the problem. “What writers are trying to do is difficult,” says Palumbo, “and the difficulty is not a referendum on their character or their talent.” It’s easy, he adds, “to imagine that you alone suffer from this fear, that Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, name your favorite writer — never struggled with it.”
And when writers are having a hard time, or thinking too much about the future of their writing, it can lead to procrastination. “If you’ve had good reception to your first book and are afraid of the critical reception you imagine awaits your second book, you’ll procrastinate.” And while you may think you’re procrastinating because you need to know exactly what you’re going to write before you begin, in Palumbo’s view, it’s more often caused by fear of self-exposure. “For many people, the smaller shame of procrastinating is better than the bigger shame of what people are going to say about you when the work is done.”
As with most issues writers bring to him, he reduces that fear to “family of origin” issues. How you take criticism is a direct offshoot of how you experienced criticism as a child and echoes the messages your parents gave you as to your inner worth. It’s up to the writer how that criticism is interpreted and personalized. “A parent can say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ and one kid laughs it off while another crumbles. If you come from a family where you were highly criticized, criticism is horrible. If you were praised to the sky, you will also find criticism extraordinarily hard and painful.”
The more a writer understands that criticism is subjective, that it’s the opinion of someone with different artistic or commercial goals, the less it’s seen as a critique of you as a person. “But,” says Palumbo, “we’re all human and it’s very difficult not to take criticism personally. When an agent of mine once said I shouldn’t take the rejection of a script of mine personally, I said, ‘How should I take it — impersonally?’”
Which is one reason he says screenwriters are the unhappiest writers. Apart from not owning the copyright to their work, screenwriters must deal both with too many people who have script approval over them and with the stream of notes that continually churn the writer’s original story, something that rarely happens with fiction. The number-one horror of being a screenwriter, Palumbo says, is that “the writer is removed from his or her unconscious and begins to accommodate the studio or the star. The screenwriter, who knows the most about the story and character, and has labored hardest, sees his or her work changed in a minute. I was in advertising before I became a screenwriter and screenwriting is a lot like the advertising business. People come to Hollywood looking for an approving parent,” he says, “and that’s the worst place to find one.”
Unlike a novel, the screenplay structure is unforgiving. “Structure is everything and every scene has to move the movie forward. Movies are mostly plot driven and the director is king. The best stuff for writers now is on television. It’s character driven, like novels. In TV, the writer is king. Every screenwriter in my practice is developing TV projects.”
Writer envy — and worship — rarely yield happy results. “So many writers come in and say, ‘I’m no John Updike,’ and I say, ‘That job has been filled by John Updike so be the best you can be.’” Because “if you think that Hemingway was a great writer and that you’re a piece of crap, it’s going to be hard starting your next novel.” Smart writers compare themselves to themselves rather than to someone else. And one of the many self-defeating forms of comparison is thinking you don’t have an interesting enough life to be a writer. One of my favorite chapters in Writing from the Inside Out is “Write About Dogs.” It’s a takeoff on an old Booth cartoon and it has to do with using who you are as the raw materials for your work. “The thing about writing,” says Palumbo, “is no matter how particular or idiosyncratic your story is, it can generalize out to everyone. You didn’t have to grow up in Dublin to understand Angela’s Ashes. Ray Bradbury said there’s only one story in the world and it’s your story.”
Many writers believe that self-aggrandizement is a lousy quality and that it’s better to be humble. Humility is great, Palumbo says, but “successful artists of all stripes need a good amount of healthy narcissism. At some level, it has to feel urgent.” And if you don’t believe in you, who will? He goes on to say that writers should feel like that five-year-old coming home with a drawing: If you draw it, it has to go on the wall. The same goes for writing. It has to feel like a calling. You feel good when you write and bad when you don’t. “Annie Dillard said if you write long enough, your body changes on a cellular level, so if you’re not writing, it feels wrong.”
That belief in the writing self is paramount. No matter when you started writing, you need that belief in yourself to be able to withstand rejection and all of the other obstacles the writing life brings. Writers who started at a young age usually see themselves more clearly as writers than those who come to writing later. But those who’ve had success in another profession can bring the same skill set, work habits and self-regard to writing that got them through med school or law school. “There is no one answer,” says Palumbo. “What motivates or hamstrings one writer is not the same for all writers. There’s no ‘one size fits all.’ I say keep giving them you until you is what they want. I see so many patients who say they want to write the next big seller. When The Da Vinci Code came out, a lot of my patients wanted to write that. When you do that, you’re dead. The best thing is to write your own reality. If it’s your karma, the powers that be will want that. We all know stories of authors who’ve written books we love that were rejected by dozens of publishers.”
