Recently your fearless editor caught up with Clive Cussler, the undisputed master of the action adventure novel, who will be speaking tonight at 7:30. The prolific writer, who will turn 80 on July 15, is a man of many interests, and he’s managed to indulge most of them during his lifetime. “Sometimes I look back and wonder how it all happened,” says Cussler, who was a flight engineer in the Military Air Transport Service during the Korean War, has a collection of 100 classic cars, founded the National Underwater Marine Agency (NUMA), worked as a copywriter before becoming the creative director at several top ad agencies in Los Angeles, and has had 40 books on The New York Times Best Seller list. Still, even with a bio that impressive, he’s amazingly down to earth. Our recent conversation went something like this:

Many of your thrillers feature a recurring character, Dirk Pitt. I’ve heard that you named him after your son? Is that true?

Clive Cussler

My son Dirk was three when I started writing in 1965. He told me that he remembers going to sleep hearing the “tap, tap, tap” of the typewriter keys as I pounded away on a card table in his bedroom. I was working in the advertising industry then. My wife had taken a night job at the local police department—she wasn’t in uniform, more like a secretary or dispatcher or something—so I’d come home, feed the kids and put them to bed, but then I didn’t have anything to do. After awhile, I thought I’d write a book. I didn’t have the Great American Novel burning inside me. I just wanted to write a little paperback series. It was kind of a lark actually. I studied a bunch of authors and their fictional heroes—Edgar Allen Poe’s Inspector Dupont, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Travis McGee, Mike Hammer. I knew I had to do something that was a little different so I put my hero in and around water. He kind of resembled me. He was 6’3” and 185 pounds with eyes greener than mine. He made out with the girls better than I did though.

What’s been one of the most rewarding things about being a best-selling author?

The part that continually astounds me is how many lives I’ve reached out and touched. I get letters from all these kids who went into oceanography after reading my books. There have been fellows who wrote to me from prison to tell me that they wanted to turn their lives around and become more like Dirk Pitt. I got a letter from a doctor in New York who told me that he and his

dad were caught in a riptide on Long Island and that his dad would have drowned if he hadn’t remembered something he’d read in one of my books about Dirk Pitt swimming parallel to the beach in order to get out of a riptide.

In many of your Dirk Pitt novels, you take an alternative perspective on history, say, imagining what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln wasn’t assassinated but kidnapped. Have you always been a curious person?

Clive's Breakthrough Novel

Oh, sure. It’s always a “what if” situation for me. You start with that. My breakthrough book in 1975, Raise the Titanic!, imagined what would happen if someone actually located the Titanic and managed to raise it from the ocean floor. It’s kind of funny because in the book I guessed that the Titanic was about 12,400 feet down, and it turns out that I was only off by 200 feet. And when Dirk Pitt was in a submersible, the first thing he saw was the Titanic’s boiler. Bob Ballard, the underwater archeologist who actually discovered the Titanic in 1985 told me that the first thing he saw when he went down there was the boiler. I’ve never been psychic, but I sure got that right.

Where do you get your ideas?

I don’t know. I remember being in math class as a kid and I just couldn’t do it. Instead, I’d look out the window and daydream about being a pirate. All my teachers thought I was a loser. It wasn’t until I was 79 years old that I found out that I have Attention Deficit Disorder. It explained everything.

How did you have the nerve to leave a lucrative job in advertising so you could have more time to write?

Just to show you what a nutcase I am, I turned down a job at a big agency that paid $28,000 a year to take a job in a dive shop that paid $400 a week so I could write. I remember the guy at the dive shop saying, “Aren’t you a little over-qualified?” but I had more fun there. I wrote my second book, Mediterranean Caper, in longhand when business was slow. Then in 1970 we left California to tour the 11 western states in a pop-up trailer. We ended up renting a little alpine house in Colorado where I started my third book. When we ran out of money, I drove to Denver and applied for a job as a copywriter. The first agency thought I was over-qualified plus they didn’t want any “hotshot from California telling us how it’s done.” I told the next agency that I’d just been a copywriter, and as luck would have it, when they called my agency in LA and asked if Clive Cussler worked there, the person in HR just said yes without adding any details. I got the job, and within a year we started winning CLEO awards. But I didn’t have any time to write so I quit that job. I was practically on unemployment when I wrote Raise the Titanic! I always talk about perseverance. When you type the words “Chapter One,” you’re committed for the next year or so.

