A Ghostwriting Synchro

Ghostwriter In Office. Creative Ghost Writer Using Computer

About a month or two before Covid started in March 2020, Rob & I signed up for Reedsy, a British online ghostwriting site. To date I’ve worked on nearly 2 dozen different projects. It’s interesting, the people I’ve met are varied, and their books span the non-fiction and fiction spectrum.

What’s great thing about Reedsy is that when a person comes to you with an idea, chapters, or a complete manuscript, you offer your services at the price you think is fair. This is where it gets tricky. If the person hasn’t written anything except an idea for, say, a novel, then as the ghostwriter I will write a novel from scratch. That means 60,000 to 75,000 words. It means a lot of time, usually four to six months, where that novel becomes my full-time job.

So the bottom line questions are  usually, What is my time worth? Am I charging too little or too much? Rob & I often discuss the prices we’re charging and since we started three years ago, our prices have risen. So this evening we were talking about prices again – are we charging too much? Too little? – and a few minutes later, I get a linkin notification from a man who opens with:

I recently helped a ghostwriter earn over 117k in 6 months so looking at your profile I thought there might be a fit. Perhaps we could have a chat?

Then there was a postscript where he asked if I was ever hesitant about asking for more money – the very thing Rob and I were discussing.

I laughed. Talk about immediate synchronicity! $117,000 in six months? That averages out to more than $19,000 a month from ghostwriting. That’s quite a tidy sum!

 

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Plumbing synchronicity

From Rob: I’m working on a novel set during World War II that involves the theft of priceless paintings and sculptures both in the U.S. and Europe. I’d just finished a scene in which one of the characters had obtained fake IDs and was walking with a fake limp for a particular reason that’s too lengthy to explain here.

I took a break, turned on the news and there was story comparing some of the actions of Trump supporters including elected officials with the actions of the Watergate plumbers from 1970. The name plumbers came about because the original task of this small group of Nixon supporters was to stop leaks about how the American public was lied to about the Vietnam War. Specifically, the plumbers initially targeted Daniel Elsberg, a State Department official, by breaking into his psychiatrist’s office looking for evidence that Elsberg might be crazy.

What caught my attention was that Gordon Liddy, in preparing for the break in, had obtained fake IDs and, for some reason, he walked with a fake limp. Of course, seeing that report so close in both time and similarity to what I had just written sent the synchronicity bell ringing loudly in my head. Fake IDs, fake limp in my world; fake IDs, fake limp in the news world coming together.

As always, the question of what do with such meaningful coincidences tells us it’s a subjective matter. It’s also a very personal matter in that undoubtedly no one else experienced that particular synchronicity. So it was  a personal, little mind-blowing experience, which for me signals I’m on the right path with the story, but also importantly that there’s a bigger picture of reality that exists outside of our everyday world of cause and effect. And for a moment, I got to come in  to touch it.

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An Odd Political Synchro

Official portrait of President Donald J. Trump, Friday, October 6, 2017. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)

Here’s an odd political synchro. I learned about it this evening on MSNBC (Oct 24) but Chris Hayes didn’t call it a synchronicity or a coincidence.Yet, that’s exactly what it is.

Today in court – Fulton County? Elsewhere? I can’t keep track of Trump’s indictments ! – trump’s former attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, testified against him. Also today, a Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, accepted a plea deal and cried during her apology to the people of Georgia for her apparent election denialism.

Sane day, 2 attorneys, one who is where Ellis is now and went to prison for it, and the other headed for who knows what – disbarment? Time in jail?

And both had been in trump’s orbit.

 

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Trish MacGregor: Star Power For November 2023

https://soundcloud.com/themysticalunderground/trish-macgregor-star-power-for-november-2023


Join Trish for the November 2023 astrological forecast!

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Save the Cat & Democracy

 

 

 

If we were living in a novel, where would we be right now as a human collective?

In novel and movies, in any captivating story, the catalyst is the event, the point in time, where an event occurs that alters the life of the protagonist. It’s the harbinger of change.