The goal of therapy, says Palumbo, is self-awareness, to be aware of the behaviors that are tripping you up. “I say insight is the booby prize of therapy. People don’t change with insight. People change with courage. You have to coexist with that which makes you anxious. You can be anxious or fearful that what you’re writing is not any good, but you write it anyway. If you sit around waiting to feel confident, you’ve got a long wait.”
So does perseverance pay off? In his 28 years of practicing psychotherapy, Palumbo says he’s never had a patient not achieve an element of his or her dreams. It may be that the person who wanted to be a TV writer ended up writing a web series. The would-be novelist becomes a successful writer of nonfiction books.
“It may not be everything you want, but the ultimate goal for a writer is to develop a healthy relationship with his or her own writing process. Agents come and go, publishers come and go, trends come and go, but having a profound, intimate relationship with process is the best protection there is. It’s the only thing that sustains.”
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is a writer in Southern California. She is the host of Writers on Writing on KUCI-FM and teaches at Gotham Writer’s Workshop. She has noir fiction in USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series and her book, Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within is in its 11th printing.
Read more
Most writers I know, from rank beginners to seasoned professionals, give themselves a hard time one way or another, at one time or another. We’re not good enough writers, we procrastinate too long, we worry over how what we’re working on is going to turn out. When we get notes back from friends we asked to read our drafts, our hackles go up and we experience everything from shame to embarrassment to anger. Sound familiar?
Los Angeles psychotherapist and author Dennis Palumbo has heard it all. Writers make up 80 to 90 percent of his practice. The rest work in other creative fields, so he deals with these issues every day of his working life.
Palumbo is a former writer for screen (My Favorite Year) and TV (Welcome Back, Kotter) and the author of Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within (Wiley). He has published a collection of short stories, is currently working on his fifth Daniel Rinaldi mystery novel for Poisoned Pen Press and writes a column for PsychologyToday.com.
Palumbo was a successful screenwriter having his best year financially when he decided to leave screenwriting to become a therapist. While in Nepal working on a Robert Redford film on mountain climbing, he had what he calls “a little bit of a Razor’s Edge experience.” He returned home, started seeing a therapist and began taking psychology classes. He had no intention of becoming a therapist, he says, but decided it wasn’t a bad idea for a writer to have a master’s degree in psychology. As part of his training, he ran a group therapy session for schizophrenics. He was meeting with a producer about a movie the producer wanted him to write when his thoughts drifted to his patients and triggered a second insight. “I had a Road to Damascus moment and thought, I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Twenty-eight years later, he’s a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in creative issues and has no regrets. He continues to write, but only what he loves. He spends most days with patients and their issues: writers’ block, procrastination, anxiety, the inner critic, author envy and more. During his lunch hour, he writes fiction.
It will likely come as no surprise to hear that writers’ block is the most consistent of patient concerns. No matter how many successes writers have, he says, they suspect their success is a fluke. “With the next thing they write,” he says, “they’re sure they’re going to be found out.” He tries to impress upon patients the fact that writing is hard — very hard — and he encourages them to resist making themselves the problem. “What writers are trying to do is difficult,” says Palumbo, “and the difficulty is not a referendum on their character or their talent.” It’s easy, he adds, “to imagine that you alone suffer from this fear, that Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, name your favorite writer — never struggled with it.”
And when writers are having a hard time, or thinking too much about the future of their writing, it can lead to procrastination. “If you’ve had good reception to your first book and are afraid of the critical reception you imagine awaits your second book, you’ll procrastinate.” And while you may think you’re procrastinating because you need to know exactly what you’re going to write before you begin, in Palumbo’s view, it’s more often caused by fear of self-exposure. “For many people, the smaller shame of procrastinating is better than the bigger shame of what people are going to say about you when the work is done.”
As with most issues writers bring to him, he reduces that fear to “family of origin” issues. How you take criticism is a direct offshoot of how you experienced criticism as a child and echoes the messages your parents gave you as to your inner worth. It’s up to the writer how that criticism is interpreted and personalized. “A parent can say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ and one kid laughs it off while another crumbles. If you come from a family where you were highly criticized, criticism is horrible. If you were praised to the sky, you will also find criticism extraordinarily hard and painful.”
The more a writer understands that criticism is subjective, that it’s the opinion of someone with different artistic or commercial goals, the less it’s seen as a critique of you as a person. “But,” says Palumbo, “we’re all human and it’s very difficult not to take criticism personally. When an agent of mine once said I shouldn’t take the rejection of a script of mine personally, I said, ‘How should I take it — impersonally?’”
