Archive for the ‘The Word Cauldron’ Category

Owning Your Shadow Part 3

link to YouTube video: https://youtu.be/t0lWFrO55vg

While in the throes of the creative process, have you ever tried to force a creation to turn out a certain way?  Have you ever tried to force a story to follow a particular path?  Probably you have.  Probably we all have.  I know I have.  Now, have you ever tried to force a dream to turn out a certain way?  Probably not.  I know there’s such a thing as lucid dreaming—which sounds like wonderful fun if you can manage it—but most of us can’t do that.  And although being able to guide an occasional dream would be entertaining and possibly therapeutic in the case of repetitive nightmares, I don’t think I would want all my dreams to be lucid.  Not even close.

Why is that?  Because I consider dreams to be messages from the subconscious, and I already exert my conscious will over my subconscious in waking life quite enough as it is.  We need our conscious will to maintain some semblance of sanity and manage our everyday lives—it’s impossible to act in the world and relate to others in a productive and peaceful way if we lack a conscious will.  However, if the conscious will grows too large and overpowering, with a loud, bossy voice, it becomes a bully, desperate to control all our impulses and ideas, particularly those that originate in the subconscious.  The conscious will is plan-ful and goal-directed; it likes to know what’s coming next, and it hates surprises.  It doesn’t gamble.  It doesn’t take risks unless it knows the outcome, which defeats the definition of risk, but the conscious will doesn’t understand that irony.  The conscious will believes in the illusion of safety and security, believes that if you follow the steps properly and do task A and task B and task C correctly and in the right order, that you will always receive the proper reward for your efforts.

The conscious will just wishes the subconscious would go away.  The subconscious is the unknown and therefore unpredictable, and the conscious will always views the unpredictable as suspect and dangerous.  To the conscious will, the unpredictable will always be the shark, the earthquake, the killer in the dark alley.  The conscious will has no curiosity and no notion of adventure.  The conscious will is Bilbo Baggins at the beginning of The Hobbit .

But always, seething under all this peace and safety and predictability is the subconscious.  The subconscious knows the peace and safety and predictability is an illusion, fine enough in its way, but a bit boring.  And it can’t last.  It can never last.  No matter how plan-ful you are, no matter how well you follow the rules and check off the approved tasks, death and chaos will still come knocking at the door one day.

The conscious will blinds itself to this dread eventuality, as it should.  The conscious will is a necessary tool—we need it to navigate the outer world and interact in a predictable and productive way with our fellow human beings.  The illusions of security and safety it provides allow us to move forward, mostly unaware of larger realities—in a strange way, in all its plan-fulness and goal-setting, the conscious will can be the Fool of the Tarot deck, blissfully going forward over a cliff because it has done everything correctly and trusts ticking all the proper boxes will guarantee its success no matter what lurks at the bottom of that cliff it doesn’t see.

The conscious will would deride this comparison.  Clearly, the Fool is that pesky subconscious.  Anything foolish and reckless and bad belongs to the wicked subconscious, always leading the poor beleaguered conscious will astray.  That’s how the conscious will sees it anyway, because the conscious will is a master of projection.  An outsized conscious will can take its bullying, lack of understanding, lack of nuance, its black and white thinking, its irrational belief in the illusion of control, and project it all on the subconscious.  The conscious will seeks to escape its anxiety over the unpredictable unknown by immediately categorizing and labeling everything it encounters.  It cannot tolerate mystery.  It cannot tolerate blurred edges.  It cannot tolerate the past or the future.  Mystery, blurred edges, the past, and the future indicate places where the conscious will cannot exert even an illusion of control.  What the conscious will cannot control, it cannot understand.  The conscious will experiences these places as terrifying voids, an all-encompassing and devouring darkness.  Why would anyone want to understand such a frightening place?  Is it any wonder the conscious will projects all its unacceptable impulses and wicked ways onto this dark unknown?  What it cannot control, it rejects and demonizes—or rejects and idealizes.  Demonization and idealization are opposite sides of the same coin.  Neither process cares about the actual truth, but about what the conscious will wants the truth to be.

An example of this would be our obsession with doomsday scenarios, both religious and secular.  The future terrifies us because it’s ultimately unknowable and unpredictable.  To deal with this terror, my conscious will could take practical action in the present moment to make it less so—for instance, I could have a month’s worth of emergency supplies on hand.  A month’s supply seems like a reasonable amount, an amount that will allow me to go out in the world and not worry so much about a future I cannot control.  However, if my conscious will is outsized and louder than it should be, this month’s supply will not quell my anxiety about the future.  Instead, I will fantasize many disastrous scenarios, each worse than the last, and because it’s impossible to prepare ahead for every possible outcome—our brains are far too puny to handle such a multiverse, our mortal lives far too short to encompass every outcome—our consciousness falsely attributes various causes to various effects in an attempt to control the uncontrollable and often conflates correlation with causation.  We see the fallacy of this most clearly in mental health struggles such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which sufferers attempt to assuage their anxiety by controlling their physical environments in various ways, which can include just about any ritual, from checking the locks on the doors three times before going out to washing one’s hands five times after cleaning the litter box.  Ultimately, it’s impossible to control anxiety this way, resulting in yet more strange rituals and more frantic attempts to exert conscious will where it has no real power.  In doomsday scenarios, people make all sorts of dire predictions for our future and then offer simple explanations for complex phenomena, simple fixes for complex problems, their version of checking the locks three times before leaving the house.  Simplicity appeals to the black and white thinking of the conscious will.  The world that confronts us is infinitely complex, far too complex for us to comprehend in our current existence.  In the face of this bewildering slew of information and emotion, is it any wonder that our conscious minds retreat to demonization or idealization?

So what does this push-pull between the conscious will and the subconscious have to do with creativity?  Conscious will can become outsized in many ways, and all of these ways can destroy creativity by distorting the conscious mind’s connection to the subconscious.  Every artist and writer I know, including myself, has struggled with this.  For all their creative output, I even witnessed this happen with both my parents at times.  My dad, who was a talented sculptor, a master carpenter, a hard worker, and quite a perfectionist, grew up during the Great Depression on the family farm.  He was the only child of his mother, who sickened and died while he was still a teenager.  These experiences molded and scarred him in many ways, some good and some bad and some mixed.  For instance, he often devalued his beautiful woodcarvings and bronzes if they didn’t sell quickly.  He had tied the worth of what he created to its monetary potential.  From a dispassionate perspective, there are many reasons a creative work doesn’t sell that have nothing to do with the worth of the work in question.  Finding perspective buyers for a particular work requires being in the right place at the right time, which involves a fair amount of luck.  No matter how much work you do to promote your creations, no matter how good those creations are, you may never be lucky.  It helps if you take as many opportunities as you can (which Dad did) and produce as many pieces as you can (which Dad did), as each opportunity and each piece provides another chance for luck to land, but there’s still no guarantee that will happen.  It’s incredibly frustrating when it doesn’t happen, and it’s no wonder people give into bitterness or blame themselves or get creatively blocked after they’ve poured their hearts and souls into a work of art or a novel or a piece of music, only to have it fail to find the right audience.  Despair tempts the conscious will into believing all sorts of fallacies.

