Welcome to The Mystical Underground

  Most of us come into the world with a first and last name and some of us have a middle name. It should be a fairly simple, straightforward thing. But my name has never been simple or straightforward and I’m beginning to think the situation may be part of a karmic pattern.

I wrote my first two novels under my maiden name – Trish Janeshutz. That last name has been problematic. My dad’s family hailed from Yugoslavia – now Serbia – and at one time, the name was spelled like this: Janeshitz. At some point during my grandfather’s immigration to this country, that i was changed to a u. At any rate, when I was growing up in Venezuela, this name was the brunt of jokes, nicknames, bewilderment. No one could spell it correctly.

After my first two novels were published under my maiden name, I started a series and my editor at the time, Chris Cox, called to ask me to change my name. “Mysteries by men are outselling mysteries by women. Can you come up with an androgynous name? Besides, no one knows how to spell or pronounce Janeshutz.”

Not good.  By then, though, I was married and became TJ MacGregor. Chris loved that name.   It has stuck with me. But on this name journey I have also been: Alison Drake, Victoria Gotti, Jamie Cromwell, Dionne Warwick,

In the early 1990s, I wrote a novel called Tango Key, set on a fictional island by the same name, and once again Chris asked if I would use a different name. Now, he informed me, mysteries by women were outselling mysteries by men and since this was a different series, a new name made sense. I wrote Tango Key and three subsequent books as Alison Drake.  

“Who’s Alison Drake?” my parents asked.

“What’s wrong with your own name?” my sister asked.

“Why did you choose that name, Mom?” my daughter asked some years later.

Well, I asked a friend who was a numerologist what number would be good for a new name. “Five,” Renie said. “Let’s come up with a five name. Fives are about freedom.” Alison Drake was a five name. It conferred so much freedom that the books went out of print a couple of years later.

This confusion about names was exacerbated by the fact that I wrote non-fiction as Trish MacGregor. It became a standing joke in the family. Who are you today?  An attorney friend who was drawing up our wills asked me which name she should use on my will. “All of them,” I told her.

Many T.J. MacGregor books later, I wrote a fantasy novel that took place in Ecuador – Esperanza,  the first in a trilogy- and my editor at TOR/FORGE asked me to pick a name. Here we go again, I thought, and became Trish J MacGregor. I moved the second book, Ghost Key,  to Cedar Key, Florida, and the third book, Apparition, took place in Esperanza again. I’m not sure what will happen to Trish J MacGregor after that book. It’s too many names to track through Internet domains!

As rights have been reverted on my back list titles, I thought about which name to use and felt a sudden, liberating sense about it. I could use any name I wanted! What a concept, right? I realized that somewhere over the years, I had reached a kind of peace with this name karma, so the books I wrote as Alison Drake and Trish Janeshutz are now enjoying a second incarnation as e-books, through Crossroad Press, under the name T.J. MacGregor. 

I think that next time around, I’ll order an easy name that anyone can spell. Jane Smith.

 Today, there’s a memorial service for Nelson Mandela and dozens of world leaders will attend. I’ve read figures from 50 to 90. This group includes President Obama and former presidents Clinton, Bush, and Carter. Speakers include Obama and the leaders of China, Cuba, India, Brazil…well, you get the idea. All inclusive.

When you think about this for a moment, it’s remarkable. Across the span of his life, Mandela was labeled an anti-apartheid rebel, became the most wanted terrorist in the world, an icon of anti-apartheid, president of South Africa, a winner of the Nobel peace prize, and ultimately, a man often equated with Gandhi.

 In 1964, at the age of 46, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent 27 years in prison, 18 of those years on Robban Island, in a cell only large enough for a bed and a bucket for a toilet. While incarcerated, Mandela was permitted to write one letter every six months and to receive a visitor just once a year. In other words, the conditions would have sent most of us around the bend early on.

He could have grown bitter. But in his prison memoir, The Long Road to Freedom, he wrote, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

Mandela became one of my personal heroes at some point in the 70s, when his wife Winnie was gaining recognition as his spokesperson against apartheid.   I remember watching his inauguration on TV in 1994, blown away by the road he had traveled to that point in his life. He had lived through the worst days of apartheid, when blacks were non-entities, without any rights at all, and here he was, becoming the country’s president.

RIP, Mandela. You changed the course of history and we are all richer for your having spent 95 years among us.

