MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS
The answer is. Start. Then finish. That's the abbreviated method.
If I were to add an inbetween, it's while you're doing the herculean labor of cleaning house or writing a script, (110 pages, wide spaced takes 4 days if you've got the plot/scene 3x5 cards done i.e. the outline --) be in touch with your muses.
MUSES you say. How do we get them? Well, Muses appear best and work best while you're doing mindless work, washing dishes, vacuuming, cleaning floors, organizing office, papers, boxes, bookshelves. The trick is to clean the office sufficiently to reach the shelves at outer perimeter of room, reach the old screenplays there collecting dust and therefore re-write and update the novel, cookbook, screenplay or magazine articles.
Muses strike at odd moments, while you pick thru piles of notes you've made for the last two decades, much of it related to that script, those characters in the novel and they even strike while you pick thru orange peels sorting trash for the compost pile.
The central trick is to stay empty enough of self to notice the fine things -- the subtle things that 'come up.' Muses work with hazy clouds of molecules. Five-fingered ideas don't drop into your lap. As muses make the job interesting, palatable, and if it's art, brilliant, stay light in the jock strap. Don't play the radio. Work in silence.
Right this moment, every room of my house is like littered, Arizona highway crossed with city dump. I have sixty years of my novels, articles and screenplays on shelves but I can't get near one to xerox it and send it out as unplowed fields of grocery boxes filled with papers, old clothes, old shoes, lay in the way.
I have nowhere to PUT the boxes as my paunch bellied 18 months pregnant SON and his wife sprawl rent-free in this house for three years, and took the garage too! So I have absolutely no storage. I beg him to build a few shelves inside the entry closet. No way he has time. He's a pro carpenter. There must be a connection here. He who has no storage has LITTER. He who has carpenter for a son has no shelves. He who has son that looks like mare pregnant with horse has no hope!
The non-paying rat fink kid has borrowed money to the tune of my monthly earnings and never once paid a cent of rent. At least I can see where my money went.(Pssst.The BELLY!)
So, as I was telling you. I have no storage. THE GARAGE belongs to the 36 year old son, his tools, his space to work, his tables. HE and his cretin co-worker the Salvadoran cracked into firewood pieces my gorgeous, antique carved furniture that I had stored in the garage the better to dump them into the trash in street -- an English Victorian walnut armoire and a huge storage cabinet of fruitwood, carved doors, cracked into pieces so that they could dispose of them easily. They needed room for their tools. I was aghast. Shoulda known! Boys will be boys. Amend that. Demons will be demons.
I read all the tough-love books at the library but I still live with scoundrel who did this to me who only said 'it looked like junk to me.' He has this dumb wife, (She who has Never touched Fire except to boil water to straighten her hair which she does daily) and they eat out three meals a day but can't pay rent. They take luxurious, very long hot showers at my expense. I have a bedroom which is neat. My two remaining bedrooms are wall to wall boxes, stacked to the ceiling, things unpacked in all the three years I rent here, and I still I have no place to put the contents of those boxes.
My guru Jules says throw them out. THE BOXES AND the KIDS. You should see my guru's garage. To the ceiling with antiques and gorgeous, sumptuous useable things, HIGHLY USEABLE. Highly saleable. He tortures me by saying that he's going to throw them out. I'd kill for stuff like that. But then your guru always knows your short hairs and pulls them.
Besides, I don't know where I'd put those goodies. My house is full of stuff now. Let's add a few details here. I have thirty cats (Someone gave me a pregnant female in 1973.) These pusses roam the house; no way I'd put them outside in the June Southern California, slightly cool, nights unless they wanted to go outside. They can use the always-open back door to look at the stars, see if there is wild life in the yard as a respite from three meals a day of home cooked turkey. So the cat spray, urine catbox smell, the hair, fleas, the filth AND the thirty always-moving bodies are also underfoot.
Another hazard is here, but it's not moving. My admiring friends call me for two hour long phone calls entailing my advising them, many times a day. I wouldn't care if they were paying clients, I'd clock them and bill them, but no, these are my friends. They want card readings, dice tossing for free. That is hours and hours on the phone. And my guru THE MASTER HIMSELF calls to dictate chapters to me, I type while he dictates. There's another few hours of wide awake time down the drain. Organize THAT!
When three a.m. rolls around and I'm unable to move from all the above, then my day starts. I must clean the house, type and make the rent. I who write movies like Billy Wilder must write, "Your JUPITER IS IN AQUARIUS," :>) glib, upbeat and charming. And email it off.
The despair in my heart is intense. I'm a brilliant screenplay writer and article writer but haven't printed out EVEN ONE finished script or sent ONE article to a magazine in two decades as that takes time, a printer, ink, ribbons, paper, stamp money. My printers don't work. I have no way to print one word. I can only email. So I surf the wave the way it's going, I'm an internet stargazer, you send the check and you get your horoscope emailed to you. We cut down no trees.
My great guru pal heard that I couldn't print out his hallowed chapters and gave me a 40$ brand new Lexmark printer but I don't know how to work it. I can't afford tekkies to show me. So the printer takes up space but does nothing. Like the son, the cats and like me and my boxes. Kind of a pattern don't you think?
