Happy Earth Birthday Sweet Jess!

Me and my girl XO!

Happy Earth Birthday to my beloved Celestial daughter! This is a day that I celebrate for all the times we had together and all the times we continue to have. Namaste my sweet girl! 

I'm not going to put a number on what her age "would be," because I talked about that in the post called Forever 26? NOT. Here's Why.

In the seven years she's been gone to True Home before me, I've learned so much, and the best way I can think of to give others hope and share some of the healing is to refer back to a page I included in my book about our journey, Coming Alive After Death, Recovery from Grief. It is one of three pages that appear in the book and I created them to show the progression of healing from shock and trauma to peace, love, and light. This is the page called COUNTING ALL BLESSINGS - GRATITUDE AND PEACE. May you all find this magical feeling that it really is okay, and we are all truly held in the dearest arms of LOVE at all times, as you go through these journeys with your beloveds both here on Earth, and in the Otherworlds.

You're my treasure, Sweet Jess. I am a buoy that will not sink. I take care of you with honor and dignity. I am strong. The angels are holding me. The angels are holding you. I do this with you. Thank you for your presence and your peace and your love. I feel it. You lived, here, with all of yourself, and for that I'm so glad. You are not cold. You are not sick. You feel no pain. You need no doctors. You're healthy and whole. You're Home, and where else would I want you to be after a job well done, a life well lived? 

You are surrounded by love. I am so honored to have been able to love you. I loved you from even before you were conceived. I loved you as a spirit dreaming of adventures on Earth. I loved you as a babe. I loved you as a growing teenager. I loved you as a young adult. I love you in your beautiful whole spirit form. I loved laughing with you. I laugh with you now. I can do this. I can do this with grace. I can do this with dignity. I do this with love. I carry you in my heart. You are everywhere. You are love. You are surrounded by love. I can hold happiness and sadness inside myself at the same time without conflict. 

I recognize you as an infinitely regenerating spirit. You've had a thousand children, and you will have a thousand more if you choose. You've been married, unmarried, male, female, child, adult, elder, and everything in-between. You've been royalty and slave, free, and encumbered. You have the right to experience here on Earth any thing you wish to experience. We all do.

I recognize and embrace worlds upon worlds of mystery and magic. I do not need to control. I do not need to save. No one needs saving. Death is but a doorway into life of another kind. Death is a blessed friend. Without death, we would have no children. We would have endless perpetuation of ownership and tyranny. Death is our freedom. I celebrate death. Death is birth, the birth of each and every one of us spirits being human.

We are not alone. You have your angels and allies both on Earth and in all of the other worlds. I have my angels and allies both on Earth and in all of the other worlds. Time is ever only now. I have learned to speak another language, the language of the heart. I have learned to listen. I am now able to hear. I have learned to look. I am now able to see. I have learned that questions are safe. And answers flow freely for all of us, directly from our Creative Source, the Source of Love.

I step forward with confidence, knowing that we are safe. We are always safe. We are loved. We are always loved. We love. It is our choice. No one and no entity can chain or bind our love. It belongs to us as individuals. Love is unending. Love is infinite. We are made of it.

I grow and develop compassion. I give. I forgive. I trust in the process. I trust in the beautiful cycles of life. I can laugh and I can cry all in the same day and yet retain my equilibrium. I love my heart. I love that I love. I choose love. Always and all ways. I love my Earth. I love the people around me. I love the creatures around me. I see the spirit in them too. I'm surrounded by love.

We are individual parts of the Whole. We are not separate, but ever, each, of one another. We are One. Like the facets of a diamond, we shine rainbow light from within when we step out of the darkness, into the light.

We are beauty. We are creativity. We are and always will be. We are color and sound and vibration. We are energy itself in all its forms. We are forever.

Let us sing. And in our singing, bring forth magic.

Smooch!

I remember!

Your heart is my new doorbell Momma!

All the loves and all the happies on this day and always!

XO!

AND, you want me to tell you how I know Sweet Jess was with me while I put up this blog post? First, I went to my original Word document to copy the section I wanted to post, but every time I tried to input it, the program treated it as an image, which, of course was too tiny to read. I went into the code to remove the image tags, but it didn't leave any text; there wasn't any text to leave in-between the image tags. Fine. We all know that copy and paste from a Word doc into another program gets ugly with dirty code. The thing is, there's no way there's any code related to images in the original Word doc because it's just straight text. Hm....

SO I got my paperback copy of my book and flipped it open, and guess which page it landed on right off the bat. YEP! The Counting All Blessings: Gratitude and Peace page. I chuckled and said "Hi Sweet Jess! Thank you!" Then I held it open with a clamp and paperweight and yes, I had to type in every single word of that section. In doing that I was deeply reminded of how much healing has taken place since the day of her death. And I was also deeply reminded that she is with me every single step of the way, as are your Celestial beloveds. Never doubt it. Where there's love, there's a connection that is timeless.

Why Create A Character List?

 

Sometimes I can be a real character; can't we all?!