In Dad’s case, his fallacy that a piece of art was only worth something if it sold, drained joy from the creative process.  He’s been gone from this plane of existence for over a decade, and writing about this still makes me cry.  He created such beautiful sculptures—I have one of his wood cravings of a girl on a horse, and the folds of her skirt seem to whip in the wind, the horse’s mane blowing back.  It’s so realistic and perfectly proportioned that it seems alive, and it hurts me that he may have lacked any joy in its creation because he was worried about it selling.  Thank God it didn’t sell—aside from the carving of a cougar he gave my mom, it’s the only woodcarving of his I have.  I hope he sees and knows where he is now how many times people have approached me and let me know how much they value his art and his other creations.  He left an amazing legacy, despite his conscious will’s inability to understand that.

Part of his legacy is the example he set me as a creator.  His work ethic still humbles me.  I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who worked as hard as Dad did.  And even though he really didn’t enjoy reading fantasy—he was a realist through and through—he supported my writing in so many ways.  For instance, when I was in college, I had a bad experience with a dishonest literary agent and called my parents in tears.   Dad went out the next day and found a local freelance editor for me to work with, a lady who helped me figure out my unique writing process and guided me through the labyrinth of publishing.  He led by example, the best way to teach your children anything.  Observing both him and mom working on their art affected me greatly from a young age—some of my earliest memories are in their studios.  I witnessed the whole creation process from beginning to end, over and over, and I feel so fortunate now to have had such experiences.  For example, I generally find it quite easy to enter a creative flow state.  My dad described these states as “trances” in a 1980s interview he did with a Canadian wildlife magazine; to know that my tough, practical father could admit to going into a trance state while carving a horse or wolf or screech owl tells me a lot about how unusual my childhood was.

So I learned a lot from an early age about putting the conscious will in its proper place and connecting with the vast underworld darkness of the subconscious.  Keeping this connection open and as clear as possible requires honesty, humility, and an ability to listen carefully and with discernment to both oneself and others.  I fail at all of these on a regular basis, and I believe everyone does, so be patient, yet firm, with yourself, as patient and firm as  you would be with a beloved child who you want to see grow into a happy, healthy, and responsible adult.  Remember, you are your first reader or listener or viewer.  If you connect with your subconscious in an authentic way,  you may feel a surge of energy.  Time will cease, and you will enter a creative flow state, or a trance, as my dad would call it.  I believe these states are when we connect with the eternal, the collective unconscious that unites us all.  We can feel this same state when we read certain stories or listen to certain music or watch certain movies or view certain paintings.  When I feel this way, whether I’m creating or I’m the audience for another’s creation, I know I have a good connection to the subconscious and its power.

I believe this is why story and art and music beguile us—effective stories, music, and art give meaning to the unknown of our subconscious and map out the dark places, showing our conscious wills a way forward even if we can’t predict what’s coming next.  Our conscious wills let go of their anxiety and need to control, if only for awhile, and this is such a relief.

There are many stories that only dip a toe into the depths of the subconscious, and that’s okay.  These are stories for their time, and they have their place.  They may lack originality, but they offer a certain comfort on those days that we don’t have the emotional energy to wrestle with deeper themes and character development.  In order to grow, however, we also need to interact with stories that leave the shallows and confront the unknown world in the darkness under the high seas.  I believe the deeper a story dives into the unconscious, the longer that story lasts in the conscious mind—the stories that do this well become classics and then myths.  There’s a fascinating commentary on the lasting power of originality, honesty, and creativity in the movie Walk the Line.  From my research, I believe this scene is dramatized and not factually correct, but I still think it holds value for anyone struggling with a creative block.  In the scene, when Johnny Cash first auditions for Sam Phillips, he plays a gospel song that someone else wrote and recorded, a song he apparently heard on the radio along with everyone else in the 1950s.  Sam Phillips stops him in the middle of the song and asks if he has anything else he can play.  Johnny Cash gets a bit irate and demands to know what’s wrong with how he played the song.  Sam Phillips replies that “I don’t believe you.”  Johnny Cash misunderstands him and thinks it’s a challenge to his belief in God, to which Sam Phillips says no and goes on to ask, “If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out there in that gutter dying, and you had time to sing one song, one song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth.  One song that would sum you up, you’re telling me that’s the song you would sing?  That same tune we hear on the radio all day?  Or would you sing something different, something real that you felt . . . that’s what people want to hear.  That’s the kind of song that truly saves people.”

Johnny Cash went on to write and record songs that spoke to millions of people, all the way from steady church-goers to prisoners serving life sentences.  Both of my parents and myself have listened to a lot of Johnny Cash music while in the throes of creation.  I wouldn’t say I heard it most of the time—when I go into a creative flow state, the world melts away, and I lose awareness of everything beyond my characters and their reality.  I’ve played whole CDs while I’m writing and heard none of the songs.  But I think having music on in the background is still important—my subconscious picks up on it, and it helps me keep the pathway open between my conscious and subconscious minds.

I struggle to keep this pathway clear.  Modernity sows weeds and bracken of incredible distraction, and if I don’t pay attention, these soon overgrow the path and obscure its edges.  It’s necessary to hack my way through on a daily basis, especially now I have a smart phone.  Technology can be a wonderful tool—there’s no way I could record and share this video with you if I didn’t have a smart phone.  I live in a place where there’s no decent internet, so the smart phone has become my only way to access email, etc., when I’m at home.  However, I also understand now that I have a smart phone how people get lost in them.  It’s so difficult at times to put the phone down and focus on writing.  Sometimes I even turn it off so I don’t hear the notifications.