What can you tell me about NUMA?

I’ve always been fascinated with shipwrecks so I created this agency to look for historic ships of significance before they’re gone forever. My first expedition was to look for John Paul Jones’ ship, the Bonhomme Richard. In 1979 an attorney who was with us on that expedition

said that if we were going to continue with this madness that we should incorporate. They wanted to call it the Clive Cussler Foundation, but I said no, so they used the name of the agency I’d written into my books.

What are some of NUMA’s biggest discoveries?

We found the Hunley, the Confederate submarine that was sunk during the Civil War. We also discovered the Carpathia, the ship that rescued some of the Titanic’s survivors. I figured that the Carpathia had been scrapped but then I found out that it had been torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland in 1918. People think we’re this huge outfit. I get letters all the time from recent marine biology grads who want to work for NUMA, and they have no idea that it’s just me sitting here thinking, “Hmm, I wonder if…”

Have you always loved vintage cars?

I’ve always been a car nut. I built a hotrod when I was a kid. I had a 1925 limousine that we’d take to football games. My friends and I would dress up like gangsters in hats and scarves and carry beer and wine in my violin case. I played the violin when I was 10. That was a disaster.

When did you start writing yourself into your novels?

That’s kind of a funny story. I was writing this book called Dragon. Dirk Pitt was at a classic car show, and I had him introduce himself to this man I described as having gray hair and a beard. When he said, “Hi, I’m Dirk Pitt,” the character said, “I’m Clive Cussler.” I remember thinking, “Why am I doing that?” My editors at Putman thought it was kind of stupid, but I got 600 letters from fans who said they couldn’t wait to see how I’d show up in my next book.

What would you like it to say on your tombstone?

“It was a great party while it lasted. I trust it will continue elsewhere.”

*This interview was originally published June 18th, 2011 for Write On, SBWC’s daily conference newsletter. Clive was wonderful! A great speaker with lots of stories, but you know that already if you’ve read his books. Pick up his most recent in the Isaac Bell detective series, The Thief.

1. Read more. The average adult reads 3 to 4 books per year, which is less than one book each season. But we are writers, so how about a modest goal two books per month? That’s 24 books this year. It sounds funny, writers needing a reading goal, but the sad truth is that most of the writers I know excuse themselves from reading by saying, “I don’t have time to read. I spend all my time writing.” Could you imagine your doctor telling you, “I don’t have time to keep up with medical journals. I spend all my time diagnosing.” We need to read. It is our nourishment and job requirement.

1. Write consistently. Here’s a thought: If you wrote one page per day for all of 2012, by the end, you’d have a novel. 365 pages. Those pages may or may not be good, but you’d have a full-length manuscript ready to edit. And no, writer’s block is not an excuse. As declared by his father whose work appeared in the newspaper everyday for fifty years, Monte Schulz told me, “Only amateurs get writer’s block. Professionals can’t afford it.”

1. Send your work out. Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, sent out 60 letters to agents over a period of three and a half years. The 61^st got her an agent, and three weeks later she had a publishing deal. We must be brave and expect rejection as part of the artist’s life. Despite the tumultuous state of the publishing world, agents and publishers still have to put food on their tables, and there’s only one way to do that: take us on as clients and sell our books. The late Anne Lowenkopf once told me, “It’s not always the best writers that get published, but the most persistent.”

1. Participate in a writing community. It’s so easy for us to hobbit in our homes, curled up in our sweatpants with laptops and coffee. And from there, it’s not much trouble to find Twitter or Facebook. I won’t knock the importance of online communities, they are wonderful places to learn and connect with others, but they cannot do so well what physical presence does: humble and stimulate. How interesting to be in the same room as other writers! They are our friends and our competition with personalities that are simultaneously fragile and egotistical (I’m not sure how this combination can exist in nature, but I’ve also seen it is peacocks and poodles.) Whether this is a writers conference, a writing class at the local community college, or a writers group, participating in a community of writers is a wonderful place to stretch your literary muscles and make 2012 the year of your bloom.

1. Find a mentor. Saul Bellow was mentor to Philip Roth. Alan Moore to Neil Gaiman. Mentors inspire us. They give us models for how to behave, provide encouragement and hopefully honesty. Think about it, why didn’t your parents want you to hang around the kids who smoked cigarettes? Well, now you’re a grown up and you want to hang around the folks with all those books on their shelves, some of which (gasp!), even have their name printed on the covers. Well, here’s to hoping publishing in 2012 is contagious like naughty teenage behavior.