The Catalyst is Beat 4 of the 15 beats that screenwriter Blake Snyder identifies in story telling in Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need. It can come as bad news, a divorce, getting fired. It may arrive in the form of seeing the spirit of your dad in the back seat of your car, a Near Death Experience, an alien encounter, a spiritual or creative epiphany. But all catalysts have the same thing in common: you’re kicked out of your status quo thinking and banished from your  comfort box, the matrix where you’ve been living.

After Blake’s death, Jessica Brody wrote Save the Cat Writes a Novel, adapting Blake’s 15 beats to novels. In the book, she writes,“The Catalyst will crash land in your hero’s life and create so much destruction, your hero will have no choice but to do something different. Try something new. Go somewhere else.”

Catalysts often involve synchronicity.

Perhaps the catalyst in the story of American democracy was trump’s election to the presidency. He broke all the norms and, ultimately, nearly broke the spine of democracy. Take your pick. Issuing a ban on Muslims entering the country. How a shot of bleach would lick Covid. The J6 insurrection. Two impeachments, 91 indictments. Cozying up to dictators like Putin, Kim Jong Un, his bogus claims that the 2020 election was stolen, his pathological lying and narcissism.

In Beat 5, debate, our hero, Democracy, now knows Trump is running for the presidency again and is thinking, Holy shit! What next? Democracy watches a small group of extremists tear apart the Republican Party, which now follows the authoritarian playbook. They can’t break away from Trump. The debate beat will continue into the election of 2024.

In the Save the Cat books, the debate beat leads us into Part 2 of the story. And here, in Beat 6, the hero accepts the call to action. But he has to do this on his own, not because someone else tells him to. Then, with Beat 7, a new character ( or characters) is introduced who will help the hero learn the theme.

The theme here is that Democracy knows he’s is an experiment with a bill of rights, a constitution, separate branches of government, and that his entire persona has been turned upside down by trump, his supporters and co-conspirators.  To make things right again, he must fight for his very existence. Perhaps the B characters are the prosecutors like Jack Smith and Connie Willis, and the judges and juries who will hear the cases against trump and the rest of them.

In Beat 8 – Fun & Games – we see Democracy in his new environment. And what’s that going to be?

Then we reach Beat 9, the Midpoint of the story. This culminates in either a false victory or a false defeat for the hero – Democracy!

In Beat 10 – Bad Guys Move In – maybe there’s another insurrection. Or the Republican Party suffers an irreversible meltdown. Or Trump is never charged with anything and really does earn the John Gotti nickname, Teflon Don. Does he then go on to win the election of 2024?

Or perhaps Beat 10 is where we are now, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas atrocities in Israel. Men  and women and kids beheaded, hundreds murdered at a music festival, thousands dead, terrorists perpetrating  unspeakable cruelty, acts so heinous  and inhumane that the rest of the world snaps to attention, appalled. How the hell can human beings do this to each other?

This beat and Beat 11, All Is Lost, melt together.Beat 11 is the lowest point of the novel. Death often occurs here.

Beat 12, Dark Night of the Soul. These moments occur right before our hero, Democracy, decides what to do.

Then the beats lead us into part 3.

My hope is that in Part 3, several things happen. Here in the U.S., I hope Democracy wins the election and trump ends up in prison. In this scenario, he has lost everything that once defined him in his own mind: the real estate, the alleged billions, Mar-a Lago, publicity, his megaphone. My hope is that what happened in Israel is a wake-up call for humanity and that we strive to create a kinder, more aware and interconnected world.