And technology is far from our only problem when it comes to connecting in an authentic way with our subconscious.  Years ago, when Disney released the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast, I remember reading a rather silly review, a review I didn’t even finish because the reviewer had gotten lost in modern politics and missed the archetypal point of the basic story.  The reviewer implicitly criticized women who enjoyed the movie as having outdated fantasies of falling in love with their kidnappers and not being feminist enough. It’s certainly not the first review I’ve read like that, and it certainly won’t be the last.  This is the type of review that our conscious wills would write—a literal, surface interpretation of the events and characters, with no comprehension that an ancient story such as “Beauty and the Beast” has been around for centuries because it taps deeply into the unconscious.  It’s not about a modern-world, two-income household, who’s taking the kids to school today marriage or even a modern dating relationship or even women’s guilty romantic fantasies.  Such old stories are more akin to dreams than waking reality, and who among us can control our dreams and what symbols pop up in our dreams?  To quote myself in a previous episode, a woman reading “Beauty and the Beast” could see the Beast as her own animus (the masculine part of her psyche) in need of rescue and reform from her more developed feminine parts.  That has nothing to do with an external romantic relationship, except in the sense that a woman who has a healthy, well-rounded animus will be more likely to form healthy, well-rounded relationships with the men in her life.

We live in an extraordinarily repressive, shallow age that has no awareness of how repressive and shallow it really is.  Many modern critics seem to willfully misunderstand stories and interpret them on the most literal of levels—with a few exceptions, I think it’s a terrible crime when I read a novel or a review of a novel, and I can tell you exactly how that novelist or reviewer voted in the last election.  Archetypes don’t care about modern politics or modern sensibilities.  Archetypes don’t bow to the whims of sensitivity readers or the overly scrupulous religious types.  They never have, and our attempts to force them into mirrored boxes that reflect the surface morality of modernity will result in outsized shadows that grow and fester until the darkness eventually swallows us in chaos.

There are some novelists—George Orwell, Harlan Ellison, and Ayn Rand come immediately to mind for me, though there are many others—who write their stories primarily as critiques of society or culture.  I call these novelists theme-driven, as opposed to character-driven or situation/plot-driven.  Of the three types of novelists, theme-driven novelists generally do the best job incorporating contemporary politics into their novels   I consider myself character-driven, both in my writing and reading preferences.  If you’re writing fiction, it’s a good idea to figure out what motivates you to write, as that will alert you to your personal style and strengths as a writer.  I mention this because I have read a number of novels and seen movies or shows in recent years that incorporated modern politics poorly.  Even if I agreed with the storyteller’s politics, I almost always put these novels down or turn off the TV.  Using archetypes as propaganda cheapens their wisdom; propaganda is always about projecting one’s shadow onto others, never about exploring or integrating it.  Such stories leave me feeling as if the writer attempted to manipulate me, not entertain me.  If I wanted a sermon, I would attend a revival meeting.  If you really want to write about politics, become a speech writer or opinion columnist.

This is not to say that modern politics can’t ever be part of a story.  My favorite TV show, 6 Feet Under, explores different characters’ political beliefs and ideas at times, religious beliefs too.  When I watch the show today, none of it feels dated to me, even though the story takes place in the early 2000s.  All of the characters feel like real people to me who actually could have existed at that time and had those beliefs and opinions.  I empathize with all of the characters, and all of the characters upset me and challenge me at different points.  It’s a great story, the best grief therapy I ever could have asked for—I didn’t see 6 Feet Under until 2009, several years after the last episode aired, and it came along at just the right time for me to process my feelings about my parents’ deaths.

The politics in 6 Feet Under works for me because it’s subtle.  Toward the end of the series, one of the main characters, Claire, gets involved with a man who’s her polar opposite in many ways—politically, socially, what have you.  It was so refreshing recently when I re-watched the series to witness this relationship unfold in such a natural and nuanced way.  Claire and her polar opposite boyfriend confronted each others’ shadows, and in the process, helped each other integrate their shadows.  Both had matured significantly by the end of the show because of their relationship.  It feels authentic.  I shudder to imagine how many current day shows or movies would have bungled the portrayal of such a relationship.  I believe many writers today struggle with authenticity because their inner critics and outer critics keep shouting at them and drown out the whisper of the subconscious.

If your inner critic sounds like a sensitivity reader, you’re in trouble.  If your inner critic denigrates you and thinks everything you do is trash, you’re in trouble.   If the inner critic gets involved too soon in the writing process, there is no more effective dam to the creative flow.  The inner critic knows how to deconstruct and point out flaws, which is necessary, but only after the novelist has a finished draft.  The inner critic has no idea how to put a story together and dreads the wild enthusiasm of inspiration.  The inner critic dreads dreaming because it has no control in the dream-space.  Anything could happen there, and the inner critic dreads the unpredictable because in confronting the unpredictable, everyone makes mistakes, and the inner critic hates making mistakes.  The inner critic views the intuitive leaps in archetypal storytelling as dangerous—in the throes of creation, the writer might overturn societal bedrock and reveal the secret truths beneath.  The inner critic will prevent the fledgling writer from ever finishing a draft if it possibly can.

The inner critic, like the conscious will, can also be a master of projection.  Have you ever had the experience of hating someone you’ve never met?  Have you ever had the experience of hating someone who’s not even real—for instance, a character in a movie?  Have you ever loved someone who’s not real?  Have you ever felt that a fictional character understood you and perhaps would be a best friend if you met that person in real life?  Does someone real or fictional annoy you, sometimes to the point of keeping you up at night?  Or perhaps intrigue you to the point of keeping you up at night?  It’s worth identifying why you feel this way.  Perhaps the character or public figure you’re fixated on reminds you of someone in real life, perhaps someone in your family, perhaps someone you have unresolved issues with.  Perhaps the character or public figure is just a bad person or conversely, someone worthy of admiration.  If this is the case, I still challenge you to at least figure out why you feel someone is bad or worthy of admiration.  What specific part of your moral code has he or she violated—or upheld?

Perhaps someone represents a part of our shadow, and that’s why we’re fixated on him or her.  Shadow is any part of us that’s outside conscious awareness.  There can be some real horrors in that shadow, but there also can be some real treasures.  It takes courage and insight to enter the darkness and confront the unknown within.  If you do something or say something or feel something that you don’t understand, shadow may be hiding there.  Shadow is why it’s worth analyzing our reactions to books, movies, games, music, cultural movements, what have you.  Shadow is why I write stories.  A bad story encourages you to project your shadow onto others; a good story encourages you to bring your own shadow into the light and integrate it in a healthy way.