Vanity Fair Special Edition: Hollywood Scandal, Sex, and Obsession

through the Sex and Scandal issue, and there was Jackie Collins in all her glitz and glamour. The late Dominick Dunne writes in Queens of the Road:

“Last year at the Writers Conference in Santa Barbara Jackie and I were both speakers, along with Thomas McGuane, Irving Stone, William F. Buckley Jr., and others. Jackie arrived only minutes before she was scheduled to speak, in a stretch limousine with a great deal of video equipment to record her speech. Only, she didn’t make a speech the way the rest of us did. The Conference provided her with an interviewer, and the interviewer asked her questions. There wasn’t an empty seat in the hall. ‘Can you give the writers here some advice?’ the interviewer asked. ‘Write only about what you know,’ she told them. Later when the floor was thrown open to questions from the audience, the audience was told in advance by the interviewer, ‘Miss Collins will answer no questions about her sister.’ Her sister was, at the time, involved in the highly publicized extrication from her fourth marriage.”

I’m not sure what year this was in SBWC history. Monte certainly remembers her speech, though he can’t recall the limousine.

Jackie and Joan for Vanity Fair, March 1988

In the November issue of VF, she says, “Time is precious. I am completely on time and if people are 10 minutes late I am pissed; in that 10 minutes I could have been doing something. At least I could have written another page.”

It’s no wonder she’s now the author of 28 novels! Check out Jackie’s most recent book, Goddess of Vengeance.

“What’d you think about Poetry?”

“To say it was exhilarating seems trite at best.”

“Say? Didn’t I see you in the ‘Creating Exciting Dialog’ workshop?”

“Yup.”

“How was the supernatural/horror/science fiction workshop?”

“Shh.  ‘They’ may be listening.”

Meanwhile, writers seeking publication were pitching ideas and agents were ducking — er fielding — them as fast as they could.

“I’m writing the definitive book on bricks.”

“Sounds heavy. Here’s my card.”

“I’m working on a travel book about Canada.”

“Great, where abouts do you live?”

“Hoboken, New Jersey.”

“Perfect, here’s my card.”

“My mother thinks my novel is the greatest Slovenian love story ever told.”

“Good niche. Here’s my card.”

I think I blew it though when an agent sidled up to me at the bar and asked me what I was working on and I said: “I think it’s merlot.”

But I wasn’t really there to sell something that could make me richer than Donald Trump’s ex-wives and more famous than Anthony Weiner’s weiner. I was there to conduct a humor workshop to help people think and write funnier so they could eventually put me out of a job. I was also there to teach them the discipline they need in order to become more prolific writers…

“What are you looking for?” my wife asked.

“Inspiration,” I said.

“Well, don’t leave your head in the refrigerator too long. It defeats the purpose of having energy-efficient appliances, plus you end up smelling like leftover stir fry and driving the neighborhood dogs crazy. Besides aren’t you supposed to be writing your post-writers-conference column?”

“It’s not due until Friday.”

“Today’s Saturday.”

Dang. I grabbed a block of cheese and a couple beers to put me in a writer’s conference state of mind and headed back to my office. Part of the problem is that so much happens in one week at the SBWC that it’s a bit overwhelming and hard to process. But if there is one lesson I have learned over the years and try to share with my students, it’s focus. That’s the difference between finishing a project you’ve been working on since telephones hung on walls and not finishing.

“I’m going to go grab some lunch,” my wife yelled from the other room. “I know you’re busy writing… Okay, so I guess you want to go too?”

“Just trying to pay more attention to you dear. Don’t want to become one of those reclusive writers you hear about, locked in their own room for days at a time.”

“You’ve only been in your office five minutes, though I see you did manage to finish off a pound of imported cheddar.”

I tossed my sweats in the corner, slipped on my shoes and headed for the car.

“Not that it’s cold out, but you may want to put on some pants.”

“Good point.”

Speaking of points that’s another one I strive to make to my students – humor is in the details. It’s often the little things that others overlook but humor writers notice that make the difference between fun and funny.

“The specials sound good,” my wife said.

“What specials?”

“The ones on the first page.”

“What first page?”

As we were waiting for our lunches to arrive I thought of another thing to mention in my post-writers-conference column. It came up after listening to the third funny tale of trying to fit into today’s women’s underwear styles. This one was actually written by a woman but a bit wordy. I told students rewriting often meant paring things down to the bare minimum.