 

 

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TMU Time Machine: Angela Willhoft: I See Hearts

https://soundcloud.com/themysticalunderground/tmu-time-machine-angela-willhoft-i-see-hearts


Join Trish and Rob in the Time Machine for their August 2022 conversation with…

Angela Willhoft is a spiritual medium, a conduit between two worlds. As an evidential medium, she serves the physical by giving hope that life continues after death.
In serving the spiritual realm, Angela aims to honor the life they lived and pass along messages of love and comfort to the bereaved.
She looks to provide hope and comfort to people questioning the possibility of life after death and healing for those who are suffering from grief.
Honoring her commitment to two worlds, she offers facts about the life and personality of the departed that can only be confirmed by her clients. Using intuitive guidance, mediumship, and astrology, Angela helps clients through decision-making and healing.

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Solar Eclipse in LIbra

 

 

Every year, there are at least 4 eclipses and sometimes 5.  The solar eclipse in Libra tomorrow,  October 14 is the first since April 30, when there was a  solar eclipse in Aries.

These eclipses are like double new moons, so that’s double the new opportunities that come your way. Mercury is conjunct within four degrees to the eclipse degree of 21 degrees and seven minutes Libra. So regardless of where Libra falls in your chart, it’s a good day for conversation of any kind, written or spoken. The South Node is also conjunct the eclipse degree, so this eclipse is  about release of situations, relationships and people that no longer serve your best interest.

If you know your time of birth – and the date and place, of course – look up your free chart here., at Cafe Astrology.  Locate the house where you have Libra and where the 21 degree ad 7 minutes eclipse would occur. Then poke around the site until you find the section on houses and what they mean. That house is where the new opportunities will surface.

Or you can listen to  this month’s Star Power forecast or read it. My version is based on  solar charts for each sign,  where your individual sign is placed at the ascendant or rising sign. The houses  are set up that way instead of by the time you were born. The most accurate way to determine the house in which Libra falls is to have your time of birth, so if you know that time,  head over to Cafe Astrology.

The eclipse should be positive!

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Message in a Bottle

What are the odds on this one? 141 years after this message was left in the bottle, it happens to wash up in the town where the guy was born.

Every so often I run across these oddball stories and just shake at my head at the weirdness of it all.  I wonder if a descendant of his found it…or his reincarnated self! Definitely a synchronicity – maybe  trickster?

I often wonder if oddball synchros like this one happen to remind us that the universe really is a very mysterious place.

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The Mystical Underground and Preston Dennett

Preston Dennett is the most prolific author of books about UFOs and alien contact on planet Earth and maybe our galaxy and beyond. Who knows. Preston began investigating UFOs and the paranormal in 1986 when he discovered that his family, friends, and co-workers were having dramatic unexplained encounters. Since then, he has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and investigated a wide variety of paranormal phenomena. He is a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a ghost hunter, a paranormal researcher, and the author of at least 30 books and more than 100 articles on UFOs and the paranormal. His latest book is Humanoids and High Strangeness: Twenty True UFO Encounters.

Here it is on You Tube

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Suzanne’s Mind-Blower

 

In Western society, we tend to believe that creativity is the exclusive domain of the Lennons, Spielbergs, Rowlings, Kings, Picassos, Streeps, Ophrahs, Harrison Fords. We forget that we are all born creative, that if it weren’t for creativity, we probably would still be living in caves. And at every step in our creative expression, synchronicity is there to guide us, inform us, and remind us that we are here to create and to do so joyfully.

Sure, there have been plenty of dysfunctional creative people – Nicola Tesla, despite his brilliance and creativity, battled constantly against poverty and emotional pain. Van Gogh chopped off his own ear and never made a penny from his art. F Scott Fitzgerald drank himself into an early grave and Hemingway put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

But for every creative misfit, there are many more individuals who have the creative equivalent of the Midas touch, a magical something that transforms the mundane, the utterly ordinary, into something unique. When we enter their homes or workplaces, that magic is evident everywhere, an ineffable quality that’s hard to pin down. We immediately sense they are connected to something larger than themselves, that that have tapped into a creative flow that spills over into every area of their lives.

So here is a stunning story:

Suzanne Cunningham, a Reiki healer and medium in North Carolina whom we had on our podcast, shared a mind-blowing story about how creativity and synchronicity occurred at a critical juncture in her life.