If you’re having trouble thinking about shadow and story and how you might start to explore shadow in a healthy way, I encourage any of you who enjoy reading and watching movies to try this experiment.  Read a book, then watch the movie version of that book.  I was fortunate enough to read both A Clockwork Orange and The Shining before I saw the Stanley Kubrick films.  For A Clockwork Orange in particular, my vision of what the story was while I was reading was vastly different from Kubrick’s vision, although Kubrick somehow mostly captured the spirit of the story in film.  He was a peculiar genius in that way, one of the few directors who can make films I enjoy while still upsetting the authors of the original source material.  Both Anthony Burgess and Stephen King reacted poorly to Kubrick’s films of their novels, and as an author, I can understand why.  I would dread what such a director might do to a story of mine.  If Kubrick films aren’t your thing, there are plenty of other film adaptations of beloved books to explore.  For instance, I love Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  My favorite film adaptation is the 2006 movie starring Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen.  I watch that movie at least twice a year—it’s one of my go-to movies when I’m feeling blue and want something to cheer me up.  All in all, it’s a great adaptation and manages to fit so much of the story into two hours without sacrificing the emotional depth, wit, and spirit of the source material that the moviemakers should teach a class on adapting novels to the screen.  All that said, I don’t know what Jane Austen would think of it, but I wonder.  In the movie, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett show far more affection for each other than they do in the novel.  Lizzie and her mother even have a few warm moments in the film that are never apparent in Austen’s writing.  Part of this could be due to the casting, particularly Donald Sutherland in the role of Mr. Bennett, but I also think the screenplay softened some of Austen’s edges.  I love both the novel and the movie, and it’s interesting to me to spot where the stories are similar and where they diverge.  It is in these places that I start to glimpse fleeting shadows.

Exploring one’s shadow can be difficult and sometimes dangerous.  I believe it’s necessary for us all, but I caution everyone to be careful and proceed slowly, particularly those of you who have suffered interpersonal violence.  If you are a crime victim, I would recommend seeking out a good therapist.  I have had some nasty material and memories float to the surface in dream-work, in therapy, in my fiction writing process, and even in everyday life.  It’s helpful to have skilled guides when these memories occur, especially at the beginning of working through trauma or when you’re young.  As I’ve aged and engaged in different therapeutic processes over the years, I’ve developed better inner and outer boundaries to contain such material in a healthy way.  I still have a lot of work to do, but I am in a much better, more centered place because of therapy, support from loved ones, and my writing.

I want to end with an excerpt from an unpublished article I wrote about being a crime victim as it relates to shadow and projection: When a loved one has betrayed you so severely and you come to the full realization of that betrayal, which can take years, decades, a lifetime to completely process, the thin ice of order you skate on suddenly breaks and you are plunged into chaos.  People will do anything to avoid that chaos, but once you’re there and can no longer escape it, basic survival instincts take over.

We are none of us all bad or all good.  Those of us victimized by beloved family members live in shades of gray.  Evil walks among us all—sometimes it wears the mask of a stranger, and that makes it easier to push away and contain in a neat cage labeled “other.”  But we do so as individuals, as a society, at our peril.  The more we deny the true nature of the wolf pacing at the door, especially if that wolf is part of us, the louder it will howl, and someday, it will break into our carefully fortified sanctuary of denial.  Then what will we do, especially if we’ve told all our hunters to leave, that we no longer need them?

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Owning Your Shadow Part 2

Link to video on YouTube:  https://youtu.be/Dpv6g992iVM

My mom said some strange things in the months leading up to her death.  Being an odd person myself, I listened to everything she said with an open mind, and I am glad now I did, as she shared many treasures, insights that I have returned to again and again in the decades since her passing.  For instance, one week before she died, she told me that I needed to buy the box set DVDs of the Star Wars original trilogy.  This was strange to me at first because neither Mom nor I had ever been intense Star Wars fans.  Lord of the Rings was more our cup of tea.  Certainly the fact that Mom didn’t even own Star Wars on VHS or DVD at that point was telling.  She read books voraciously and watched movies voraciously and owned hundreds of both, and no Star Wars amongst them.

Anyway, a few weeks later, I was in the store and noticed the Star Wars DVD box set with a bonus disc—this was early 2005, so whatever box set that was.  Remembering what Mom had said, I bought it and one weekend soon after, watched the movies back to back, then the interviews and various featurettes, all the while haunted by Mom’s lingering presence.  As a result of this experience, I developed a great appreciation for George Lucas as an innovator in his field, a risk-taker who had the foresight to understand merchandizing and other creative income streams long before such things were commonplace, much in the same way I admire Charles Dickens not only as a storyteller but as a businessman with uncanny instincts.  Creativity comes in many, many forms.  I think all of us tend to compartmentalize impulses such as creativity in response to the ever increasing complexity of our environments, and although it’s an understandable impulse, it leads us to limit ourselves and others before we even get started.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that they aren’t creative, even though they started their own businesses.  It takes creativity to start a business, all right?  Creativity is basically the ability to solve problems.  As a fiction writer, I started telling myself stories as a child to solve the seemingly insurmountable emotional problems I faced.  I think many artists get started in much the same way.

All right, back to Star Wars.  One of the most interesting things I learned about how George Lucas developed the concept of Star Wars was its relation to Joseph Campbell’s work with archetypes and myths, specifically the hero’s journey.  Lucas followed this classic story arc in A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi with an almost mathematical precision, making the original Star Wars trilogy a perfect way to reconnect with basic archetypal drives.  Whenever I’m between writing projects and need a jolt of adrenaline to my sluggish subconscious, I watch the original Star Wars trilogy.  I also watch Disney’s Fantasias, both the original and Fantasia 2000, as well as their classic fairytale collection—my favorite of these is Sleeping Beauty, partly because it incorporates large swathes of Tchaikovsky’s ballet of the same name and partly because of the animation style and partly because of the story and character development—as a bonus at the end of this episode, I’ll read a blog post I wrote years ago about Sleeping Beauty and why I love it so much.  Right now, I’m re-watching some of Stanley Kubrick’s films and reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, a collection of dark fairytale retellings, to get my subconscious in the proper mood to continue work on a gothic fantasy novel I started last year.

