Sunday, June 29, 2014

A Blog Tour:  On Intuitive Understanding
Diane Brandon


I was flattered when Fran Kramer asked me to participate in a blog tour.  Fran is currently writing Too Much of a Good Thing, a sequel to her book, Dead Men Do Tell Tales, a teen mystery novel that came out last year.  I feel that writing about our work and reading about others' work is a wonderful way not just to share information, but also be inspired.

For this blog tour, each of us has been asked to answer four questions. Here they are, as well as my answers to them:

1) What Am I Working On? 

I'm presently working on two different books.  The first one, Spiritually Aware Since Birth, is about those of us who have always remembered what we thought when we were born.  It's near and dear to my heart because I have always had that memory, which has never dimmed over time.  I'm presently conducting interviews with people who have those memories and have been fascinated by other people's accounts and both the variations and commonalities among our experiences.

I'm also working on 100 Dreams Interpreted, which will be a follow-up book to my book, Dream Interpretation for Beginners -- Understand the Wisdom of Your Sleeping Mind, which will be published in March 2015.  I'm presently collecting dreams from people for that book.  My hands are quite full right now!

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre

This is an excellent question.  I tend to combine the left brain, more logical approach, with my right brain, more creative and intuitive side.  As a result, my books are in that gray area that represents the confluence of these two, seemingly opposed modes.  (Of course, they're neither opposed nor mutually exclusive.  Many of us are whole brained.)  I have always been driven to understand things and have never been content to just look at the surface appearance.  Thus, in my books I work at sharing with my readers what's behind the subject material I'm writing about and I like to share as many ins and outs of a topic as possible.  One reviewer wrote that my book, Intuition for Beginners, would make a wonderful textbook for people.  I'm also an armchair philosopher, so my natural bent is to share concepts in my writing as well.  Many of these deal with personal development, metaphysics, and cosmology.

3) How does my writing process work?

Well, I'll admit that I never used to see myself as a writer.  It came out of left field for me, just as working with my intuition did.  As a result, I don't have a burning need to write every day.  I write primarily when I have something to say.

Once I identify a topic that I feel driven to write about and communicate information on to others, I start making notes of points I want to cover.  That's a major part of the creative process for me, when the ideas are popping in.  Once that faucet appears to be turned off and the stream ends, I then sit down to start writing.  Sometimes I may do any necessary research in advance or perhaps during the writing process when I need to document a point I'm making.  Once I make a draft, I walk away from it for a while, so that I can come back to it fresh and edit and proof.

Once I sit down and start writing, most of the time it just flows -- sometimes so quickly that I work at typing quickly enough.  I love it when it just flows.  If I hit a snag and feel blocked, I walk away.  (This is similar to how I wrote papers in high school, college, and grad school, except when I hit mental blocks then I would turn around and play a few hands of solitaire until the blocks evaporated.)  Once my mind has cleared, I go back to writing.  I do tend to go back and reread what I wrote and tweak and make little edits.  If I have been away from the project for a while, I always need to go back and reread from the beginning, so as to get back into the flow of the work again.

4)  Why Do I Write What I Do?

That's an easy question to answer.  I write about subjects that have fascinated me for years and which I've often researched over the years and sometimes for decades.  I write about what intrigues me and that which I feel others may find of interest.  I am deeply spiritual -- and have been so since birth (viz., that book I'm working on now) -- and am driven to share that passion, knowledge, and awareness with others.  My writing is probably a form of teaching that which I know and feel that I have considerable expertise about.  Receiving positive feedback about how my writing has helped others is certainly a positive motivation.

Two excellent writers and wonderful women will continue this blog tour, and they are the following writers:

Peggy Payne


Peggy Payne
Travel writer and TV reporter turned novelist, Peggy Payne is author of three novels and two nonfiction books. Her writing has taken her to more than 25 countries, including three months in India researching her novel Sister India.  She has published in magazines including More, Cosmopolitan, Travel & Leisure, Ms. Magazine, Family Circle, Coastal Living, Publishers Weekly, etc., and in most of the major American newspapers. 

Screen rights to her first novel Revelation were sold to Synergy Films. Peggy Payne has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the NC Arts Council. For completion of her new novel Cobalt Blue she won the 2003 Sherwood Anderson Award. 

A native of North Carolina, she grew up in the coastal town of Wilmington and graduated from Duke University.  Peggy lives with her husband Bob Dick, a psychologist specializing in clinical hypnosis, in a log cabin by a pond in rural Chatham County, NC.  She writes and works with other writers in Raleigh’s historic Oakwood in an old Victorian called Free Range Studio. Her writing has come to range over every sort of spirituality and its expression in the physical world, particularly through sexuality.


C. A. Rowland

C. A. Rowland

C. A. Rowland  is an author, lawyer, speaker and teacher.  She is currently working on short stories and a mystery novel set in Savannah, Georgia. 

She is a regular blogger on www.mostlymystery.com and has a personal blog that features Stories Inspired by Pictures (SIPs) at www.carowland.com.  She’s a member of Sisters In Crime,  Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Virginia Writer’s Club, Inc.,  and Riverside Writers. Her short story, "The Gift,"  was a semi-finalist in the Bethlehem Writers Roundtable 2014 Short Story Contest.  Two of her other short stories, "An Interview with a Rabbit"  and "The Crock of Gold," were originally published in 2013 in the e-magazine, Kings River Life (www.kingsriverlife.com) and "An Interview with a Rabbit" was included in the anthology, Rappahannock Voices, which can be found at www.buybooksontheweb.com

For more information,  see her website at www.carowland.com or you can follow her on twitter as @writer4993.

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