Trusting my subconscious

The Fountain of Trabazon: An Oracle Deck by Julie Pepper

Earlier in the Autumn, I attended the Paradise City art festival in Northampton, MA. It's a beautifully curated art show with a wide variety of artists and craftspeople. I usually wander, doing a lot of 'window shopping' and comparing notes with other ceramics artists, but this time, I stopped short at a piece of art that was filled with color, energy, and narrative.

It turns out that the artist - Julie Pepper - is a local Central Mass artist and that we know folks in common.

Her paintings were also available as the illustrations in a 56 card oracle deck and I bought it.

I had learned a bit about Tarot reading for a novel I wrote some years ago and find reading the cards to be a way to free my subconscious and help me in my creativity.

This morning, I pulled out Julie's deck and prepared to do a past/present/future spread. The question in my mind as I shuffled the deck was about my writing and how to move through the resistance I've felt all year.

Here is my interpretation of the reading, using the Divinitory Guide as a starting place.

The leftmost card represents the past.

Card 31: South Africa
Listen
Spirit is telling you to listen to your body. 
Can you be open to your body's changes?

There have been so many changes for me over the past year. I'm in menopause - a time of great transition both physical and emotionally. In addition, I've been dealing with some nagging health issues. It makes sense that my creative energy has been sapped by the demands of my body and its changes. I've been working hard to accept where I am and embrace this new phase of my life. In many ways, I am stronger than I've ever been, notwithstanding my nagging knee and wrist pain.

The middle card represents the present.

Card 48: Ophelia
Believe
Wearing your heart on your sleeve?
Trust yourself.
Can you believe in your intuition?

It's been a strange year. The year I didn't write. As a writer, perhaps I should have been far more distressed about that than I have been. Instead, I've been focusing on other creative pursuits - knitting, crochet, and yarn spinning, ceramics, working on our farm. And I have been content. I feel a deep sense of being home in my self. Seeing this card and its interpretation is right on the nose for where I am now. My subconscious has known all along that I'm on the right path.

The rightmost card represents the future.

Card 32: Choice
Dance.
Pick your own music, choose your own steps.
Have you forgotten you have choice?

The question on my mind as I prepared the cards was how to return to my writing discipline and will I find that joy again.And considering this card, it occurs to me that my question was one created from a place of fear. And fear is not a healthy place to cling to in making choices. I don't need to be afraid. I am picking my own music and choosing my own steps. Fear doesn't need to trap me: I have the power of choice.

This is what I will tell myself, when the fear rises up again.

Be patient with yourself - so much is changing in your life. You can trust in your own power and intuition. Your choices will take you where you need to go. 

---

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The Evolution of a Story and a Cover

Original art, copyright Chris Howard, 2014

This is the cover for my upcoming YA release, FUTURE TENSE.When I started writing this story in 2009, it began with a single phrase that bounced around my brain before I fell asleep one evening: run away.

From that one thought, a story took shape.

Who was running?
A young teen in foster care.

Why was he running? What was he running from?
Some guilt from his past. Something connected to his being in foster care in the first place.

Why was he in foster care?
His parents died in a fire when he was 6.

How is that related to his current circumstances?
He foresaw the fire that killed his parents, but didn't understand at the time. His precog abilities have dogged him throughout his life, bringing glimpses of dangerous futures for the people around him that he has always been powerless to prevent. The story starts when he begins to see visions of a girl from his school that show him responsible for harming her.

Once I had that - the character's history and present conflict - it was time to build the world of Matt Garrison, including the people and places that surrounded him.

Fast forward a little over 4 years, past more than a half-dozen revisions and multiple rounds of edits, and I was ready to send this book out into the world.

It needed a cover.

I am not an artist.

But I know one in real life. :)

His name is Chris Howard, and I am fortunate to have met him years ago in a Boston area writing workshop, where in addition to discovering his incredible writing style, I also found out what a creative and skilled artist he is. I asked him if he would take on a cover commission for FUTURE TENSE and he agreed.