Anyway, as I hinted, I believe Star Wars and some of Disney’s cartoons hold so much archetypal power because of the music and imagery.  Because written and spoken language constructs so much of shared human reality, we all suffer a certain amount of word fatigue.  This is particularly true for writers who attempt to use language in original ways to express their creativity.  I spoke about perfectionism and writer’s block in the last episode.  I believe word fatigue can also be a form of writer’s block.  One of the best ways I’ve found to overcome word fatigue is working on a jigsaw puzzle after a stint at the keyboard, particularly jigsaw puzzles of antique maps or fantasy art.  Examining a painting, a purely visual art, in the minute form of jigsaw puzzle pieces, helps my brain recover its words so I can return to the keyboard refreshed.  This same process works on a much larger level by watching movies such as the original Star Wars trilogy or Fantasia between finishing one novel and starting the next.  I also reread fairytales and other deeply archetypal stories and pore through fantasy art books while listening to music.  The works of genius fantasy painters such as Michael Whelan and Kinuko Craft capture our archetypal souls and reflect them back to us, much as gifted musicians can return us to a place of no words, just pure emotions.  I also study the symbolism of Tarot cards and then make collages.  I just finished a collage of the Underworld, which started with me pairing a grocery store ad depicting a pomegranate and a cartoon image of monsters dressed in modern attire in an urban scene, crossing the street and talking on their cell phones—I believe it was a New Yorker cover, though unfortunately I can’t remember now.  I collect scrapbooking materials from many different places, cut out the images that intrigue me, and then burn the remains, so it’s hard to remember where all the images come from.  I also keep a dream journal when it seems particularly useful.  I don’t write down all my dreams, not even close, just the ones that seem to communicate a special message that I want to puzzle over further.  The act of writing these images down, putting them into words, helps me remember them longer and think about them in a different way, which can sometimes lead to important insights.

So these are all the ways I reconnect with my subconscious when I need its creative adrenaline to fuel the start of a new project or continue an ongoing one.  Aside from movie dialogue, music lyrics, and the text of dreams and fairytales, most of these methods bypass words entirely, which can be such a relief to a beleaguered writer’s brain.  I don’t know how this might work for other creative types—for instance, perhaps visual artists enjoy reading novels to recover from too many images crowding their minds?  My mother, who was a painter, a potter, and toward the end of her life, a fiber artist, loved novels, histories, and true crime stories, so I sense there might be something to this idea, that those of us who labor in one art regain focus sometimes by playing in another art form.

One never knows how or what type of exposure will affect one’s subconscious, which is why it’s so important to get out and experience a wide variety of different places and activities as budget and time allows.  For instance, I love visiting antique stores and junk shops—sometimes I buy items, but more often, I just go to browse.  A year or so ago, I came across a creepy carnival mask in one of these stores, and the idea for a story popped into my mind, the same novel-in-progress I mentioned earlier when talking about Stanley Kubrik and Angela Carter.  Such inspirations can even happen at the most prosaic of day jobs.  Over 15 years ago, when I was putting the finishing touches on The Witch Awakening and tearing apart the first draft of Tapestry Lion, I worked as a secretary/receptionist at a program with a phoenix in its logo.  One morning after seeing this phoenix for over a year on the company letterhead, posters, etc, I woke from a dream I couldn’t remember with a vision in my mind—the vision turned out to be the pivotal scene of The Landers Saga.

I knew in that moment that I was indeed writing a series and that it would have four novels:  The Witch Awakening, Tapestry Lion, Phoenix Ashes, and The Curious Fear of High and Lonely Places.  I knew in that moment exactly how I needed to fix Tapestry Lion, the novel I had struggled over for five years because of significant personal loss and extreme stress during that time.  I didn’t have an outline—I’m not much of an outliner, which I’ll get into in a minute—but images, images which seared me to my bones and that I had to capture in words.  The details would work themselves out in the writing process, but those images had me in their grip until I could get them out and on the page.  If I’m not creating, if I’m not telling a story, I don’t feel fully alive, and I have arranged my life as best I can to facilitate a regular creative routine.  It’s not a life that many people understand, but that’s okay.  I don’t need them to understand in order to be happy and grateful for what I have.

 

I encourage writers who want to engage more fully with archetypes to study stories like Star Wars—it certainly has helped me—but I wouldn’t recommend stopping there.  While the original Star Wars trilogy is a great story, it has its limitations.  For instance, I quibble with its language around emotion.  This is not a criticism of Star Wars specifically, but of our culture in general.  I believe modern society is a gift in many ways—we have so many conveniences now that our ancestors couldn’t even have dreamt of.  However, those same conveniences have perpetuated an illusion of control that we simply don’t have and will never have.  We have a great deal of unacknowledged anxiety around this illusion of control.  I remember all the screwy advice I got when I quit my day job to finish Phoenix Ashes.   I had planned to quit my job for a couple of years for a variety of reasons, had saved up a little money to do so, even had a day job lined up for the summer.  However, many mostly well-meaning people around me just couldn’t understand what I was doing.  I told them what I’ll tell you now.  The security of a job, any job, is an illusion.  That job could be gone tomorrow, and in the United States at least, there’s not much of a safety net for most people as I had suspected and then found out for sure last year when I was laid off.  And that’s just a job.  Death can come at any time, even with all our annual check-ups and drugs and other modern conveniences.  My mother died at the age of 56—I wish she’d had more time.  She was an amazing artist.  My dad was an amazing artist too.  Now they’re both gone, but they both left a remarkable creative legacy, and I feel blessed to have had them in my life for as long as I did.  Thank God they fit as much as they could into the time that they had.  Neither of them ever made a lot of money, but they left the world a far richer place in all the most important ways, and I live by their example.

As artists, we must seek catharsis and awe, not distraction.  We must live with our full emotional range, and that can be a frightening task for many of us.  I cry frequently over movies and books, and if others are around me, they often apologize to me for my tears, as if they did a bad thing by encouraging me to see a film that made me feel something.  It’s well-meant, but rather silly to me.  I love crying at movies just as much as I love laughing.  I wrote my novels because anger and grief drove me.  I wrote my novels to connect with my passion and intense desire to engage with my inner life and bring it outwards.  I published my novels because of my joy in the world I had created, but also because I was frustrated with my day job and jealous of authors who didn’t need day jobs to support themselves.  It’s okay to be angry.  It’s okay to be sad.  It’s okay to be jealous.  It’s okay to be happy.  Emotions in and of themselves are states of being, not doing.  Emotions are fuel, energy to be channeled into actions.  A car can have a full tank of fuel, but if you don’t turn the key in the ignition, that fuel just sits there, existing in its liquid state.  The fuel won’t be transformed and used to power the car unless you take an action.  If your action involves driving that car recklessly and perhaps hurting yourself and others, it’s not the fault of the fuel.  So it is with our more difficult emotions, such as anger, jealousy, and sadness.  They’re just fuel.  It’s what you do—or don’t do—with the fuel that deserves a moral judgment, not the fuel itself.