Which is one reason he says screenwriters are the unhappiest writers. Apart from not owning the copyright to their work, screenwriters must deal both with too many people who have script approval over them and with the stream of notes that continually churn the writer’s original story, something that rarely happens with fiction. The number-one horror of being a screenwriter, Palumbo says, is that “the writer is removed from his or her unconscious and begins to accommodate the studio or the star. The screenwriter, who knows the most about the story and character, and has labored hardest, sees his or her work changed in a minute. I was in advertising before I became a screenwriter and screenwriting is a lot like the advertising business. People come to Hollywood looking for an approving parent,” he says, “and that’s the worst place to find one.”
Unlike a novel, the screenplay structure is unforgiving. “Structure is everything and every scene has to move the movie forward. Movies are mostly plot driven and the director is king. The best stuff for writers now is on television. It’s character driven, like novels. In TV, the writer is king. Every screenwriter in my practice is developing TV projects.”
Writer envy — and worship — rarely yield happy results. “So many writers come in and say, ‘I’m no John Updike,’ and I say, ‘That job has been filled by John Updike so be the best you can be.’” Because “if you think that Hemingway was a great writer and that you’re a piece of crap, it’s going to be hard starting your next novel.” Smart writers compare themselves to themselves rather than to someone else. And one of the many self-defeating forms of comparison is thinking you don’t have an interesting enough life to be a writer. One of my favorite chapters in Writing from the Inside Out is “Write About Dogs.” It’s a takeoff on an old Booth cartoon and it has to do with using who you are as the raw materials for your work. “The thing about writing,” says Palumbo, “is no matter how particular or idiosyncratic your story is, it can generalize out to everyone. You didn’t have to grow up in Dublin to understand Angela’s Ashes. Ray Bradbury said there’s only one story in the world and it’s your story.”
Many writers believe that self-aggrandizement is a lousy quality and that it’s better to be humble. Humility is great, Palumbo says, but “successful artists of all stripes need a good amount of healthy narcissism. At some level, it has to feel urgent.” And if you don’t believe in you, who will? He goes on to say that writers should feel like that five-year-old coming home with a drawing: If you draw it, it has to go on the wall. The same goes for writing. It has to feel like a calling. You feel good when you write and bad when you don’t. “Annie Dillard said if you write long enough, your body changes on a cellular level, so if you’re not writing, it feels wrong.”
That belief in the writing self is paramount. No matter when you started writing, you need that belief in yourself to be able to withstand rejection and all of the other obstacles the writing life brings. Writers who started at a young age usually see themselves more clearly as writers than those who come to writing later. But those who’ve had success in another profession can bring the same skill set, work habits and self-regard to writing that got them through med school or law school. “There is no one answer,” says Palumbo. “What motivates or hamstrings one writer is not the same for all writers. There’s no ‘one size fits all.’ I say keep giving them you until you is what they want. I see so many patients who say they want to write the next big seller. When The Da Vinci Code came out, a lot of my patients wanted to write that. When you do that, you’re dead. The best thing is to write your own reality. If it’s your karma, the powers that be will want that. We all know stories of authors who’ve written books we love that were rejected by dozens of publishers.”
The goal of therapy, says Palumbo, is self-awareness, to be aware of the behaviors that are tripping you up. “I say insight is the booby prize of therapy. People don’t change with insight. People change with courage. You have to coexist with that which makes you anxious. You can be anxious or fearful that what you’re writing is not any good, but you write it anyway. If you sit around waiting to feel confident, you’ve got a long wait.”
So does perseverance pay off? In his 28 years of practicing psychotherapy, Palumbo says he’s never had a patient not achieve an element of his or her dreams. It may be that the person who wanted to be a TV writer ended up writing a web series. The would-be novelist becomes a successful writer of nonfiction books.
“It may not be everything you want, but the ultimate goal for a writer is to develop a healthy relationship with his or her own writing process. Agents come and go, publishers come and go, trends come and go, but having a profound, intimate relationship with process is the best protection there is. It’s the only thing that sustains.”
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is a writer in Southern California. She is the host of Writers on Writing on KUCI-FM and teaches at Gotham Writer’s Workshop. She has noir fiction in USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series and her book, Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within is in its 11th printing.
Read more
September 8, 2017
September 7, 2017
What do you get when you give a design tool a digital nervous system?
Computers that improve our ability to think and imagine, and robotic systems that come up with (and build) radical new designs for bridges, cars, drones and much more -- all by themselves. Take a tour of the Augmented Age with futurist Maurice Conti and preview a time when robots and humans will work side-by-side to accomplish things neither could do alone.
