Lifewriting Live 8/19

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Writing Live View, and I am Steve, and we are always happy to see you. Now, we're going to mute you, those of you who are in our Zoom Room with us. The rest of you, feel free to speak as much as you want.

So, Suzanne, Paul said, I don't have a question, but I wanted to share that I've taken the Sunken Place and the Afrofuturism classes, and I love them, which is great.

Thank you so much for that, Suzanne.

And since you brought it up, they are available@sunkenplaceclass.com or afrofuturismwebinar.com but right now, this is just our opportunity to speak with you, to care about you, to find out what it is that we can do to contribute to you. So we're going to talk about what the last week of our existence has been and the tools that we have used to help increase our aliveness and our success, to protect ourselves in the midst of a very stressful time. So, T, would you like to get started? I was. You don't see it on your page. It'll be there. It'll be there.

All right. So I didn't get a good night's sleep last night. We were up a little bit too late. Then my mind was racing because I had some ideas, writers, you know how that is. I don't usually get out of bed to sneak into the bathroom with a flashlight to write down ideas. So this was a little unusual.

Did you?

I did.

Oh, that is so cool.

I was like, this is so brilliant. I have to get it down now.

Look, I love that. I love. If you don't have an answer to a problem, if you can clearly state the problem and then turn it over to your unconscious at night, you'll often find that your unconscious mind is working on it in dream time. And you might. And you will often end up in the morning with an answer to a problem that seemed intractable the night before. So trust the process. I think that all of us have had, you know, instances where we had a breakthrough at an unexpected time and just trust that, learn how to nurture that, learn how to actually set yourself up for those breakthroughs.

It wouldn't have been so bad except that there was this construction happening, like right in front of our house starting at 7am that was literally shaking the house. It was so powerful. So not only was I up late, I got awakened early by the construction. But other than that, we've been having a really, really good week. We've been doing a little consulting with production companies. As we mentioned, we did our second consulting gig yesterday, which went fantastic, which is great because we don't have to write anything. We just come and we drop our little.

Really? It wasn't anything more than we give you guys for free every week. But they paid us very well.

Yes, they paid us. Listen, if you can get, if you can monetize what you know. Monetize what you know, and that's what we are certainly striving to do. But we also, we've mentioned, have a lot of exciting other projects happening. We're moving to the story phase with a pilot that, that I have in development that hopefully one day will be announced or one day soon will be announced. But it's for my first novel, the between, which is in development for tv. So we're gonna, you know, we're moving ahead, like we said, to the story point with that. And that's the first of the several things we have cooking that is actually going like, to the point where like checks will change hands when you turn in this next.

Well, they just announced yesterday, so there was the Black Panther.

Right. So today, announcement, cereal box publishing, which some of you may know, it's a combined audio ebook format, announced the upcoming Black Sins of the King cereal box book that Steve and I wrote chapters for along with Ira Madison. And I'm trying to find all the names because I'm so bad with names, but there's a bunch of us, Jeff Thorne, some of you may know as a TV writer, he's written for a bunch of shows. And also there's a Mohale Machego who's an African writer, and I forget if she's South African. I think she is. And so glad that we have a South African writer, an actual African writer on this book that's coming out at the end of January and that just dropped today. And the audiobook is going to be read by an actor that some of you may know from the show the Good Place. Others of you may know him from Hereditary. The one and only William Jackson Harper will be doing the audiobook for that Black Sins of the King. So look that up. That came out in a Hollywood Reporter, I think it was today, which is super exciting.

Yeah, it is. It's always nice to get that kind of reinforcement from the trade magazines. You know, it makes a difference and it isn't always easy to get it. And so it can feel sometimes like you're doing work and it's like dropping coins into a well and just everything has just disappeared. But when you start getting feedback from the environment, not just checks that you get or people enjoying the thing, but you're enjoying your work. But when the trades know it now, it's the praise of your peers, it's other people who are in positions that are like you and people who are above you, people who can help you, can assist you as you climb up that mountain. So that's all great. So let's see what.

And this weekend in terms of announcements. So I have one more. Because a lot of stuff started dropping today, we took part in a Ray Bradbury Centennial readathon that includes readers like Neil Gaiman, William Shatner and us, Marlon James. And we also co read some, some pieces from Fahrenheit 451 to celebrate Bradbury's 100th birthday. Yes, correct. And that starts this weekend. So if you want to look up Ray Bradbury Centennial, I think it's raybradburycentennial.com that drops August 22nd where we've serialized the book and several different readers will be reading different portions of the book. That's right, yeah. And that's a lot of fun.