She was leaving a marriage of 25 years and trying to decide where to live. At the time, her son was living and going to school in Charlotte, North Carolina and she was living and working in Syracuse, New York. She worked for a woman that owned a couple of bridal salons, one in Syracuse, the other in Charlotte (part of the reason my son was there, as she visited often). “I was trying to decide the direction and location my life needed to move in. As my personal life was deteriorating I asked my boss if I could work in her Charlotte location as well as NY while I decided what I needed to do and where I needed to live.”

At the same time Suzanne was also working on developing her intuition with a teacher in Central NY. She was a powerful intuitive with a group of wonderful, equally powerful friends. “Our group included a former local mayor, a graphic artist, a corporate trainer, my teacher and I. We decided to create a festival/retreat weekend to celebrate women. We lived in the land of the Haudensaunee, the Iroquois, and the Clan mothers had been so important to the tribes that called Central New York home and to us, as young women growing up there. We were feeling inspired and decided to call it The Goddess Weekend.”

Her teacher invited a young woman she’d met on a recent trip to San Diego, an author, Julie Hunt., to join their weekend in NY. They were thrilled when she said yes! Suzanne picked her up at the airport on the Friday of the retreat and they shared a room in her teacher’s house.

Julie, the author, spent the three days meeting, greeting and selling copies of her book, Shout from the Rooftops in Your Stilettos. The cover is at the top of the post.  Everyone kept asking her about the identity of the beautiful young woman on the book cover who exuded such joy. But repeatedly over throughout the weekend Julie politely told each person that she didn’t know who the woman on the cover was. It was a stock photo chosen by the publisher.

“On Sunday night, she presented me with a copy, inscribed with a lovely message,” Suzanne wrote. “I left there feeling like I could manage, regardless of where I would end up. I was still afraid but the weekend had so filled me with hope. I felt surrounded and supported and most importantly loved, and so I drove to Charlotte, the Queen city!”

When Suzanne arrived at the store she brought her copy of Julie’s book to share with her boss. They chatted for a few minutes and then, as Suzanne was telling her about meeting this wonderful young woman, the author Julie Hunt, she slid the book across her desk. “She looked at the cover and turned white. I watched the color drain from her face and could only ask WHAT???”

Her boss exclaimed, “Suzanne, do you know who this girl is?”

“No,” Suzanne replied. “Lots of people asked Julie but she had no idea and would love to know but it was a stock photo.”

Now here comes the synchronicity,

“Suzanne, this girl asked me for a job a few weeks ago. When you called and said you needed to be here, I told her the job was no longer available, my friend needs the job.”

Just consider the mind-blowing odds of this kind of thing happening.

“There are no words,” Suzanne said. “We both just sat there, letting the reality of what had just happened sink in. I then asked her if the young woman on the cover KNEW she was on a book cover. We called her, shared the news, and then I called Julie to tell her the mystery was solved although the mystery hung thickly in the room because HOW COULD THIS BE POSSIBLE?

“I lived in Central New York, where the Goddess Weekend was held, Julie lived in San Diego and the young woman on the cover, Vironica Schreiner Dawson, lived in Charlotte. So is this synchronicity or a miracle? I’m still not sure. This is an example with tangible evidence, something I’ve physically held during moments of doubt. I just carry the experience like a bubble of emotion and memory.”

Some years later, when Suzanne related the story to Trish, she pointed out that the only time she’d met Julie was at the gathering in New York, when she’d given Suzanne the book. Then she got to Charlotte and found out that Veronica, someone she’d never met – and someone the author had never met, either, had been let go from the part-time job so that Suzanne could have it “while I gathered my life together as my marriage ended.”

“I contacted them both and shared the information. Vironica didn’t know she was on a book cover and Julie finally had a name of the girl when asked! It was so clear to me when that happened that I was where I needed to be even if I was terrified and questioning.”

And here’s a beautiful postscript to this story: Suzanne later met her present husband in Charlotte.

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