Today at Whole Foods, I bought a kind of beer I’d never heard of before – depicted above. At the time, I was puzzled about why I’d chosen this beer. After all, Whole Foods has an infinite variety of beer, much of foreign, organic and gluten free, and  and yet, I was drawn to Brooklyn Beer.

When we got home, I stuck the bottles in our small fridge in the garage where we keep bottled water, extra butter and veggies, and forgot about it. This afternoon, my agent called to ask if I would be interested in a ghostwriting project, and spelled out the terms. Yes, it interested me, I told him, and he said he would have the woman’s agent call me later today or tomorrow some time.

The agent called this evening, spelled out the details, and the project sounds intriguing. I downloaded the author’s two earlier books and was captivated by her voice, that of a young woman growing up in a Mafia neighborhood in NY borough. After Rob and I got home from the gym this evening, where I’d started reading the woman’s book, I went out to the garage fridge and brought out two bottles of the beers we’d bought today.And that was when the connection hit me. I burst out laughing and hurried over to the kitchen table, where Rob was sitting.

“Synchro. Look at the name of this beer and NY borough where this woman’s book takes place: Brooklyn. It’s where she was born and raised.”

“Wow. Good one!”

Two Brooklyns. Not quite a cluster….but interesting nonetheless.

UPDATE:

Now it’s a cluster. Two years ago, Rob and I were approached by a company that develops apps. We were asked to write content for an astrology app. The project was cancelled by the Japanese owners, but we were paid our full fee.

About 24 hours after my conversation with the Brooklyn author, I received an email from the astrology app guy. He and his brother left the Japanese company more than a year ago and were now ready to move forward with an astrology app and were Rob and I available for it? And guess where he lives: Brooklyn.

For me, 3 constitutes a cluster.

It’s funny, but actually deeper than it first appears. It matters.

…well, you’ll see what you watch this very funny ad!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMzgl0nFj3s&feature=youtu.be

One of the frequently questions novelists are asked is, Where do you get your ideas? Depending on the book, writers have various answers to this question.

William Peter Blatty said his idea for The Exorcist was based on a newspaper story he read as a 20-year-old English literature major at Georgetown University. The article by Billy Brinkley appeared in the August 20, 1949 issue of the Washington Post and was headlined, “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held In Devil’s Grip.” It told the story of a 14-year-old boy from Mount Rainier, Maryland who supposedly was possessed and how a Catholic priest freed the boy by performing the ancient ritual of exorcism. It was latter learned that the boy was actually 13 years oldand from Cottage City, Maryland.

For years the notion of demonic possession stuck in Blatty’s mind, and twenty years later, he began writing The Exorcist. He finished the novel during the summer of 1971. As part of his research, Blatty contacted the priest who had conducted the actual exorcism. The letter Blatty received revealed that a diary was kept by an attending priest, who recorded daily events related to the ongoing exorcism.

Blatty requested to see the diary, but the priest refused. After Blatty changed the lead character from a 14-year-old boy to a 12-year-old girl, he obtained a copy of the diary and based much of his book and movie on the material. The diary revealed that the exorcism was partially performed in both Cottage City, Maryland and Belmore, Missouri. Several are newspapers at the time reported on a speech a minister gave to an amateur parapsychology society, in which he claimed to have exorcised a demon from the boy named Robbie and that the ordeal lasts a little more than six weeks.

A film called The Haunted Boy – The Secret Diary of the Exorcist was released in 2012. It was based to an article Haunted Boy, by Mark Opsasnick that appeared in Strange Magazine.

 I haven’t read Blatty’s other books. But The Exorcist is what made him famous. The same is true for Peter Benchley’s Jaws,  John Knowles A Separate Peace,  Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Octavia Butler’s Kindred,  J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451.

Writers are an uneven bunch, but when they’re on their game, they can produce  something that not only reflects some essential truth about the time in which they live, but also reflects an essential nugget about human nature.

This is a scary story about a stalker. Having been the target of one, we can sympathize. Because this stalker is still on the loose and threatening the life of his target, we’re not using names, not even the name of the person who related this story. We do, however, use the name of St. Jude, who we’ve written about here, and who again comes into a story as a synchronicity–a connection between a deeper reality and our often crazy everyday world.

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“A friend of mine has been seriously stalked for some months now. It began on Facebook and e-mail. So she gave up all social networking, but the stalking continues through the mail for months. Twice a week she would receive notes sent to her business and home addresses.