So let's see. And then what else we're working on. We've got two graphic novels that we're having to edit to promote to shepherd towards publication. We've got a couple different groups of people want us to do movies potentially and seriously a couple of different scripts that are being shopped, a couple novels that are under option. So we've got all these different things that are going on. Plus we have a son to raise and school is about to open up Monday. Plus we have a relationship to maintain, you know, so it's.

Oh right, yeah, you know me, yeah, yeah, right, yeah. See that.

How soon they forget. So trying to think about all the different things that you have to do and stay sane enough that you can have fun and enjoy the process of doing it is central because remember you're the instrument that does. You are the most important part of the equation of your life. And if you forget that you don't take care of yourself and you don't say I've got all these different things going on because all the stuff we just mentioned to you is about half of what's going on really. And some of the things are really live. Some of them are very speculative, but it's all there. So the question that really comes to me is what is it that we need to do? How can we thrive? How can we do all the things that we need to do and simultaneously be certain that we're not going crazy in the process. If you can do that, then you get to win the game. If you can't do that, then you lose the game. Okay? It's really, it's really pretty much as simple as that. And I don't want you to lose the game. You know, I want very, very much for those of you who've been here and continue being here to. Oh, so we don't have the Restream custom service. That's okay. We'll just post the video later. We want those of you who are here to be happy and healthy so you can be of support to your friends and family and community. Right now we're being failed a bit by our top down leadership. So that means that we need to be leaders. We need to be capable of supporting our families. We need to be capable of giving love to the people who need it, giving support to the people who need it. There are people who are looking to answer the question, is it even possible to be happy in the world? I mean, seriously, there are people who actually take the position that being happy means that you're not paying attention. Being happy means that you don't care. No. Being joyful in my mind is the meaning of life is to seek joy. But if you would like that life to be a life of meaning, then you want to find joy in helping other people as well as yourself. So you take care of yourself first. You put your feet on the dock. You don't get down in the water and drown with drowning swimmers. You get your feet on the dock and throw them a life preserver. You say this way to the dry ground. You get there, people are looking. Is it possible to be happy and healthy and successful and have a healthy, loving relationship and be a good, decent, moral person? And I'm telling you it is absolutely possible to do it. I've never figured it out, but it's possible. It is possible.

And first I just, you know, want to honor that. What a dumpster fire. Okay, so a lot of you were dealing with the transition back to the school year, whether you're a teacher or a parent or sometimes both. And it is not easy. It is scary. We're lucky that our district is not opening up in person. We did a drive through pickup of school supplies and we'll be doing virtual learning right now. But if you're afraid, I mean, it's just a lot. It's a lot of stress, a lot new things that we're all getting used to. So I just want to basically acknowledge that, that while we're spreading joy. And while we attempt to spread joy, we understand that we're not always feeling joy. And it is absolutely normal not to be feeling joy right now because of the times we're going through. It's not. It's a bad, bad time. For some of you, it may feel like the worst time you've ever been through, and that is real. So acknowledge that, sit with that. And we absolutely embrace that that is the case. But we're hoping that there's some things that we can say that can help bring a glimme, maybe a glimmer of inspiration. Even with less time to write. Wouldn't it be great if somehow you were doing more writing? Yeah.

Doing more and less time, Becoming more efficient, more effective. And I want you to start with you. I want you to start with your own lives, your own families. Waking up in the morning and feeling like you have a reason to get out of bed besides just, you know, pain or paying those lousy bills to feel that there is something of joy. I can tell you I was just talking about this with Tina. Yes, yes. That I don't get out of bed in the morning until I have figured out how I can improve my level of joy, energy and contribution by just 1% is like, what do I have to be? How do I have to align myself? Who do I have to commit more deeply to? Serving to just get 1% better at being a father, at being a husband, at being a teacher, at being a writer, at reaching out to the people who've been good to me. So good. I have been so blessed by my mentors and friends and this incredible woman in my life, how can I be the best I can be for them? This is important because we often can't do it just for ourselves. But if we know that what people want is to feel joy, to feel juice in their lives, and then we figure out if I am feeling joy, then I figured that out. Not only that, but I can radiate that to them now. You have the right to be happy. You have the responsibility to be happy. So how can you accomplish the things that you want to accomplish in your life and be joyful in the process? Figure that out and life becomes a very different place. So we've talked about that in the most basic way. We talked about this thing called the five minute miracle, where every hour, like, if you are under real, real, real, real stress, the way to beat that is every hour, on the hour, you do 60 seconds of deep, slow, diaphragmatic belly breathing. Okay? You do that between five and ten times a day, you change your life. Remember, it's not five minutes or it's not 10 minutes or five minutes all at one time. It's one minute at a time, spaced every one to three hours. By doing that, you are forcing yourself to break the negative patterns, negative physiological patterns.

