I love having money! I know that sound awful, but it's true! I just paid off my trip to Hawaii and a store credit card that I used to purchase my whole new wardrboe last year, and YES, it feels so good!

Of course, my fantasy is that one day I'll be able to pay cash for stuff like a vacation and that cash will come from the money I earn from publishing and selling my stories. That day will come soon, but until then I'll pay my bills over time like everyone else in America.

I am happy with myself. This is my third day of doing timed freewrites. I have not written three days in a row in a long time. I even have the goal of finishing the last chapter of my Texas novel this week so I can say "I completed a novel, yeah me!"

Tonight's freewrite started with "I remember" but this time a character came through. Some kind of science fiction character talking about meeting alien invaders for the first time as a young girl in her father's court. The alien invaders were all beautiful men, strong and dressed in white jumpsuits with silver capes. They had silver hair, and they had the power to read thoughts. Once an alien invader reads the thoughts of a human, they are then able to tune into the mind of that particular person and once they tune in they can control their body reactions and functions. It's not quite mind control, but the aliens are able to manipulate body reactions. It's kind of cool because the manipulation of body reactions can make a person think they are experiencing a certain emotion, when in fact they might not be. I like it because it's creepy and interesting at the same time.

Think about it. If you see a person and have an excited reaction, wouldn't you kind of think you were attracted and lusting after the person. What if that weren't true? What if the body reactions you were experiencing were being manipulated by an outside force? It's not exactly mind control because they're not taking over your mind They're just manipulating your body's response to stimulus to suit their own ends. And how would you catch them? How many people know their own mind and body well enough to know when the two are not feeling and thinking the same thing? Very few I think. Of course, someone will catch on eventually. But by then it will be too late.

Now I'm listening to "Sacred Chants of Shiva from the banks of the Ganges". Shiva the destroyer of the world, who is responsible in the Hindu god pantheon, for change both in the form of death and destruction and in the positive sense of the shedding of old habits. The music makes me want to read the Mahabarata again. I'ts been 15 years since I've read this epic, and I still have my authentic Indian book I bought in NYC.

The sun was out briefly this morning, but now it's raining again. I had a productive morning and already completed a timed freewrite. I am going back to basics with my writing, and doing timed freewrites. I think my writing has become too introspective, too inner directed. When I did first timed freewrite late last night and read it over, I was shocked how seriously lacking in detail my piece was.

Natalie Goldberg is right. Journal writing is not great writing practice. It's good for getting your thoughts out and reflecting on the events of your life, but it's too focused on the self and your own thoughts. Journal writing has been good for me and I have but one regret; that I did not keep my journals from age 8 to 18 years. It would have been fascinating to see what I was writing about during that time period. At least I have my journals from college on, and a file full of all the poetry I wrote in college.

But timed writing is different. When I wrote this morning and trying to get more detailed in my writing, I felt fear coming up. It's the same fear I felt in acting class that I could never get over, and that was being "naked" on stage". When you're on stage, you have to open up, you have to let the world see all of you, see your character in all their gloried humanity and flaws. It was too frightening for me to open up like that, even though I was always playing characters that were never like me. When I took my first acting class in college, I remember thinking that acting was great because I could hide behind a character and let my emotions out. It really wasn't me on stage being watched, it was me being someone else, and I could let my feelings out through my characters. Acting was therapeutic back then.

I should have remembered a friend of mine telling me back then how freaked out how became when he was playing a murderer on stage, because he had to reach inside of himself to find the cruelty necessary to play the character. Once he found it, he realized it had always been there and that bothered him because he had always thought of himself as a kind person.

My first monologue in college was a speech from a Eugene O'Neill play that I fell in love with in junior high. The woman was a morphine addict, and I so related to how she talked and felt. II know I was thinking to myself, I can do this. I know what this feel likes, I've experienced youthful drug addiction; this speech is going to be a piece of cake.

But when I was rehearsing the monologue my acting teacher Sandy kept telling me I wasn't reaching far enough inside, i wasn't relating enough to how my character felt. My speech was when she was high on morphine and talking to one of her sons. Sandy kept saying I wasn't achieving the distance from reality that a drug takes a person, and I kept thinking to myself but I know how that feels, I experienced it myself, I know how drugs take you away, so far away to a place where you feel safe, where it's only you and the drug and everyone else in your world is at a safe distance where they can't hurt you, they can't touch you, where the hurt and rage you feel inside subsides, is quiet, you know it's still there but the drugs have quieted the demons.

But looking back, Sandy was probably right about me. I couldn't really get that character right because I would have had to go back and experience that distance, which have meant experiencing that hurt and rage all over again and I know I couldn't have done it back then. I was too young, I was still too close to the experience and it had only been a few years since it all happened. Besides, I was still walking around with 4o hits of pharmaceutical speed in my backpack just in case I needed it. I loved that distance, I loved my safe place, but not without the help of my drug to get there and I knew that despite my need to carry my drug, I could never visit that place again because the price of my health I paid for the fare to get there had been far too high and I was unwilling to pay that price again.