“Are you going to eat all of that?” my wife asked.

I looked at the two platters, three bowls and a mug that was going to take two hands to lift. “You know my motto: ‘Live well, write often.’”

“Hm. You know I think the name of your next book should be “Do as I say, not as I do.”

“Ha-ha,” I said, sarcastically, but inwardly I was already preparing my pitch for next year’s agent party.

Read more writing humor in my latest book: “A Year in the Life of a ‘Working’ Writer”

http://www.erniesworld.com/

Here’s a useful technique for all kinds of writing, although it works particularly well for the travel genre.

Close your eyes. It’s dark now, like being in a theater when the lights go down. See the white screen inside your head and let it fill with a mental movie of a scene or incident from your travels. As the scene envelops you and details grow sharper, look around. What’s nearby?

Remember, your mind has not only an eye, but also an ear, a nose, and skin to take in what’s around you. Listen to people’s voices (kids giggling? cab drivers arguing?), smell the air (roses? diesel fumes?), see colors (sand, watermelon), and feel sensations (the Greek sun burning the tops of your bare feet).

When the movie ends – and it will naturally just fade out – it’s time to capture your impressions. Without coming out of your quiet state of recollection, jot down phrases that describe what you experienced, capturing the details before they fade. Later, these impressions will help you create a scene for your story.

Here’s an example from an article I wrote early in my career for the “Los Angeles Times” travel section, about buying inexpensive air tickets in Bangkok:

We were standing in front of “K. King’s Made-to-Order Suits and Travel Agency – Once Tried, Ever Trusted” at 119 Sukhumvit Road, quietly melting away in the sun like sticks of butter, when a round Sikh with black eyes and an electric blue turban leaned out of his shop.

“You want cheapest air fare?” he asked, his eyebrows shooting up and down suggestively like Groucho Marx’s. “Come in, come in! Call me Jimmy . . .”

My job as a travel writer was to make this encounter in Thailand come to life for the reader. To accomplish this, I mentally replayed my memory “movie,” wrote down the details, and employed them in writing the scene.

Here’s a promise: Use this technique, and you’ll soon be writing travel stories so real they jump off the page – and into the reader’s head.

Jerry Camarillo Dunn, Jr. teaches the SBWC travel writing workshop. His work has received three Lowell Thomas Awards, the “Oscars” of the field, from the Society of American Travel Writers.

by Rebecca Robins

The New York Times mentioned recently that a slight brouhaha was brewing. After Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, a memoir of her life following the death of her husband of many years, came out, Julian Barnes complained that it was “a breach of narrative promise” for her not to reveal that she’d remarried a little over a year after her first husband’s death.

Ms. Oates, in response, said the book was meant to be about the immediate experience of widowhood, but suggested in future editions, she might add an appendix to bring her story up to date.

Her editor, in response to them both, said Ms. Oates’ memoir was about losing her first husband and her second marriage was inappropriate information because it ruined the integrity of the experience she described.

One book, three opinions, and it got me to thinking about how one chooses what to include in a memoir, and what it means ‘to tell the truth,” something I often say to writers.

What I’ve always meant by that is pretty simple — you have a choice about what you want to write, but once you make that choice, tell the truth about it if you want your work to have integrity. There is the expression: warts, and all. You get to choose the wart, but once you have that wart on the page, it’s your responsibility to tell the truth about it.

Now I’m pretty sure, given Ms. Oates, that whatever she wrote about her immediate experience was as close to the truth as she was going to get. I am also pretty sure that if she had sifted how she felt immediately after the death of her husband through the filter of her future marriage, it would have distorted the truth of the experience lived. She would have been looking back through a future knowledge she didn’t have when she lived those moments.

But I’m also pretty sure that Mr. Barnes, short listed multiple times for the Man Booker prize, and quite the heavy weight novelist, felt the novelist’s burden to tidy up the story. Even if only the frame he wanted it presented in. But, and this is important, that wasn’t the story Ms. Oates chose to tell.

Just as you have a choice.

If Ms. Oates deprived the world of Mr. Barnes’ narrative promise by her choices, that only meant the world would be in for the satisfaction of a turn of events separate from the text and a little farther down the line — what, already remarried? — which, if you think about it, approximates more closely for the reader the sequential experience of the two separate events: widowhood and remarriage.

It really is your story. You get to choose.