I think he's taking a picture.

You're taking a picture?

No. But in any case, sometimes it helps. Like last night, I was super wired. I'd had all these ideas. I was up scribbling in the bathroom. I was like, you know, you can't keep this up. You have to go to bed. And I actually have a pose where I have to have one arm over my head, I'm on my back, and then, you know, there's a specific pose. I know if I go in this pose, it'll be easier to go to sleep. But also listening to an app and Calm App, a lot of people like it, but it is a paid app, so I know it may not be in everyone's budget, but you can find free meditations on YouTube, breathing visualizations on YouTube. As wired as I was when I was listening to calm and my favorite meditation coach, I'll call her, reminding me to breathe through my body. Like long inhalation, slow exhalation. It really did help slow down the. We call the monkey mind. There's a visualization exercise where, you know, instead of being disappointed with yourself because you're having too many thoughts and you don't want to have thoughts, just visualize those thoughts as little shiny balloons. I picture silver shiny balloons blinking away into the sky. I had a thought. Goodbye, thought, Good thought, bad thought. Goodbye thought, you know, I honor that you were here. Bye. You know, and just let it go and breathe. And sure enough, I did go to sleep.

One of the things that I will do to prepare myself for sleep, because a good, solid night's sleep is one of the best things you can do. It's, you know, it gives you good, solid dreams, you know, and if you, for instance, are having a problem being creative, if you make sure you get enough sleep. And then you keep a dream diary where you either wake up, you know, you tell your subconscious you want to wake up after you've had a dream, and you dictate it into a tape Recorder or an MP3 recorder, or you have a dream diary and you scribble something on it in the middle of night, or you wake up in the morning to write them down, the first thing, you are strengthening the connection between the conscious and the Unconscious minds, as well as giving yourself the restorative rest that your body needs in order to thrive, in order to, to cope with the stress that's hit you during the day so that you can continue to get stronger. If you get enough rest, if you get the right nutrition and if you handle stress properly, your body will continue to grow, your mind will grow, your spirit will grow. But if you don't get enough of those things, you'll start breaking down. So when I'm trying to go to bed at night, it might be things you just want to start paying attention. Well, what is it that allows me to get the best night's sleep? Is it, you know, don't eat within two hours at the time I go to bed, you know, don't drink within an hour of the time I go to bed?

No screens. A couple hours or at least an hour before you go to bed, hopefully.

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I have to admit, no computer screens. I'm not missing, I'm not missing my Robot Chicken.

That's our ritual.

We have our ritual. We watch Tyler Moore episode of the Mary Tyler More. We watch an episode of Columbo or some other show that we're binging or part of an episode, maybe like a half hour of, you know, we wait until the guy has killed, you know, somebody has killed somebody. And it's always somebody who's wealthy and powerful and snobby. And then here comes little blue collar Columba.

Excuse me, there's one more thing.

He's gonna take him down.

Comfort food for me, it's like shows I used to watch in childhood are really important to me right now. So comfort food, Mary Tyler Moore, it just like puts me back in like a simpler time.

And then Robot Chicken is so stupid, but it's smart stupid. You know, every little 15 minute episode, there's gonna be something that makes me laugh out loud just at how outrageous it is.

If nothing else, in all seriousness, and I'm not a huge Robot Chicken fan, I get one good laugh out of every episode. But I watched an entire family on their way to a funeral, these parents to bury their son who had been killed in the military. And they were watching Robot Chicken and I paid attention to that.

I was like, wow, yeah, that is powerful.

If you can like quiet these minds at this moment with this, that is something worth paying attention to.

My first, my first marriage, my father in law, my first marriage was mourning the death of his brother and he was in deep, deep grief. He came and he's staying with me. And my wife and I put on airplane. And he laughed until he cried. He finally let that. That damn break. Now, we could go from that discussion about sleep to the question of. There's often the part of us that feels like if we're gonna write something, it has to be heavy and meaningful. No, it can simply be honest and funny.

Some people want to lean into post apocalyptic and like, oh, it's even gonna be worse, or it could be worse. And some people want to lean into something lighter. Romance. If you've never tried that, you know, comedy, try your hand at funny.