“She employs 28 people in her business and this week the stalker wrote to many on the staff. Posing as the woman and forging her signature, the stalker told the staff that they all would get terrific salary raises and bonuses!

“More sinister, though, is the fact that the stalking has escalated to include  death threats sent to her home address. The stalker knows the names of all her family and her two dogs. He always names the dogs and posts their photos, along with photos of family members, which were taken from her FB page.

“Her father is a close friend of mine and as you can imagine is beside himself with worry. So today I recommended petitioning Saint Jude for help. He replied he had a visit from a child called Jude yesterday and had been playing Hey Jude last night. And then I came along and mentioned the name. So he’s going to try it.

“The police are involved and now are taking it most seriously. However, they are unable to trace the post marks on the envelopes because the post office doesn’t stamp letters that way anymore. So all the letters pass through a big city for sorting, regardless of which town they were posted in locally.

“This young woman is also a friend of mine. It’s interesting that a clairvoyant we both use told her as soon as she walked in that she was being stalked and letters would start arriving at her home and business addresses. The clairvoyant thought there are two people involved, but had no more to offer.

The latest threat involved a collage created on a computer that showed a coffin and a party going on around it. The message with it said: “You’re your funeral party!’

“Meanwhile, her father performed his first invocation to St. Jude. Afterwards, he texted a friend and the predictive text that appeared spelled Jude, which wasn’t even close to the word he was texting. He and a friend had just read a book about the Beatles and were texting in ‘John Lennon speak,’ when he used the term ‘luff,’ which generated Jude – the Lennon song.

Certainly it served as confirmation. He seems plugged into the right frequency. My cards suggest divine intervention in this situation. I can only hope they are right!

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Apparently, the young woman has no idea who is stalking her, which must make it even more frightening and frustrating. In our case, we were able to track down the stalker. But when we confronted him, via e-mail, he called the police and reported that we were stalking him! That was after he had destroyed three of our computers, let us know he knew our address, and threatened to come after us. We could’ve used help from St. Jude at that point. But we received help from another source, and once the FBI’s Internet division took an interest, he immediately ‘un-stalked’ us…and stalked away elsewhere.

 Our daughter, Megan will be teaching her second paint night class tonight, at a bar in downtown Orlando. Tonight’s painting will be the image depicted above.

So last night, Rob and I were her test students on whom she tried out her particular teaching technique for this painting.  Usually, the students have paper plates that serve as palettes. Since we didn’t have any paper plates, we used pieces of aluminum foil. We had four basic colors: black, yellow, red, blue.  We each had three brushes with tips that were small, medium, and large; a Styrofoam cup filled with water water to clean the brushes; and copious amounts of paper towels.

First, we started with the background – a sunset. The top half of the canvas was a mixture of red and yellow to create a vibrant orange that gradually melted into a soft butter yellow, a bit of green, and purpose to suggest shadows.

The tricky parts were, well, the rest of it – the elephants in silhouette with their trunks forming the heart.  Megan wisely broke the elephants down into shapes and advised us to do the shape in yellow or red, so we could blend our mistakes into the background.

We had a big mistake with our original hearts. They were too big and didn’t leave enough room for the elephants. We blended our mistakes into the backgrounds and started over.  “Go midway across the canvas,” Megan said. “Go down the length of your index finger, and on the left hand side of the canvas, go in a hand width in and leave a drop of paint. Go down a knuckle on your index finger and leave a second dot directly beneath the first one. Now, create the outline of a heart, starting with the uppermost dot and ending at the lower dot.”

Done.

From this point, she broke down the elephants into shapes – rectangles, trapezoids, Cs, straight lines at angles.

Once we had all the shapes, we began filling in the lines with black – the silhouette effect.

And wow! I’m much happier with my version of this painting than I was of the wine glass painting we did several weeks ago. This process is relaxing, stress-free, fun, and a non-artististic person like me can leave with something to hang on the wall at home!

OK, so the tusks are a bit weird. They look like worms. But oh well!

Daughter Megan is an avid fan of Reddit, where the news Saturday night was about the death of Paul Walker, 40, the star of the Fast and Furious franchise, the first of which was released in 2001.