When I exchanged a dental practice in Chicago for a typewriter in California, I had already finished the first drafts of two novels. It was hard to believe that from then on, writing would be my life and that I no longer had to search for a free moment to do what I had always believed was my vocation.

I enrolled in workshops and extension classes at UCSD to make sure I was on the right track, but it wasn’t until I joined SBWC that I became a committed writer. Ten years ago, I packed my manuscripts, sharpened my pencil and drove to Santa Barbara. Having lived at home during college, Westmont was my first real “college experience.” As a mother of two college kids and having taught at Northwestern, I was familiar with dorm rooms, cafeteria food, and lines of students waiting to use the computer room. How alluring were those scenes now that I was once again the student.

I had no idea as to which of the many workshops and classes would be best to attend, but soon realized that it didn’t really matter. After sitting in a couple of classes I knew that I’d benefit from each and every one offered. By the second day, I had met students of all ages, who had come from around the country. Some of those friendships have lasted to this day and their support and camaraderie has seen me through years of struggle. It was one such friend, who encouraged me to stay up at night and join one of the “pirate workshops.”

That night, a few hours after dinner, using the flashlight she had brought along, we walked through the wooded campus to the to east side and entered the den of ‘pirate writers.’ People of all ages sat wherever they could find a seat and their conversation filled the large room with a pleasant buzz. Shelly Lowenkopf was in a wing chair at the top of the room. I knew his name because I had pre-submitted a portion of my manuscript for his preview. He was busy talking, a large dog at his feet.

A young girl held a clipboard and went around to take down names. When she reached me, I wrote mine and had no idea that was the list of volunteers who’d read that night. Looking back, I recall many of those writers’ names, including some who were already established, such as Monte Schulz, and am amazed that I had found the courage to read a few paragraphs. It was the first time I read my Sky of Red Poppies to a crowd and I felt as if I had just revealed my biggest secret to complete strangers.

Throughout that first conference, a Mark Twain quote echoed in my mind. “Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.” I was determined to receive the education that my schooling had deprived me of. My writer’s life had just begun and SBWC was at Westmont College to make sure I was educated. I had arrived with a bag full of rough drafts and a heart heavy with uncertainty. Little did I know that on the drive home I would carry enough hope to see me through years of hard work.

The legendary Ray Bradbury taught me to seek knowledge in the library, Shelly Lowenkopf said, “You were born a writer.” Sid Stebel found the point where my story should begin, and John Daniel helped me to hone my prose. Yvonne Nelson Perry taught me to be “visceral”. Later, she also made sure I understood punctuation. “You’re allowed ONE exclamation mark per lifetime!” Her loving, caring ways helped me to pass a few more steppingstones long after the conference. Marla Miller taught me to speak up and present myself. And so it was that at the conclusion of the following conference they called my name and I walked upstage to Cork Milner and received my first award for “Excellence In Writing.”

After a short absence I now return to Santa Barbara, but this time I’m not empty handed. My born-in-Santa-Barbara novel is going back with me to celebrate its triumph over obstacles such as education, motherhood, career, even age. There is much to learn and many more books to write, but this time I won’t simply absorb and dream. In a way, I envy the newcomers because what is now an expectation to me will be a most pleasant surprise for them.

Too many teachers and fellow students have touched my life and I won’t ever be able to thank them all. So I hope they hear me when I say, “I’m bringing you the first harvest of the seeds you sowed, Santa Barbara Writers Conference, because Sky of Red Poppies is as much your novel as it is mine. “

Among the many myths associated with the activity of being a professional writer, none is so epidemic and fraught as loneliness. I’ve heard some writers and want-to-be writers go so far as to construct an entire calculus in which the degree of authorial depth of skill is directly related to the agony of loneliness a writer suffers.

He or she who is gregarious, has a life filled with friends, the myth goes, is doomed to a life of rejection slips or, at best, a choice spot on the remainder table. It takes a trail of broken relationships and estrangements to make it to the backlist of the publisher’s catalog; nothing short of a hermit-like existence and shabby personal habits gets the writer a choice spot on the frontlist.

Bologna. The sausage, rather than the city.

Most writers would give up their latest bug-free edition of Microsoft Word or iPages for more time apart and, indeed, this becomes one of the reasons why writers who do manage to get time away from friends, family, and associates for composing their latest work often have reputations for being inconsiderate, uncaring, and cold. Some writers—amazing persons—have learned to manage their work while babies or mates are napping. Others still have found ways to turn off the individuals in their surroundings and work in spite of not being lonely, wishing all the time for loneliness.