Well, there's a. There's a fantastic movie called Sullivan's Travels about a comedy writer in Hollywood. This is done back in like the 1930s or early.

Oh, yeah, I remember that.

A comedy writer who believes that he should be doing something serious with his life. And so he. He rents a van and he and his girlfriend and his agent set out across the country to find out what real America is. And they end up in prison.

Oh, that's the part I remember.

So he ends up losing his memory and being taken onto a chain gang. And while he's there, you know, he's just in misery. He doesn't know who he is or what's going on. He's working in the hot sun, you know, for day after day after day. And on Saturday night, they play. I think it's a Mickey Mouse cartoon. And he laughs until he cries. He just laughs and laughs and laughs. And when he eventually gets his memory back, because he does, he realizes that there isn't anything more important than simply providing entertainment, that people are being pushed to the wall by life. This was during the Depression. And sometimes they don't need your heavy thoughts. They need you to help them laugh until they cry. And I can't tell you enough that whatever it is that you want to create and give to the world, don't judge it by whether or not it's going to be an Academy Award, this, that, or the other, an award winning. How about actually entertaining people? How about giving people some peace and.

Joy or starting, you know, like. Is it pronounced Malaika?

Malaika.

Malaika.

Malaika.

But she's writing comedy sketches. And so it's. It's like, yeah, you could try to get joy to other people, but sometimes you're just giving joy to yourself.

Dre said, after my daughter committed suicide, I became a stand up comic and it saved my life.

Well, thank you for sharing that.

I'm so sorry, first of all. Absolutely. I'm so sorry for your loss. But that was brilliant. A brilliant adjustment.

I love stand up comedy and I absolutely.

That's how you do it.

If you, if you saw Patton Oswalt special that, the first special he did on Netflix after the unexpected death of his wife, or the sketches Richard Pryor used to do, like the one he did after he was out of the hospital for his freebasing where he almost died, you can really see the power that comedy has to exorcise some of those demons. So good for you.

So it's part of the. Part of creativity. Help people cry, help them laugh, help them scream, help them help change them emotionally. There are three things that you need to do to control your emotions. There are three things that emotions come from the pattern of your physical movement, your mental focus, and the language that you use. So when you engage somebody and you make them laugh, scream or cry, you have changed their emotional focus. That person, you know, they could have lost everything that day. But if you can make them laugh, you have given them a moment of peace. If you can make them scream at a monster on the screen, you've gotten them to forget the horrors of their lives. You've allowed them to get some distance from that from which they can have some perspective and maybe remember. I've had problems before. I fell in love again. I laughed again. I healed. When the bad thing has happened, when the terrible thing has happened, we can be so engaged with it that we can see no hope. And this is the beautiful gift of fiction, of myth, of song, of dance, of art. You can save lives and heart.

Starting with yours.

Starting with yours. So talk about a little bit about how you've used art to express, you know, to deal with your own pain. Honey.

Oh, my God. Well, you know, the first thing that comes to mind, we were talking about going to sleep. I just finished a novel that I was working on for seven years, and it's called the Reformatory. When I say finished, I'm still tweaking, actually, so that's not quite true, but. But it was a difficult subject matter. It has to do with Jim Crow, Florida and a little bit like Lovecraft country. I'm not trying to say it's like Lovecraft country, but it is set in the Jim Crow era and it uses the supernatural as a metaphor for racial injustice, horror. So it's a racial injustice horror set at a reformatory for boys. And it was very painful to work on it. But I have to tell you, when I finished it, I had an empty nest syndrome like you wouldn't believe. It was just like my mind didn't even know where to settle. I didn't know what to feel guilty about. I didn't know what to feel happy about in terms of my creative work. I felt like I had been like put out of my house. So that's one thing. Just on a day by day basis. Like I'm working on a work for hire now. I can't say anything about it, but it's a work for hire, it's a short story. And even that, even that, it's not even my character. I didn't create these characters, you know. But just having that deadline to do a 5 to 7,000 word story and having written a few pages gives my mind somewhere to go at night and just settle and just sort of snuggle in and think about that story. That helps me go to sleep. So my writing projects not only make me feel good when I'm in the midst of it and I'm in flow and I'm in touch with that inner child where all the joy is stored. You know, if you're wondering where your joy went, it was. It's your inner child has that joy. So what we try to do with writing is we try to mine for it and bring it out to the surface and kind of remind ourselves of what joy feels like. Which is hard because sometimes writing does not feel like joy. It's only later you realize, oh yeah, that was joy, I guess. But. But it's just being in touch with that part is super, super important. And I think it's more important the more stressful life gets. It's just the onslaught, you know, I can't even look at the news some days. It's just so much every day so frustrating, horrifying, really. A lot of it. But then there's this peaceful island in my head that I can sometimes get to. As long as I have a writing project I'm even just thinking about, which is what happened last night. I, you know, we were joking about. I mean, I shouldn't say this because I don't know who's on this call, but Steve and I were joking about this project that I have in TV development because of all the projects we're working on, it's probably the one we have sort of the least handle on story wise. Right. So, you know, but then we found out that we get paid when we turn in the story. That's right. And the next thing I know, I'm up at one in the morning with all these ideas. Where did all these ideas come from?