Because I had absolutely NO IDEA what I wanted for the cover, I sent him my 'cover blurb' along with physical descriptions of the major characters, as well as some of the specific tarot cards that were crucial to the story.

In the ten years since his parents died in a fire he predicted but couldn't prevent, seventeen year old Matt Garrison is trying to stay out of trouble, biding his time until he ages out of foster care. All he wants is for the world to leave him alone so he won't be tortured by seeing someone's future he's powerless to change anyway. But his plans for keeping himself aloof fail when he interrupts a vicious attack on Amara Guzman, a girl he recognizes from his school. Despite his best attempts to push her away, he can't ignore the connection they've formed. That's when glimpses of her dangerous future start to invade the present — a future he fears he is responsible for. Now Matt has something to lose again . . . and something to fight for.

Main characters:

Matt Garrison

6'2", well built, (advanced brown belt in karate)

Caucasian, short dark hair, blue eyes

Amara Guzman

5'3", slender

Hispanic, medium length dark hair in ringlets, brown eyes

Foster family:

The Powells are an older, middle aged African-American couple, both greying. Mr. P was in the army and has the grizzled look of former vets. Mrs. P has a neat afro.

Trina is their granddaughter, 9 years old, but petite for her age. Traumatized as a young child, and possibly on the autism spectrum, she communicates through her drawings.

Lola is a mixed-race foster kid, also 9

Jack is a 6 y.o. African-American foster child with closely shaved hair.

Antagonists:

Bruno Jones

6'4" football player build, African-American teen

Chico Alvarez

Slender, 5'10", Hispanic teen

The final important character is Amara's grandmother, Abuela Rosa, an elderly, mostly blind and tiny Hispanic woman who lives in a nursing home and teaches Matt to read the tarot as a way to harness his pre-cog abilities.

Setting: post-industrial inner city. Think Detroit, or some of the old MA industrial towns on the decline. The tarot features heavily in the plot, with several cards recurring thematically:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_%28Tarot_card%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_of_Swords

The major theme of the story is about learning to trust and that trust is worth the risk.

I assured him I didn't expect him to paint a huge cast of characters on the cover, but wanted to give him a flavor of the story and its environment.

The cover took a few iterations, with my suggestions amounting to minor tweaks. (The first version didn't have Matt wearing a hoodie, and that's actually a thematic element throughout the story. I asked Chris to include the Tower card prominently.) It was astonishing to me that even the first version he sent me captured the emotion of the story so perfectly. There is no scene that looks like this in the book, but rather, each of the elements of the cover echoes the themes that recur.

I loved watching this take shape and life and marvel at the skills of a visual artist. I tell stories with words. I can't draw or paint. Not only am I a terrible photographer, but I don't tend to notice visual details in my environment. (I get lost a lot. Thank goodness for my GPS.) So I am grateful to know someone like Chris, who not only has the artistic skills I lack, but comes to his art with a firm grasp on storytelling and so can use his art to enhance the meaning of a story.

FUTURE TENSE is in its final stages of its publication process. Stay tuned for its release date in early February. It will be available as a trade paperback as well as in all eBook formats.

If you are a book blogger/reviewer, and would like a complementary advanced copy, please contact me, either through the blog or via email: lisa@ljcohen.net

Card of the Day: The Magician--Opportunity and Optimism

Pulling a card from the tarot deck and musing on it has been my morning meditation for the past week or so. It is my opportunity to sit quietly and prepare of my day.

Writers (and artists of all stripes) need to exercise their subconscious. It's the place where deep connections are made between the ordinary and the numinous. It's where all art emerges from.

I look at the tarot as a way to connect with my subconscious, to open a channel, not with the spirit world, but with my internal world.

Some artists do this with meditation, some with exercise, some have tried using drugs and alcohol. Clearly, some methods are more successful and sustainable than others. 'Nuff said.