Many of us struggle with identifying and fully feeling our emotions because of how we grew up.  For instance, if there were toxic expressions of anger in our families, if only certain people were allowed to express anger while others were punished for even feeling anger, much less expressing it, then we will most certainly struggle as adults with our anger.  If we grew up in stoic families, families which feared emotion as a loss of control, we’re going to struggle with losing control creatively.  It’s impossible to experience the thrill of inspiration if we can’t let our conscious minds lose control and wander occasionally.  It’s okay to have no idea what comes next.  It’s necessary to have no idea what comes next sometimes—such mental silences leave the door open for the muse to whisper her wonderful intuitions.  I’ve had characters show up in a scene while I’m writing, characters I had no idea existed until that moment.  Characters who sometimes go on to upset the whole narrative in a glorious mess.

I love these moments—if I have no idea where the story is going next, it energizes me to keep writing and see what happens next.  When I wrote The Witch Awakening, I had no idea it was the first book in a series.  I didn’t even know how it was going to end until I reached the last couple chapters.  Years later, when I had completed the series and went back to reread The Witch Awakening, it shocked me to realize how my subconscious had sprinkled so many hints and symbols of the ultimate end of the series in The Curious Fear of High and Lonely Places throughout the narrative.   There was one scene in particular that one of my early readers thought I should cut—I remember telling her I couldn’t cut that scene, but I couldn’t explain why at the time.  That scene carried the symbolic weight of the series that my conscious mind had no idea I was writing at the time.

My hope in this series about archetypes is that everyone experiences such moments of being one with the creative flow and having no idea where it’s going next.  Such moments render the act of creation magical.  All right, as promised, I will read my blog post about Sleeping Beauty:

 

My favorite animated fairy tale has to be Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (a close second would be The Last Unicorn—highly recommend that animated film as well).  Anyway, I love the angular, elegant, highly stylized animation of Sleeping Beauty–it has a different look from most other Disney movies.  I love the character development.  Of all the early Disney princes, Prince Phillip stands out as one of the few who actually gets his own story arc and a distinctive, wisecracking personality as opposed to just being a prop Ken doll prince (I don’t think the poor princes in Snow White and Cinderella even have names–they’re just there to show up at the end and pose with the bride on the wedding cake).  Briar Rose/Aurora comes across as a bit spooky (in a good way, as in being dreamy and mystical), the fairies, especially Meriweather, make me laugh, and the scene where the two kings get drunk is classic.  And then there’s Maleficent — best Disney villainess ever.  She has a pet raven, crashes parties with a big bang, is wonderfully sarcastic, and turns into a dragon–what more can you want?  My mother gave me an eyeglass case with Maleficent on the lid that I treasure to this day, even though it’s falling apart–she bought it on our last major shopping trip together.  That year was the year for Disney villainesses to shine, when all the Goth merchandise took off in a big way.  I remember seeing Maleficent’s picture on a shirt with “Ultimate Goth” printed beneath it on that shopping trip.  My sentiments exactly.

But as much as I love Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, it doesn’t tell the whole story.  Most versions of “The Sleeping Beauty” don’t tell the whole story, and I think that’s a shame.  Case in point:  I have an absolutely gorgeous picture book of “The Sleeping Beauty” written and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman (her paintings for “Saint George and the Dragon” won the Caldecott award–if you’ve never seen this book, find it).  Like almost all versions of “The Sleeping Beauty” out there, this one ends with the prince waking up the princess with a kiss and a wedding.  Sigh.  Given how wonderfully gothic and creepy Hyman’s illustrations can be (her painting of all the poor princes stuck and dying in the thorn hedge still gives me nightmares), I would really liked to have seen how she illustrated the original ending of the story.

Charles Perrault’s ”The Sleeping Beauty” doesn’t end with the happily ever after kiss and wedding.  No, in Perrault’s version, the prince’s mother turns out to be an ogress (perhaps she inspired Maleficent).  The prince, fearful of his mother’s temper, keeps his marriage to Sleeping Beauty a secret.  He and Sleeping Beauty produce two children (Dawn and Day) before his mother discovers her son’s big secret.  She is not pleased, and when the prince goes off to war, Mommy-Dearest-the-ogress goes to the palace cook and tells him that she wants her granddaughter Dawn to eat for dinner (with ”a tasty sauce” no less).  The cook can’t bring himself to kill Dawn, so he hides her and serves a lamb in her place.  The ogress then demands little Day for dinner and finally Sleeping Beauty herself.  The cook hides them all and somehow fools the prince’s mother with various poor animals sacrificed in their stead and his amazing sauces.  Eventually, however, the ogress discovers the trick.  She orders that the cook, Sleeping Beauty, and the children be thrown into a huge basin filled with snakes, vipers, toads, and “a few spiders.”  Just at the moment that Sleeping Beauty is about to be hurled into the “squirmy, loathsome basin,” the prince returns from battle and saves the day.  In a fit of fury, the ogress throws herself in the pit, and the remaining characters live happily ever after (I don’t know about you, but just being alive after everything they’ve endured would make me happy).

All the remarks in quotes in the previous paragraph come from The Fairy Tale Book:  A Deluxe Golden Book published by Simon and Shuster in 1958 and translated from French by Marie Ponsot.  It was my mom’s book before it was mine, and it’s a wonderful fairy tale book in the sense that reading it probably helped develop my warped sense of humor.  I had forgotten until reading ”The Sleeping Beauty” out loud a few weeks ago to some friends how cleverly written the fairy tales in this book are.   For instance, here’s the paragraph right after the prince awakens Sleeping Beauty:  ”Meanwhile, the other sleepers had wakened, too.  Since they were not falling in love, they were all very hungry.  The maid of honor announced, firmly, ‘Dinner is served.’”  The whole story is full of such dry wit–the bit about the “tasty sauce” in particular made me howl with laughter.

I suspect that Charles Perrault based his “The Sleeping Beauty” on an even earlier tale–there are too many similarities between it and “The Handless Maiden” to be a coincidence.  To read ”The Handless Maiden,” I recommend Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves.  Estes relates “The Handless Maiden” in Chapter 14 and then does an excellent job breaking down the archetypes and discussing their possible meanings, both ancient and modern.

As a perpetual insomniac, the tale of Sleeping Beauty has always held great charm for me–some nights when I’m tossing and turning, I think it would be nice if all I had to do was prick my finger to fall asleep.  And I’d much rather have a handsome prince as my alarm clock then the shrill, plastic apparatus I have now.  Sorry Timex.

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Owning Your Shadow, Part 1

Here is the link and the script for the first episode of my new YouTube series on the Reluctant Phoenix channel:

Link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QGQz4PKGP20

Hello and welcome to the Reluctant Phoenix YouTube Channel.  I’m Karen Nilsen, author of the Landers Saga, the Phoenix Realm series, and two standalone fairytale retellings.  In this series, entitled Owning Your Shadow, I explore archetypes and creativity, particularly archetypes in written story telling, although I hope this exploration may also be helpful to those engaged in other types of endeavors, from the visual arts to music.