My, my it's like, what a surprise.

I mean, stuff I had struggled over, like, even the character name. I was going on websites trying to find a better name, and then I realized, duh, just go to the book. Her name is this. You know, and just having all these brains, like ideas and epiphanies.

Look, you need. As you've noticed, these talks wander all over the place.

I'm sorry, what was I saying?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I wasn't. It had nothing to do with you. You were fine. I'm about to have a problem. I was. I was good friends with Harlan Ellison, who is one of the greatest creative minds of the 20th century. And watching him to go into flow and create to the point where he could write stories in the windows of bookstores, you know, with. With people watching, you know, it's something that most people need privacy to do. He could go into that state so deeply that he could shut out the rest of the world. And I was watching. I was. Had a chance to observe him, and I wondered, well, how does he do this? How does he. How does he access his creativity? And one of the things I was listening to talk about writing, he talked about going into the burning core to do something. I said, okay, so that's the metaphor that he's using. And what you want, when you want to understand somebody, you want to understand their mental syntax, their use of physiology and their belief systems, their emotions, their mind, their bodies. So I said, okay. His map of creativity, then, is. It is that there is a burning core inside human beings and that the work has to touch that core and be filtered through your physical work and your intellectual understanding to create a story. So you connected with the emotions, you do the work, you gain the knowledge and the understanding, the patterns and the rhythms and so forth and so on, and you produce a story. So the task then is, how do I continue to make contact with those emotions? Because it's not. In that sense, it's not any different from what Bruce Lee talked about in Enter the Dragon. So real emotional content, not anger. Now try again. So it's like, okay, so what is the real emotional content that I want? And that can be strong emotion, which means that you can tap into your anger, your pain, your fear. Any emotion will do it. But if you go deeper into emotion, you reach the burning core. That is not. It's like white. Real emotion is like white light. Individual emotions like fear and pain and anger and so forth are like, what happens when white light strikes the prism of our conscious minds? And we put a label on it. Babies are born screaming, pure emotion. Okay? It's that, you know, that Buddha baby energy. Heaven above earth below. No one in the world like me. Human beings begin to label those emotions and therefore distance themselves from it. What you want is to find the emotion in your life. That is not something to avoid. That is a gift. Every human being on this planet feels alone and afraid. The only question is, what do you do with your loneliness and your fear? How do you with my fear? It sent me into 40, 50 years of martial arts training. My loneliness, it made me find love and embrace my friends and connect with the people who care about me, who I care about, and to try to find ways to serve them every day. Every single day. So that's what I do with my emotions. So I can tap into that emotion anytime I want to and I can use it to power. There is nothing sadder than people who believe that they are purely rational. Those are the most emotional people of all. Those are the people who cannot handle their emotions and so shut them down and pretend those emotions are not there. They are lying to themselves and they're lying to you. They are terrified of their feelings. As opposed to acknowledging, I have fear, I have doubt, I have regret, and I need to work with these things.

You were about to say sometimes that works its way into your fiction. Some of you writers who write point of view, characters who don't experience emotions, they're very detached narrators. And that feels like a style. But sometimes that's just because you don't know the characters well enough. You're not asking the emotional questions of your characters because maybe you're not asking those emotional questions of yourself. Maybe just a thought.

So you might ask yourself some questions. What do I love? What do I fear? What makes me angry? What makes me joyful? And when you inquire into those things, you are learning how human beings are wired up. You know, we do an entire course called the Warrior's Journey that is about learning how to deal with fear. Because until you've dealt with your fear, and if you. If you cannot deal with your fear, it's very difficult to feel love and joy. Most of the things we are afraid of are things that threaten the things that we love. So by understanding our fear, we get to understand our love better. And by understanding love, we get to understand the things that we would feel fear about. In other words, if you have ever thought that you were about to lose so much and honor, you thought that I might be coming down with COVID Because a friend of mine. Yeah, we just buried one friend. Another friend was in the hospital getting a test with symptoms that matched. Covid and I had gone on a walk, a nice masked and socially distanced.