Now I don't know about HOUSE AND GARDEN MAGAZINE, but FENG SHUI masters say that anything on floor, table, any drop of clutter in a room is bad feng shui and attracts no business, no money. Chinese aren't a 6,000 year old culture for nothing.
Clients come see it, go eek. There was once this big star yoga teacher with lotsa movie star students who had a student come and consult me. That person got their reading, but went back and said "EEK" to the big teacher ergo she sends no more clients to ANITA for readings. And was heard expressing horror over how I live.
My guru comes to leave new tapes for transcribing, says EEK a dead VW in your driveway. The garden is overgrown, plants lie in the paths, get some workers in to clip back the plants, BAD FENG SHUI. He added "now type my chapters for free."
My heart doctor says "You won't live to thirty without open- heart surgery to repair that aortic valve that doesn't close." I told him I was sixty and to stuff it. This year I tell them I'm 73 and thank you for taking Med-i-care.
I had my first mini stroke at age 70. I had been in a ten hour typing session. Suddenly it felt like a small animal suddenly moved inside my skull and instantly my eyesight blew. There was a bright flying saucer flashing back and forth beneath my left eye, flying in the air. And the Computer screen, (I'd just put in a ten hour day typing on it,) was a blur unless I turned my head and looked sideways. Now, I always knew strokes ran in my family. Therefore I ate lots of bioflavenoid rich oranges that had hung three years on the tree to be super ripe, in order to prevent it! I have no time for strokes and impaired eyesight! I have to sell a screenplay or at least an article but the problem is, I have to clean up my house to do that.
So I just started.I spent an hour on the front end of what really should be a week long "spring housecleaning". I started in the kitchen. Chased out a litter of kittens. How much harm can they do to a living room? I washed the floors with soap and bleach so I could stand to be there. Did dishes by hand. Dishwashers waste water and electricity besides which I don't have one. I emptied drawers near the sink that had mysteriously filled with black water. Too close to sink I guess.
I need to do several loads of clothing but can't with COMPUTERS turned on as clothing washer blow PC hard drives with the brownouts and surges they cause to current. So I turn off PC's. As I juggled cutlery, drawers, the subtle thought that came to me: Here's how to do this huge job of organizing my house and writing the screenplay and sending it out, when I have 30 cats, thousand of boxes, kids a stroke and a dinky heart valves?
Then it came to me! Just START AND FINISH. And in between, listen for inner cues. The Muses. So as I clean, I waited for thoughts to come. Inspirations. Views, PHILOSOPHY maybe. The first thought came. It was this. Martha Stewart would tackle any chore, even a week long housecleaning, with the MARTHA HEAD TRIP that it was absolutely possible to do it in one night! Martha Stewart would probably go at it like a beagle after a rabbit and probably knock it down to a single night too! SO I decided to see if I could pull a MARTHA! THREE YEARS OF UNDONE WORK, MESS, ROOMS STACKED TO THE CEILING WITH BOXES so you couldn't enter the door, find a blouse and yet no storage to put the mess IN.
Knock this mess down as my guru had told me to do, as the famous yoga teacher had implied had to be done after having spent an entire day talking to people who wanted to talk only about themselves until I was lying on the floor answering them. I had friends that would call me at three a.m. So then it came to me. UNPLUG THE PHONES! I did it, amazed that I could.
I cleaned until dawn. Then fell into bed. Not a sleeping pill left but I didn't need one. NEXT DAY: Today is the big day. THE OFFICE. How can I keep from distracting myself? The phones are still disconnected, so that's a help. I tip toe through the maze of boxes, turn on PC, review my internet mail already. 90% spam. "Lengthen your penis, lower your mortgage, make money at home stuffing envelopes." ERASE it all.
Now, undistracted, this vast plain, this infinite
possibility of a DAY stretches in front of me. The day I tackle the OFFICE.
The one that I couldn't wade through to get a silk party blouse last Friday
night. (I had to wear a burlappy cotton daytime dress to a Bev Hills party!)
So now I tackle the office that is wall to wall boxes stacked three high.
Turn radio on. NO! Today is office cleaning day. Don't distract yourself!
I have empty boxes for putting stuff in. I have my eyeglasses as I will
be going through 40,000 documents to see what is getting tossed. BOXES
and boxes of documents. OK. I"m rolling up my sleeves. I've just had my
morning coffee and bible bread. Quelle Excitement! I know Martha would
approach it with excitement! Here goes nothing.
Note: Ten years after this was written, I still
haven't submitted a novel or script. Much less finished one. THIS IS HARD.
Don't blame yourself, blame GOD! Writers have to be born with a trustfund,
servants and no need for a job.
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Our POSTER is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, activist, ombudsman, Futurist and Astrologer to Yogi Bhajan for 35 years. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! FRUGAL LIFE STYLE TIPS, HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also ARTISANRY FOR EXPORT, EARN EUROS....* Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 15$ natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic! No smarter, more accurate career reading out there! PS. Anita sez, 'get a website for 5$ a month and post articles that YOU LIKE, TOO! Be someone who forwards the action, the evolution. IT IS getting better you know and by getting WORSE FIRST, it gets better!
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