Today I pulled "The Magician." It is a card of power and potential. It shows a magician surrounded by symbols that occur throughout the tarot deck: swords, cups, pentacles, and wands. In addition, the symbol for eternity, the sideways figure of eight hovers over his head. According to my deck interpretation, The Magician signifies new directions, imagination, optimism, and new chances of success.

Given my husband's distress over his work situation and my own limbo waiting on word from publishers over "The House of Many Doors" which is on submission, I'll take that.

Card of the Day: Three of Swords

One of the characters in "Future Tense" informed me that she reads tarot cards. And suddenly, that became central to the plot and to Matt's character arc.

I know next to nothing about tarot and I knew that tarot readings would be crucial to plot, so I put out a call and several very generous writer souls answered it. (Thank you "A" and "B"!)

In order to write about readings, I needed to really learn the cards, so I bought a deck and went off to the library for several books on tarot interpretation.

One of the things all the books recommend is to draw a card of the day to learn about the deck and its meanings. The deck I bought is slightly different than the traditional deck, and some of the cards have different interpretations. I have been using the daily cards as a meditation of sorts, letting my subconscious make connections between the art, the traditional meaning, and current life events.

Today's card is the Three of Swords. In a traditional deck, it is a photo of a heart, pierced by three swords. Meaning: heartbreak, pain, despair. The deck I have shows something slightly different: a woman collecting firewood in a winter landscape, three swords piercing the barren ground. According to the artist, this represents obstacles, opposition, separation, and estrangement.

Now, I don't believe in a fixed fate, nor do I believe that cards can show me the direct future, but it is interesting that I drew this particular card today. My husband is struggling with frustration at work, which came to a head last night. Since he has been at the same facility for nearly 18 years, in large part defines himself by what he does there, and is extremely emotionally committed to his patients and his work, this conflict and difficulty fills him with despair.

I like the interpretation at the Intuitive tarot site:

"On a more general level the Three of Swords represents storms that must be weathered if one is to grow beyond the illusions being held onto. The three always brings anguish at its darkest level but it also brings a truth that needed to be learned."

If nothing else, I see the tarot as a wealth of symbols and archetypes, that mingled with the imagination of the writer can lead to useful narratives. Narratives that illuminate one's internal and external landscapes.

How generous people are

Writing is often a solitary and lonely endeavor. Unlike music, which is commonly (though not always) a collaborative process, writing tends to be one writer, typing away at a word processor.

The internet, that whipping boy of modern civilization, is a terrific boon to the writer. Research is only ever a click away, and there are numerous internet based writing organizations and communities that help with the isolation.

I am a member of two of those: one for poetry and one for fiction.

This is the tale of making connections through those communities, as well as ones in real life, and what happens when you have questions that a quick net search won't answer.

As part of "Future Tense," I needed information on foster care. My main character is a teenage foster kid. What I know about the foster system is distorted through the lens of television police procedural and crime scene shows. I knew I needed some better source material to plase my character's actions and reactions in context. It also was critical to have the character's foster parents feel real and three dimensional. So I asked questions, both in my online communities and through real-life connections.

My online writer friends gave me links and information that helped me tremendously. But I needed more.

It just so happens, that I am the human half of a certified dog therapy team through a local therapy dog organization. Tigger and I have often done visits to an afterschool program organized for children who live in homeless shelters and transitional housing. I figured that the organization might know of a social worker who would be willing to let me pick his or her brain about the foster system.

One email, and voila. I have an appointment to have coffee with a lovely woman who was interested in the novel and wanted to help me get the details right.

The other issue that came up in working on the novel was reading tarot cards. I honestly didn't know at the start of this at the beginning of the month, that not only would I have a tarot card reading character, but that she would be critical to the plot!

I know almost nothing about tarot cards, other than what I have seen in other books and tv shows. So off I went to my writing networks, and lo and behold, not one, but two tarot card readers who have both been immensely helpful and generous with their time.

I can only hope to repay their generosity, both in kind and in paying it forward to a writer approaching me with questions.

To my angel helpers--thank you!