Walk, 10 days prior. Still within the incubation period. That's right, by the way.

And so I was.

And he was coughing all night.

I was coughing at night.

Like a little light, dry cough. Yeah, I have exactly the top of my symptoms list.

Yeah, I have a seasonal thing every year at about this time at bedtime. No other time I'll be coughing at night. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's all, you know, probably some sort of a pollen response or something like that to something that didn't happen to me earlier in my life. So I've never been to a doctor about it, but, you know, this continues for another year.

So I went to the damn sofa is what I did.

That's right. And how did you feel in the morning When I woke up, it was fun.

And he was. And we found out the COVID test for the friend was negative. I felt so ecstatic. I was writing that joy for days. Because being an imaginative person and a writer, and a horror writer at that, I have a very vivid imagination about the things that can go wrong. So while I was telling myself it's important to go to sleep because if you are rest broken, you're more likely to get sick yourself. And the other part is me saying, oh, who are you kidding? If he has it, you already have it.

So. That's right.

It's like two conversations.

Want to live without that?

So it's like, part of me is, like, relaxing, saying, everything is fine. Everything is fine. The other part of me is like, but if everything isn't fine, this, this, this, this, and this, I find that planning helps me feel less stressed. Like, it's like I'm not helpless in the face of anything. I could. You know, I may go down, but I'm gonna go down swinging. So like my. A character in any of my favorite horror movies. I'm not gonna scream and trip and fall. I'm gonna, like, pick up a bat. You know, we're gonna have a plan. If Steve gets sick, he'll sleep here, I'll sleep there. If I get sick, this is where I'll so, you know, make the plan. Make the plan. And between those two voices, the one that was planning and the one that was saying, everything is fine, I did go to sleep that night.

Well, I'll tell you, the sofa, when I Heard that my friend was potentially ill. I said to myself, I think I'm going to lose him. And I basically just kind of made my peace with that. And I thought, is there anything left unsaid? Does he know that I love him? Does he know how deeply I cherish my friendship with him? Is there anything I haven't said, anything I haven't done, made my peace with all of that? And it's like, no. Our relationship is complete. He knows how I feel. He knows how grateful I am for everything. And then, of course, when you've given that up, when you get the good news, that's just joy. So what I wanted to say is that when there are people in your life who, if you lost them, it would create misery, doesn't it make sense to celebrate the fact that they're here? If there's something. If you would miss your eyes, doesn't it make. If you went blind, doesn't it make sense to give thanks that you have your sight? If you have things that you would grieve if you lost them, why are you not joyful that you have them now? What is that thing about human beings that makes us feel sometimes that we don't have anything? When we have a host of things which, if we lost them, we would miss them, does that really make sense? Yeah.

Every single one of us has electricity right now. You know, everybody on this call, everybody on this call, you probably have a roof over your head. Even if it's a borrowed roof, you are somewhere with safety, hopefully, you know, and with shelter. So we often compare what we used to have with what we have now and feel deficiency. But let me tell you, that thing with Steve thinking for, like, has Covid come into this house? And I just felt so much relief on my morning walk. It's like, oh, thank you for my health.

And I know what it is.

Thank you for my husband. Thank you for my life.

Yeah, And I know what it was. I mean, like I said, I buried one friend earlier that day in a socially distanced, masked funeral, you know, at Forest Lawn. And then I found out that one of my friends, my friend who had not been able to attend the funeral because he was ill, you know, might have Covid. And we've all lost people during this period of time. We all know people who have. And I got a little overwhelmed. It was. It was just like, okay, this is a little bit. This is a little bit too much, you know, so. And I would actually tell Tanato. So I'm dealing with a lot of stuff right Now I need to process this. So I don't tend, I tend to slow down. Things don't tend to blow out in me. What happens is my entire system slows down. I feel like a low geared truck, you know, pulling, pulling a bunch of track of trailers up a steep hill, sometimes in icy conditions. So it can feel bad, but that's better than your axles blowing on you. I just get slower and it feels terrible in the sense of where's my energy, where's my liveness? I just got to keep taking steps, keep taking steps. Let me do my yoga, let me work out, let me meditate, let me, you know, what can I do? Can I get.

