Progression

I have been busy checking my manuscript to make sure I am perfectly happy with it before it hits the printers. As the author, I can change anything I want. If a particular sentence keeps catching me, I can change it. All too often, one reads over the same passage, stumbles each time and decides it is ok how it is. But once a change is made, the flow returns and then one wonders why they didn’t just change it in the first place. Sometimes we place words on a page and they become concrete-like, refusing to shift or allowing us to move them, as if they have the power, rather than us. My fiction writer friends often tell me that a particular character is doing things they hadn’t anticipated. That has always baffled me, as they as the writers are the creators of their own stories.

I do believe that often there is a degree of channelling going on when we write. Where did that idea or word come from? is a common thought. Often the ideas flow unstoppably, or in my non-fiction writing, the words demand that they appear too.

In one chapter in The Collective Us, I mention that when in meditation viewing some lives, the words that come to me are not words that one would use in this day and age. In a new Greek life that I viewed, I had the distinct impression that the man had lived a life of opulence and possibly debauchery. Now those are definitely not words I would use today but they were words very much pertaining to this man’s life. So perhaps when we write, we do have those who have gone before us, putting their two cents worth in, ensuring we are accurate with what we are writing or are using a word that they think should be used.

Are we as writers sometimes puppets for passed-over beings or our former selves? I know Chief White Cloud was definitely behind the writing of Who Is Me?; he wanted that story told. Perhaps all of my former selves want The Collective Us told as well.

I am happy now with how the words in that second book flow together. Sometimes I had to read a passage many times before I could finally make the change that was obviously needed. I am hoping that all my former selves are happy with how they have been portrayed too; perhaps we have all reached a state of peace, allowing the manuscript to continue on its journey toward completion.