Walker played an undercover detective in 5 of the 6 films about illegal street racing and heists. He died as a passenger in a friend’s Porsche while en route to a charity event to aid Filipino victims of the recent typhoon.  Apparently, the driver was speeding in an area known for racing and struck a streetlight. The car was demolished and engulfed in flames. The first fire rescue team to get there pronounced both men dead within two minutes of arriving.

It’s easy to see the eerie similarities between Walker’s fictional life and the real life incident that ended his life. When these two worlds collide for actors, the defining event can be startling and deadly. Since actors essentially live the role they are playing,  even if for a short time, the stage is literally set for them to attract synchronicity through the dark trickster. While these occurrences are rare, when they do occur, they shock us and we might pause to wonder about the deeper mechanisms of reality. Here are some other tragic incidents involving actors that reflected their work:

Christopher Reeves. His last role before the horseback riding accident that paralyzed him was that of a paraplegic. A few hours after the first news conference about his accident, HBO aired—as previously scheduled—a film starring Reeve that had debuted only a week earlier: Above Suspicion. Reeve played a police officer, who was paralyzed after being shot in the line of duty.

Brandon Lee. He died while filming a scene in his last movie, The Crow. In the scene, he discovers his girlfriend being raped by thugs who kill both of them. Funboy, one of the film’s villains, fired a gun at Brandon’s character as he walked into his apartment. The gun was loaded with blanks, but a dummy cartridge had lodged in the barrel and the detonation of a blank propelled it through the barrel, killing Brandon at point-blank range.

Bruce Lee. Eighteen years earlier, Brandon’s father died on the set of another movie, ironically called, The Death Game. Both Bruce and Brandon were playing characters who died and then returned to life. Both deaths were ruled accidental, though highly suspicious. The dark trickster was present at the end of both of their lives.

David Carradine. He played a deadly swordsman, the head of a family of assassins, in Quenten Taratino’s Kill Bill movies, and died in 2004 in a luxury hotel room in Bangkok during the filming Kill Bill Volume 2. He supposedly hung himself, but may have died accidentally in a dangerous sexual act.

Heath Ledger. The dark trickster also came to play in the death of Ledger. At age 28, he was already a legend, an Oscar nominee for his role in Brokeback Mountain. He had just completed filming his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight. The movie made box office history, Ledger was praised for his portrayal of the dark character and won an Oscar for his performance. Unfortunately, died of an accidental overdose of prescription medication six months before the release of the movie. Ironically, Ledger played the role of the dark trickster himself.

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Life imitating art.

 Cougars. Usually when we hear that word, we think of sleek, gorgeous wild cats. But this cluster of cougar synchros we experienced over a period of about 48 hours didn’t have anything to do with cats, wild or otherwise.

The first one occurred when I was reading through the revisions Hilary had made on our script for Ghost Key.  There’s a scene where Hannah, who works for the Bio-Terrorism unit of the Department of Homeland Security, is interrogating a 16-year-old who was involved in the events on Cedar Key. The scene is written from Rocky’s perspective and the way Hilary had written it was something to the effect of: “Already freaked out by this Cougar…”

And I thought, Huh? What’s that mean?

Then, when Megan was home over Thanksgiving, Rob mentioned a young man who was dating an older woman and Megan said, “Oh, a cougar.”

My synchro detector instantly perked up. “Wait a minute. You know that phrase?”

Megan rolled her eyes. “Mom, you need to watch South Park. It’s all about popular culture. A cougar is a woman who likes younger men.”

So after we’d had our fantastic Thanksgiving dinner that Rob had cooked, we finally settled in to watch a movie. Megan picked The Way, Way Back, about  a 14-year-old kid who has trouble fitting in and finds an unexpected ally and friend in the manager of a water park. The synopsis sounds kind of lame, but the movie is actually quite good, with great performances by Steven Carell and Sam Rockwell, who plays an archetypal role of mentor.

And in this movie, a cougar is mentioned. Cougar, as in a woman who is attracted to younger men. So there you have it, this weird cougar cluster. I have no idea what it means in the bigger scheme of things. But when we were joking about it later, Rob said, “Hey, Trish, maybe it means you’re attracted to someone younger than you are. And hey, guess what. That’s me.”

Rob is a year younger than I am, so I’ll claim that one. But I think the synchro also points to the importance of staying current with the language and archetypes of Megan’s generation, people in their 20s and 30s, who are ushering in not only new language idioms, but the birthing of new paradigms.

Now, this cougar thing has become something of a family in-joke.