And you do that. Just trusting that you will snap back to what feels like your center. It doesn't happen right away always, but just do the work, do the rituals and trust that you will snap back.

That's right.

And, and, and I want to do two things here because we have about maybe 10 more minutes left. Speaking of the two voices in my head, the one that was saying everything's gonna be all right and the one that was like, we need to start planning. We mentioned last week that Steve and I have a lot of projects at hand. In fact, I'm going to tell you about one you haven't even heard this yet, but four Active things we're working on, which is a lot for us. I know a lot of seasoned Hollywood folk, you're used to that.

But yeah, we just talked with a guy yesterday. It was like he's got 10 different television series going.

And for like active and 10 in development, it's like, it gets crazy. It gets crazy. And he said every new project, that's 20 new emails you're getting from somebody. Right? So I tend to just sort of feel confident, well, we can handle it, you know, and just go power through my day. Steve, Steve likes to have a structure. He doesn't want to like jump into the pool and then we realize we can't swim. So planning, planning, planning is his approach. So we're looking at slack, you know, considering a slack workspace just for us. It's designed for offices, but we are an office. And listing every single project we're working on, which will have a whole different stream for each project, doing those things to organize so that we can prepare to succeed. You know, we may not succeed, but it's not going to be because we didn't plan or we didn't learn how to keep a calendar. You know what I mean? And the reason this is going to Be even more relevant, honey, is because Mitchell Kaplan wants to talk to me. My 10th grade English teacher, Mitchell Kaplan grew up, I'll say, to be a producer. He was a bookseller. That was weird. When I was publishing books, he was a bookseller. That was weird. And now he's a producer. And his sister, Marcy Ross works for SK Global. And I, we sent them a copy of the Reformatory, this novel I just told you about that we haven't finished. I haven't even finished it. I have a meeting with one of my beta readers tomorrow to, like, even submit it to my agent. It is so not sold. It's not even really quite finished. But they had expressed an interest in optioning it, and apparently they just got the counter and it's done.

The deal is done.

The deal is done. So anyway, one of the conditions of this deal is that they're gonna announce it. Cause getting an announcement out of Hollywood is like pulling teeth. And so we said from the beginning, yeah, we want an announcement as a part of this deal. So, yeah, that's the second. So we can talk to me right after we finish.

So we're going to story on one project, you know, cheddar. We close the deal on another project, even more Cheddar.

Well, you know, it's not. I mean, we're not bringing it in like, you know, the A list, but it's still. It's just. It's baby steps.

We ain't the Z list.

Thank you for your shout outs. But it would be scary. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that keeps him lying awake at night. Like, how are we gonna juggle all these projects? I'm more like, whee.

No, it does not keep me awake at night. It does make me spend hours looking into what is the best way to organize these things. So just very. So you said there's something else you want to take. Is that the thing that you want to take? That's just fantastic.

Wants me to call him right after.

Okay. So my attitude is, is that.

And thank you all for your. Your kind words.

Absolutely.

This guy read Mitchell Kaplan. I. He was my English teacher in 10th grade. I brought him a 200 page handwritten manuscript when I was 15 years old. And he read that.

You get that? Her favorite teacher of all time.

He's one of the.

To be the producer that's gonna make her first movie.

Well, it's not a movie. It's.

It'll be television. Oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry. My mistake.

And y' all know there's a lot way between an option and a series. But it feels like the timing is good. No for Black Horror right now. So I'm thinking we have a shot.

Yeah, I think so. So, you know, I've said to people that Tananarive is in some ways the best. She's the best prepared person for the life that she chose that I've ever met. Her internal integration is astounding. And this is not just a matter of her intelligence and the work that she's done. Her mother did this, her father did this. Her family culture raised her to have, you know, to have belief in herself, to have commitment to her culture, to work hard, you know, all the things that you need for that internal integration, the things that we want to give our kids. I just want to say that the luck that she experiences because she naturally reaches out through social media and things like this is leading to the opportunities that lead to these other things. That's what we want for you, is for your natural tasks every day to be the things that not only bring you joy, but also feed into your career, that keep you healthy and serve your family and serve your community and make your money. So it's like when you can do that, then it's just a matter of I wake up. The meaning of life is to seek joy. What can I do to seek joy? I need to avoid pain. That's going to require money. I need to take care of my body. I need to take care of the people and my family. But it's the beginning phases of that that are moving away from pain. Once you've got your basics understood, you should be looking for what brings me joy, what makes me happy. So you start with avoiding pain. It's like if you don't do your work, you're going to be spanked. That works as long as you're standing over them with a belt. But by the time they have their self image, I'm a person who is organized. I'm a person who contributes. You start cleaning up your house or doing your tasks or studying in school because that's who you are. And then you start doing it because you love to learn.