My two primary interests have always been storytelling and psychology, and as a result, I’ve participated in many writer’s groups, book clubs, and psychotherapeutic seminars over the years.  I want to fuse these two loves in this series, especially in regards to archetypes.  Linking dream-work and creative work has enabled me to overcome various blocks and complexes, and here I will give you some insights into my own process with the hope that sharing this may be of interest and perhaps even help some of you who may be struggling with your own blocks and complexes.  I’m not a therapist, just a fantasy author, so please take what I say in that context.  If you’re dealing with serious emotional issues, I recommend you seek out professional help.

To start, I want to share a blog post I wrote back when I started publishing my novels in 2010:

In writing classes and critique groups I’ve attended, questions that come up more often than you might think are “What is memoir? What is autobiography? What is creative nonfiction? How much can I as a writer bend the truth before I break it?”  The answers are far more complex than first might be supposed.  Well before Oprah confronted James Frey about his memoir A Million Little Pieces, writers I know have debated these questions.  Even in a memoir where all the facts can be corroborated by outside sources, the slippery tricks of memory and the addition of dramatic tension can completely obliterate any objectivity.   We don’t remember facts so much as we remember emotions, particularly when it comes to our personal past.  An established fact can be portrayed in so many different ways, dependent on variations in tone, word choice, and whose perspective frames it.  Just ask any student of history after he or she has taken a course in historiography.

In a sense, all writing is autobiographical.  We can’t ever fully escape our own perspective–even us writers of fantasy and science fiction.  When I started writing about the House of Landers in my mid-teens, it seemed like a welcome escape from my reality, the reason I suspect many teenagers read fantasy/sci fi and/or write it and/or play role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.   Adult reality doesn’t just overwhelm some kids–it terrifies them.  It terrified me, and I didn’t even realize it had terrified me until I reached age twenty-five or thereabouts and started reflecting more on my life.

At some point, soon after college I think, one of my friends ( someone who devoured every early word I wrote about the Landers), said, “You know, Karen, I could tell you were working out your family stuff in that particular scene.”

I gaped at her.  “But this is pure fantasy–it’s not about my family,” I said, and the conversation drifted to another topic.

For years, I’ve turned that offhand comment over and over in my mind, and in that process, I’ve come to some realizations about my writing and writing in general.  Even though all the events in the Landers saga are fictional (for instance, I’ve never been in a sword fight or painted a picture or given birth or even sensed an aura, for that matter ), everything I write about holds some emotional resonance for me, or I wouldn’t write about it.  The facts don’t matter so much in fantasy, but the emotional reality does.

I’ve studied psychology on and off for a long time, culminating in the dream group experience I had last fall.  The ladies in dream group taught me about internal family systems theory and Jungian archetypes, to the point that I was inspired to finally read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves.  I picked up this book when I was in my early twenties, but it’s one of those books you have to pick up at the right time or it doesn’t affect you in quite the same way.  In my early twenties, I wasn’t ready to read it.  Now I am.  I imagine it’s one of those books to grow old with, as I’ll likely get different insights from it when I’m sixty than I do now.  Interestingly enough, several people in my circle are either reading this book or have mentioned Jungian archetypes to me in the last few months.  Serendipity can be cool.

Although internal family systems theory doesn’t rely on Jungian archetypes to explain the different parts of the personality, I’ve paired the two theories in my mind because I started seriously thinking about both around the same time.  In internal family systems theory (developed by Richard Schwartz), the personality is comprised of manager parts, exile parts, firefighter parts, and then the self, the spiritual whole that can offer some connectivity among the various parts.  If you want a better explanation than that without an overwhelming amount of detail, I recommend Wikipedia.

However, since Jungian archetypes are so personally powerful for me, I prefer to think of my personality parts and other peoples’ personality parts in terms of archetypes, not exiles, firefighters, or managers.  And if you want to learn more about archetypes (and read some wonderful fairy tales in the bargain), I highly recommend Women Who Run with the Wolves.

Perhaps this has something to do with my love of fantasy.  Fantasy novels are extended fairy tales, and fairy tales are a series of archetypes interacting with each other, archetypes that draw on subconscious drives and desires and the innate longing to understand self and others.  In my writing, I feel I explore Jungian archetypes that represent mostly subconscious parts of self and how these parts support and conflict with one another, a major tenet of internal family systems theory.  In a sense, my novels are my archetypal memoirs.

 

All right, now that 2010 Karen has spoken and provided some back story, 2024 Karen returns to close out this episode and outline where our archetypal journey will take us next.  All artists must surmount creative blocks; however, I believe fiction writers confront particularly pernicious blocks because of how the human brain processes written and spoken language.  There’s a reason it’s called writer’s block and not potter’s block or musician’s block or painter’s block.  Almost everyone learns how to speak and write to some degree.  Only a few of us, however, learn how to paint or how to read music or how to use a potter’s wheel.  Because so much of our experience and learning gets processed through words, a writer is far more liable than other creative types to get snared in various traps.

Perfectionism is one such trap.  I have witnessed talented writers get so caught up in finding the “perfect” words that they rewrite their first chapters over and over and over again and never get to chapter two before they abandon their un-hatched novels completely.  In this futile search for the “perfect” words, they lose sight of the big picture.  They can’t find the story in the forest of words.  They lose touch with the emotional heartbeat of their stories.

Don’t get me wrong—word choice is important.  When setting atmosphere in a fictional story, connotation is second only to definition when it comes to word choice.  Poetry relies almost entirely on refined word choice for its effect.  The best way to learn proper word choice is to read a lot and write a lot.  Study stories obsessively, both your own and others’.   Begin to notice when your interest flags.  Begin to notice when you have to tear yourself away because the story engages you so much.  Begin to notice when you feel an emotion while reading or watching or listening.  Is the emotion you feel in accord with the characters or not?  What do you think the writer intended in particular scene and how was that intention conveyed?  And practice, practice, practice.  Almost all of us who write novels have at least a million words of BS to wade through before we get to the good stuff.   You wouldn’t expect a novice potter to sit down at a wheel and turn out a beautiful pot on his or her first try.  To this day, I come across practice manuscripts of mine buried and forgotten in closets.  As a teenager, I wrote constantly, and none of it was any good.  I needed to get that million or so words of BS out of my system before I finally stumbled on a story that worked.

