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Anthony Alvarado

Monthly Archives: November 2014

My book is up at Amazon.com!

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

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Don’t get too excited, you can’t actually get one for months. I mean the book hasn’t even been physically printed yet by Penguin. But it is kind of exciting to see it up on Amazon. Here is the link:

http://www.amazon.com/DIY-Magic-Strange-Whimsical-Creativity/dp/0399171797

I used to work at Amazon back in the day actually. It was a weird job, this was a decade ago in Seattle. The internet seemed much newer then. And people didn’t know how it worked. I was in tech. service. But a surprisingly large amount of the job was just customers phoning to ask me about books, yes, Amazon mostly just sold books back then. I would read them the description of the book (which they were looking at on their screens at home simultaneously) and say, “well, that sounds like a nice book” and then they would buy it.

800px-Seattle-PacMed-2571

Ah, those were the days. It was a graveyard shift. It was a job that gave me conflicting emotions. (Kind of how everybody feels about Amazon now.)  Like, it paid ok, but you definitely felt like a corporate drone. They laid us all off, during the dot.com crash, which sucked. But they also gave us all a decent sized severance package which was nice. But you got the feeling they were only doing that because it was good publicity. Not out of any compassion.

Hmm, come to think of it, as a first time author, who just got his book posted to Amazon.com I should probably not say anything bad about the touchy behemoth . . .  ahem. We love you Amazon. Be nice. I will be quiet now.

Invoking the muse

10 Monday Nov 2014

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inspiration, invoking the muse, writing

I got to thinking about the muse after reading Stephen Pressfield’s excellent “The War of Art” book. He talks about every day when he sits down to write he invokes his muse by reciting the opening of Homer’s Odyssy. A passage called, the invocation of the muse, aptly enough. I’ll post that invocation at the bottom of this entry. It’s beautiful, but I wonder if it might have more meaning for a writer to write their own invocation of the muse. After all, I believe that every writer has their own personal version of the muse. That is, the muse comes to each of us in a different guise.

We talk of being inspired by the muse, because the best creativity feels like it comes from somewhere else. Inspire once met: to breath into, the original usage meant it was as though the poet’s words were breathed into them by someone else—the muse.

Stephen King describes his fecund muse as being like a plumber.

“He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration.”

Shakespeare describes a real give and take relationship with his muse, as in come here dammit, if you know what’s good for you.

“Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?”

timescythe

And here is a great quote by Tom Robbins about making sure your muse knows just where to find you:

“I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 a.m. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there, sometimes she doesn’t, but she always knows where I’ll be.”

And for the terrific history writer Barbara Tuchman the muse is a place. (By the way you should read her excellent and true book on the history of France in the medieval; A Distant Mirror. It makes Game of Thrones look like the muppets.)

“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.”

barbara

Finally, here is the T.E. Lawrence translation of Homer’s invocation of the muse:

homer

O Divine Poesy
Goddess-daughter of Zeus,
Sustain for me
This song of the various-minded man,
Who after he had plundered
The innermost citadel of hallowed Troy
Was made to stray grievously
About the coasts of men,
The sport of their customs good or bad,
While his heart
Through all the seafaring
Ached in an agony to redeem himself
And bring his company safe home.

Vain hope – for them!
For his fellows he strove in vain,
Their own witlessness cast them away;
The fools,
To destroy for meat
The oxen of the most exalted sun!
Wherefore the sun-god blotted out
The day of their return.

Make the tale live for us
In all its many bearings,
O Muse.

It takes a snowflake to start a snowball

03 Monday Nov 2014

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chasing snowflakes, how to get an agent, inspiration, intuition, motivation, trusting your gut, whims, writing, writing tips

It takes a snowflake to start a snowball. It takes a snowball to start an avalanche.

8903668-snowflake

I just finished the final draft of my book that will be published by Penguin next April, and I couldn’t be more excited! It got me thinking about how it all started, and how you never know which of your efforts and passions are going to gain momentum and turn into something awesome.

A friend of mine runs a little bar/coffee shop called the Waypost. A few years ago he told me he was hosting a lecture series, where people could talk about anything they wanted, and would I be interested? I thought, sure, why not? As I had been doing a lot of research into the paranormal, I suggested a lecture on “Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, and UFO’s”. At first I worried maybe that idea for a lecture was too weird, too idiosyncratic of a thing to talk about, and so why bother? Who would be interested? Still, it was what I was fascinated by, so I did it. (My thinking being that there was some commonality behind these seemingly disparate supernatural sightings. I did a lot of research into Jungian archetypes —Patrick Harpur’s book Daemonic Reality was a revelation, and I had fun presenting the talk.) It was a unique mix of weird, but also logical and rational.

Anthony Alvarado at the Waypost

Anthony Alvarado at the Waypost

That was the snowflake. Later, when I approached Arthur Magazine about writing for the Arthur blog, I knew I wanted to harness that same blend of reasonable and inquisitive + magical and weird. That was the snowball.

The ideas that I developed for Arthur ended up being put out as a small press book by Floating World comics. That first edition quickly sold out, and ended up helping me to land a great agent, and a great book deal with a fantastic publisher due out next April! That’s the avalanche. Pursuing writing as a career has always been my dream, and now it is a reality!

But none of it would have happened if I hadn’t just followed my whim, and my curiosity, and for no other reason than I thought it would be kinda interesting, put together a small speech that I presented for free to a crowd of maybe 15 people! When that snowflake first appeared on my horizon, I thought it might be too small to be worth pursuing, but I went for it anyhow. Why? Just for fun!

If you believe in something, if you are curious, if you are passionate about something then jump in there and get to work, no matter how small that first impulse seems. Chase your snowflakes: the whims, the fancies, the little notions that strike you. Because you truly never know what that snowflake might turn into.

rlaavalanche_small

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