And as creative people, we like to be in flow and we like to be loosey goosey and like, you know, we get the inspiration when we get it. Think of it as creating structure in your life so that you can experience those periods of joy.

Right?

So we're not in a panic about missing meetings. And just since we set up the slack channel, it's already full of channels. Like all these different projects, and some of them we would be adding other people because we were in conversation with other people about those projects. And whether it's that or you just need to find a time of day that you need to commit to that. You know, my kids need this, this and this. But between 3 and 4, or 3 and 3:30, I can write. That kind of structure can give you joy.

And if you say to yourself, you want to avoid guilt, blame and shame and be dealing only with the thing itself, okay, so if you want to be a writer, if you could define yourself as a writer, and you say to yourself, if I write at least one sentence every day, I'm a writer. No guilt, blame or shame. You have to remember that any life path that will change you, your ego thinks it's you. And so therefore anything that will change you, even if it's a positive change, will cause nervousness, it will cause fear. So if you remove all the negative emotion from the situation by saying, all I have to do is do one sentence in order to be a writer. Once you've done that one sentence, you're in a clear space. You think about all the things you've had to do to do that one sentence. You've had to sit down, you had to turn on your computer, you've had to, you know, close the door on your office, whatever it is you've done. By the time you've done one sentence, I might as well do another couple sentences. You'll end up doing a page or a couple pages or a thousand words because you only had to do one sentence. And instead of saying, well, I have to write five pages or I. Or I'm not a writer. And then you don't do those five pages because you legitimately are busy. Now you've got guilt about not having done the thing that you said you did. It attacks your self image. Now you've weakened the very tool that you should be using to do the work. So you set yourself up every day to win. What do you need to do to win today? Because you deserve to win. And the people around you are asking, is it possible for me to win and be a good person too? Can I be a caring person and be happy? Can I be a caring person and not be down in the water drowning with people who are hungry or are homeless or, you know, there's so much pain in the world. Yes. Don't add to it with your pain. Instead of that, be a light. Integrate yourself. Do your. Do what you need to do to elevate yourself and then shine your light to the world and show other people that it is possible for them to succeed with integrity and joy and service.

Fantastic. So it's. I don't know. We ready to wrap up?

I think we're about ready to wrap up.

Great talking.

Anybody have any questions, type them in.

Chat.

You know, chat wise, we'll do that for just a minute. Otherwise, just, you know, God, it's, it's, it's so wonderful to see everybody here. Yeah.

And in terms of this, this TV work we're doing, you know, it's too bad there isn't like a legendary cinematographer and television director.

Yeah.

Think of who might be a great fit for someone.

Yeah. It's a real shame that we don't know any directors who we can, we can like, recommend to these people who are saying, well, who could write that just for the sake of fun? Because I just, I really do appreciate having there. I'm just for the sake. I can't help it. Hey, Ernest, how are you, buddy? Hey. I still haven't gotten this typing to people. I got people that type to me, but I don't think my thing went to them. Hey, everybody. Very inspiring talk always. Well, we want to do this every week. We are so blessed to have love and a roof overhead and sushi on the way.

Tonight.

I feel so blessed. You know, when you lose a mentor and you realize you cannot repay them, the only thing you can do is pay it forward. The only thing you can do is try to tell other people there is light, there is love. It is possible to live your dreams. It is possible to make money and have love and have a healthy body, that these things are really possible. I want to live in that space and I want to give as much of that as possible. I literally got everything I wanted when I was a kid. I had all the dreams. I wanted martial arts mastery. I wanted a writing career. I wanted a family to love. I got all that stuff. What do you do next? You give it away. That's what you do. You teach other people. That's what you do.

And you come up with new dreams.

And you come up with new dreams. My dream right now is to find the most efficient and effective way to pass these lessons on to the next generations. That's all I want to do right now. And. Well, it's not all I wanted. I also want the television series and the movies and I want to be partying on Maui with my friends and.

I want this pandemic to be over and could January get here? Already. So everybody have a fantastic week. The rest of you guys have a fantastic weekend.

Absolutely.

And we will see you next time for Life Writing. Live.

Take care, guys.

All right.

Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Great to see you.

You too.