When I did a timed writing this morning, it made me cry to remember the details. Remembering the details brought back all the pain, all the hurt, all the rage. They god is the details, but the hurt and pain are also there and writing about them makes it all come back in real time. And in my writing I couldn't slow down. I kept trying to, to remember details but with details come pain and memories. Screw "show don't tell"! Showing means reliving again and again. Telling is better, telling achieves distance without the necessary drugs.

But I have to able to show, I have to be able to write details, and so somehow I must get through this wall that I could never get through in my acting, and that I only very rarely get through in my writing. Maybe mining my own memories doesn't work for me. Maybe I need to get through to the memories with a character like in acting. Characters are not me, they are a fictional me. I can make them stronger, I can give give them strength I know I don't have. They can mine my life for details that they can transform as details in their own world. I know my writing works best for me when I write as a completely different character and my character is telling their story, which is sort of my story only transformed into their fictional world.

There's a line from the USA series "Witchblade" that I like, "in your world, parallel lines always meet".

From Natalie Goldberg's book, "Wild Mind" when she was talking to a friend about how writing is an addiciton and the friend told her, "No, Natalie, an addiction diminishes you. You have not been diminished by writing. It is your passion."

And then she writes later on in the book about Linda Leonard, who was writing a new book about creativity and addiction.
"....both the artist and the alcoholic have parrallet paths. They both go into the darkness, but the alcoholic gets stuck there. The artists (if he/she is alos not addicted) goes into the darkness and is transformed by the experience and comes out more alive. I picture the artist as someone deep-sea diving, holding her breath and bursting out of the water into the air six minutes later, one hundred feet from where she begain, with sun catching the water spray. The alcoholic dives down and gets caught in the sludge or is mesmerized by the underwater world and drowns. The good thing is the artist can move through the experience, learn from the experience, and not be caught by it. Writing and reading can give us."

In my world, I hope parallel lines do meet to create heart-breaking stories.

The crows are cawing outside my window, and are making quite a fuss. They only caw like that when something is going to happen in my world.

I am sitting here listening to cd of ancient hawaiian huna chants that I bought at the Monterey Psychic Festival and I dragged my friend K to last April. We went specifically to see a woman I'd heard about from friends. We went to her lecture and afterwards when I told her I had heard about her through friends, she gave me a hug. Sweet huh? My friend K and I have since driven down to Monterey, a good two hour drive, five or six times to take seminars from her in Pacific Grove.

I used to think it was such a big deal to drive two hours to see someone, but having done it now a few timess, it's not such a big deal. It's a long drive but at least you're driving and not just stuck in traffic for an hour or two and not going more than 10 miles.

There was a woman at the Monterey Pyschic Festival wearing a lei on her head. There is a specific name for that kind of lei, but I cannot remember it right now. I stopped at her booth and told her I was born in Hawaii and she started chanting hawaiian huna chants to me. I felt tinglies run up and down my spine during her chanting, and I don't know it was because the chanting was really powerful or it was because hearing hawaiian chants opens the floodgates to my childhood memories.

My hula teacher in 6th grade taught us ancient Hawaiian hula, and not the tourist kind that you see at hotels. This is the kind of hula done mostly sitting on your haunches on the ground and is more ritualistic and tribal. My hula teacher, who grew up on the Big Island, learned it from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and so on. She taught that hula was a sacred rite performed for the ancient hawaiian gods and goddessses at heiaus, and that we were to act like priesteses, devotees, and not shake-your-butt for the tourists hula girls.

It's kind of amazing that I still remember some of her teachings, but I'm sure like any typical 12-year I was thinking what the heck was she talking about. And I was a bad little priestess too, never quite getting anything right. I could never duck walk properly. She always made us duck walk around the room a couple of time, and I could never master the art of duck walking. I still remember her screaming at me because when I moved my hips, my upper body shook. She would clamp her big hands on my shoulders, tell me to bend my knees really low and start moving my hips in a circle. I could feel my scrawny shoulders trying to move under the presssure of her hands, and the eyes of everyone in class watching me. Beads of sweat started forming at the base of my spine and travelled upwards towards my neck as she kept saying over and over again like a chant, "stop moving your shoulders, only your hips should move not your whole upper body." Geez, I was only 12 years old, give me a break.

I'm trying to remember if I was the youngest person in that class. There were other kids there but they were older, and older women that didn't live in our neighborhood. How I got stuck taking an ancient hawaiian hula class instead of the tourist hula that I started learning at age six is a mystery to me. Her daughter and I were in the same grade, so I don't know if I asked to go to the class or if my grandma knew about the class and wanted me to go. My grandparents were strict catholics, not followers of ancient hawaiian ritualistic hula.

The hula I was taught that year is hardly ever performed except at hula festivals in Hawaii. My hula teacher told us that this kind of hula is passed down from female to female only, and you have to be invited to learn it. No wonder it's never seen if the hula is that exclusive. Tourists wouldn't like this kind of hula anyway. It's all this gutteral chanting, and the costumes are not that pretty and the girls never really smile since they're supposed to priestesses. You have to be serious, religious and devoted because "you are offering a prayer to the gods and goddesses".