This is my "mouse face," which cracked my kids up to no end over the years, especially when I pull my ears out with my fingers behind them. We used to sit at the dinner table and do this, good times. Sometimes my mouse face accidentally appears when I am editing and or writing and I see something egregious that we really need to fix in a manuscript. There's some entertaining breathing that goes with it too.... Mouse represents scrutiny, according to my favorite teacher, David Carson, with his animal Medicine Cards, and editors have to be reeeeally good with scrutiny. 

But seriously, I want to share a great tip for writers and editors that can make the job of completing a long manuscript (book) SO MUCH EASIER.

As a professional editor and published author, I've worked with various wonderfully creative clients and projects that are vastly different, but the one thing we ALL benefitted from during the creation of these works was a CHARACTER LIST.

WHAT IS IT? Always much longer than you might assume at the beginning. And really a lifesaver at the end of the project when things are complicated and getting all those ducks in a row can be challenging.

WHY DO IT? Oh, because so so so so many thousands of tiny details can go wrong and you might spend hours trying to make them right, such as the MATH in a book (dates, ages, what happened to whom and when, who are the key players, closure on characters as they roll in and out of the story) and much more!

I'll share a couple of examples of what happens if you DON'T have a Character List.

• The author wrote a manuscript about 140 pages long, a page-turner for sure, and it includes 69 characters. The plot contains flashbacks, so some of the passages describe events from various childhoods, and it includes deaths, pregnancies, and loads of other juicy adventures. I realized that one of the characters as currently written (BEFORE I created the character list) was pregnant for TWO YEARS (cause the man who impregnated her had been dead for over a year by the time she had the baby later in the manuscript), yep, we fixed that! She was so relieved, that woman carrying that babe in her womb for so long.... And another character was somehow able to see with eyes in the back of her head as she fed her baby (strapped to her back because he was just an infant until we fixed that) strawberries and the juice went down his chin. We made him older and took him out of the papoose so the mother could walk next to him so as not to need those eyes in the back of her head to see the juice run down his chin while he was strapped to her back - though all mothers know, and some smart kids too, that we DO have those eyes in the back of our heads, oh YEAH!  
• If you're working on a trilogy (very helpful to have a list on this one!) you have to make sure the characters are described the same way and how can you hold all that in your head when you're dealing with fairies with silver skin and purple eyes or green skin and yellow eyes and certain powers that other fairies don't have? AND who lives where? They have territories too! 

The Character List is truly one of the most useful things I've ever devised and I can say I've referred to it a million times working through manuscripts and been able to answer questions and solve problems with the flick of a page where that info sits, readable at a glance, as opposed to rereading or skimming through a hundred pages to find out the facts.

HOW TO ORGANIZE A CHARACTER LIST

Not too helpful to have a straight list of 69 names with brief descriptions. That takes wading, and I don't have time for wading unless I am out with my feet in a stream in the forest. I wanna flip those pages and go "AHA! I've got it! It's right here!"

So a little organization is a Very Good Thing.

To do that you can ask yourself - 

• Who are your KEY players? 
• they may often be closely related to other characters whom you should jot down in the description such as spouses, siblings, etc.
• Next category - Who are your SUPPORTING players?
• these are the ones that are well-developed in the story but not appearing in every scene, not the protagonists, but important nonetheless.
• Next category - Who are the ones mentioned almost off-handedly, maybe important to the events as they play out but they only appear in one scene and aren't critical?
• You can separate these from the main characters but still jot down a bit about them to preserve consistency throughout the manuscript.
• Last category - Who are the ones introduced lightly in the beginning or middle so they need some closure but they're pretty much peripheral?
• These might be characters who come in, create a kerfuffle, and may appear later, needing to be dealt with, but if we don't have them on the character list, it's too easy to forget them so the reader's left thinking, "Hm, whatever happened to the kerfuffle guy?"
• And I have to mention that I have not yet worked with any author who doesn't choose the SAME NAME for more than one character in their manuscript. Yep, sometimes this is important, but it's like caviar, a little goes a long way and there better be supporting players, like son named after father, etc. One of my authors had five, count 'em, FIVE characters (females) with the same first name, and THREE (male) unrelated characters with the same first name. We fixed it. Easy peasy!

Sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees. That's why a Character List is so helpful.

The Character List can also save you from introducing someone IMPORTANT waaaay too late in the game (with a character list you can see where to add scenes that are pivotal for an important later appearance to support it). The art in creating a story that holds together, provides emotion to move the reader, satisfaction on all fronts but pulled together at the end, benefits hugely from something as simple as the Character List.

I actually don't need major software to do this and I don't belabor it though you can if you want to. You can do a spreadsheet with several columns of information, but I find that just choosing the categories listed above (and/or other categories as needed depending on the manuscript) on a Word doc saves oceans of time.

Tuck this into your toolbox. It'll be different for each manuscript, and likely it'll be a dynamic document that grows with the development of the story, so you'll need to update it and share it with your author, but its value is priceless!

You're welcome.

Namaste from the Jen who writes and encourages all who have an interest to do the same : ) And do get your material edited. Quality is so cool and satisfying on all fronts, and it makes YOU look so GOOD!!