All that practice refined my sense of which words worked and which didn’t, depending on what I hoped to achieve in a particular scene in order to move the story forward.  There are no right words or wrong words, no perfect words or imperfect words.  Rather, there are the right words to strike as close as you can to the bulls-eye kernel of truth at the center of every great story.  Before you start, swallow the bitter medicine that you will never succeed in hitting this bulls-eye.  No one does.  That’s the human condition.  All of us see through a glass darkly in our current state of existence.  However, as with actual archery, practice and more practice and yet more practice, will help you develop a sense of when you’re close to the bulls-eye and what might be wrong in your approach when you’re not.

Perfection is a myth, and any creative who pursues perfection will wind up blocked and unable to create.  When I look over what I’ve written for the day, I certainly don’t expect perfection—ever.  When I read others’ stories, I don’t read for perfection.  I read for how the story makes me feel first and foremost.  Do I want to keep reading?  Do I care enough about the characters to concern myself with what happens to them?  A distant second to my feelings are my thoughts.  I may finish reading a novel that has an exciting plot or interesting ideas at the expense of character development, but it’s not a novel that I’ll likely ever reread.  I don’t reread Animal Farm because of its themes—I reread Animal Farm because I care about the characters and want to explore every emotional and philosophical nuance of their predicament.

I seek authenticity in my work, not perfection.  The best thing I can do in a story is show the truth about my characters and their situations.  This is one reason I tell most of my stories filtered through several point of view characters.  The truth is a sneaky trickster, and none of us has a handle on the whole of it.  If you imagine humanity as a vast, multi-faceted crystal, then each individual gets a facet of the crystal, his or her own unique perspective.  We are all of us unreliable narrators in some ways, and true objectivity is impossible.  Accept that you will fail in this.  Everyone fails in this.  There is truth, objective reality, and our task as fallible humans is to seek it as best we can, with the understanding and humility that we may only get to hold it for a few precious moments before it slips away again.  The postmodernists did make a few good points amidst all the bad, and the idea that we all struggle with escaping our own subjectivity is one of them.

I remember first studying postmodernism in my college literature and history classes.  Specifically, in historiography class, I and my fellow history majors examined all the different lenses through which we could view the past.  The feminist lens, the Marxist lens, the postmodernist lens.  All of the lenses irritated me, but I particularly loathed the postmodernist lens for its denial of objective truth in favor of infinite relativity.  There is no solid bottom to the postmodernist quicksand, no place to ground ourselves.  Certainly, objective truth is a cagy beast, difficult to catch and even more difficult to hold on to.  But I far prefer the endless hunt to drowning in my own subjectivity.

So this is where I offer you my lens for writing fiction—the archetypal lens.  It’s a flawed lens, to be sure—they all are.  However, for some writers, myself amongst them, I believe the archetypal lens could be a useful tool to break through creative blocks.  When we study fairytales or dreams on the archetypal level, each character in the tale becomes a facet of an individual person’s psyche.  For instance, a woman reading “Beauty and the Beast” could see the Beast as her own animus (the masculine part of her psyche) in need of rescue and reform from her more developed feminine parts.  When I dreamt of a seven foot tall serial killer shaking me, I viewed the serial killer as a part of my psyche desperately trying to rise into my conscious awareness, an internal insight I had avoided up until that point.  This archetypal lens tends to provoke curiosity rather than denial for me.  I don’t know if it’s like that for others, but if it is, you can use this curiosity to break through creative blocks.  Archetypes live deep in our collective unconscious, our shared humanity, and stories that draw on these universal symbols retain a hold on our conscious minds because they enable us to tap into the forces that guide us and be more aware of who we are and why we’re here.  Used in a thoughtful and questioning manner, archetypes can help authors find the heartbeat of their stories, the emotional tempo that can lead us to the truth and deep self-awareness, if only for a precious instant.

 

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Fledgling Witch now available on YouTube

I’m pleased to announce the launch of my YouTube channel, Reluctant Phoenix.  There you will find an audiobook version of Fledgling Witch as well as the first chapter of The Witch Awakening.  Many thanks to my talented friends at Noble Sparrow Studio for their wonderful work on the audio portion of the videos.  Here’s a link to the channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@reluctantphoenix

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Announcing my first audiobook!

Hello!  I’m excited to announce the release of my first audiobook!  Narrated by the talented Leslie Gallagher, my novel A Nest of Thorns reimagines Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of the princess after she wakes up in an abandoned tower with no idea how a hundred years passed overnight.   Her prince has vanished, and she sets out to solve the mystery of the curse and find her beloved, in the process uncovering family secrets that threaten to unravel her very existence.

Amazon

Audible

 

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A Nest of Thorns now available!

A Nest of Thorns by [Karen Nilsen]

Lycora drifts off to sleep one night in her tower chamber and awakens a century later to snow falling through the crumbling roof over her bed. Stunned and grieving her lost world, she discovers her cousin also shares the curse. They set out together to learn how a hundred years passed while they slept and find themselves caught in a web of family secrets, betrayals, and dark magic. In order to free herself, Lycora must face the truth within and reclaim the destiny stolen from her.

Click here to view A Nest of Thorns on Amazon

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The Dream Garden now available!

I just completed my latest novel about the Landers – entitled The Dream Garden, the story follows the adventures of Safire, Merius, and their children in the mysterious land of the phoenixes.  Links below to major retailers . . .

Amazon US:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09P9SHQQ2

Amazon UK:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09P9SHQQ2/

Amazon Australia:  https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B09P9SHQQ2

Amazon Canada:  https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09P9SHQQ2

Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1123580

Kobo:  https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-dream-garden

Apple:  https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-dream-garden/id1603507890

Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-dream-garden-karen-nilsen/1140843316

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Gothic Childhoods article

Third Factor has published my article “Gothic Childhoods,” in which I explore my difficult relationship with my grandmother and my love for Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and what both taught me about healthy boundaries, emotional honesty in storytelling, and being a contented outsider.

https://www.thirdfactor.org/gothic-childhoods/

 

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A Nest of Thorns

Last week, I started serializing a retelling of Sleeping Beauty entitled A Nest of Thorns through Amazon’s Kindle Vella program.  If you would like to learn more, here is a link:  https://www.amazon.com/A-Nest-of-Thorns/dp/B0939FK7YK/

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Smashwords Read an E-book Week Sale!

From March 7th to March 13th, I will be participating in the Smashwords’ Read an E-book Week Sale. All my titles available on Smashwords are 50% off for the entire week, except for Fledgling Witch, which will be free! Here’s a link to my Smashwords profile:
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