Not far down from loneliness on the Ten Things You Thought You Knew about Being a Writer is the idiotic trope that writing books, short stories, essays, and op-ed pieces presents the writer with the freedom of choice and expression dictated by their own conscience and creative self. This may work for the dilettante or hobbyist, otherwise—welcome to the world of publishing, where there are literary agents, acquisitions editors, content editors and copyeditors, not to mention publishers, salespersons, and publicists. Each of these worthies has a semblance of a career tacked on to what you propose to do, and don’t you forget it.

Good luck finding a literary agent who will represent you when all you wish to do is write short stories and the occasional prose poem (whatever the hell that might be.) Better luck yet with getting a manuscript into type without “notes” from an editor or that bugbear for consistency of usage, the copy editor.

Unless, of course, you chose to self-publish. Some possibilities of loneliness for you when you take your self-published work into a book store, or show it to a literary agent, or do manage to buy your way into a “book tour” in which you address potential audiences in strange venues that seem to attract large crowds of motorcycle tourists.

Writing is one of the least lonely of activities. When you hear a writer complaining of the time spent in isolation, away from his or her fellow humans, devoid of the human foibles that so infuse writing with heart and content, it is because he or she—that very filer of the indictment of loneliness—wants your ear to complain about the injustices visited from reviewers, agents, editors, booksellers.

Even if you have not come close to approaching the plateau of stature you wish in your writing, the mere fact of you being on the learning curve will have the effect of lifting a rock after a rainstorm. Individuals, some of them complete strangers to you, will be only too glad to send you their latest work for a reading, or perhaps you have some pointers for their son, daughter, husband, cousin, who also wishes to join the community of writing voices.

If you are serious about wishing to forge a career in writing, you will experience many things, ranging from abject humiliation to those embarrassing moments of being congratulated for books you did not write nor have any wish to write, to flights of the sheer satisfaction a bird must feel when a thermal provides it a lift skyward or a dog feels when its nose wraps around an intriguing scent. But lonely? Not likely.

The conference is filling up; we’ve got 20 spots left, if you can believe it. Don’t wait until the last week to sign up!

Good News:
Hotel Mar Monte is celebrating their 80th Anniversary, and to celebrate all lunches and dinners at the hotel will be 25% off during the week of the conference. Yum!

The Graphic Novel Panel is scheduled for Tuesday June 21st at 4pm. Panelists include: Joyce Farmer, Sammy Harkham, and Tim Hensley. Joyce’s graphic novel, Special Exits, was recently awarded the National Cartoonists Society Award.

Announced at BEA in NY: Writers and Their Notebooks, an anthology workshop leader Diana Raab compiled and edited with a Foreword by Phillip Lopate, won the 2011 Eric Hoffer Award.

Sad News:
For the first time in 39 years, Ray Bradbury will not be joining us at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference due to complications with his health. Ray has attended every SBWC since it’s beginning 1972 and has inspired hundreds of writers with his talks on love and writing. In Ray’s place, Clive Cussler will speak on opening night.

If you’ve been wondering, What is the pirate workshop? Check out this video (Thanks, Lisa Angle!). For those of you pirate veterans, you’ll enjoy this, too.:

If you want creative help from your muse, here’s an important insider secret. Start working first. It’s a lesson that I forget at least two to five times a week.
Muses, turns out, are agents of the active, not the idle. In order to lure one to your table, your canvas, your novel, poem or blog, roll up your sleeves and get to work. Dive, doodle, journal, collage, whatever— enter boldly into the world of artistic expression. Then, just watch and wait to see what happens!
Quite often, NOTHING. (Whaa-a-a-t!) That’s right. Sometimes you sit for hours and end up with nothing newer than a raging red hangnail. So you stop, and then try again the next day. Nada. A recorded message plays close to your ear. “All Muses are busy, please stay on the line for the next available goddess.” The minutes, hours, days tick away and your hangnail has now born several offspring. Still, nothing.

Minerva Among the Muses

Mary Hershey is an author for children and young adults and a certified Personal & Executive Coach. Her first book My Big Sister is So Bossy She Says You Can’t Read this Book was published by Random House in 2005. Her three subsequent books have equally long titles that barely fit on the book spine. She has a very nice editor that doesn’t mind one bit.