Use creative visualization: hold a picture of what you want in your mind and act as if you already have it.

One of my friends lost twenty pounds this way by visualizing himself twenty pounds thinner each night before he went to sleep.

I myself went on a trip to Europe when I was seventeen by announcing I was going about six months before I wanted to go, and then continuing to tell everyone I was going as if it were an accomplished fact. It took six months, but it worked.

You have to be careful with this, though.  One time my friend Gary really wanted a gold Rolex watch, so he used creative visualization to convince himself he already had the gold Rolex. He was a Hollywood guy, and one day he was on a plane with a movie star who was giving away Rolex watches to his friends, and Gary said, “No thanks, I already have one.”

There is no road. Your footsteps are the road. (Paraphrased from Antonio Machado)

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. You make your path with your footsteps. (Paraphrased from Joseph Campbell)

There is no way through to Cold Mountain.

More writing rules:

1. Start with an image. Write to the image. Write within the image.

2. Start each scene at the last possible moment.

3. Leave out everything you possibly can leave out (Hemingway)

4. Find the emotion in each scene, and that will create the emotional throughline of the story (James Franco on how they made Rise of the Planet of the Apes).

5. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, the story finally teaches you how to tell it.

6. A long poem must turn three times.

7. Just when you think you know what comes next, you have to twist it.

My new Latin motto. Doesn’t completely replace Mors, aut honorabilis vita. But I like it better than the motto I inherited along with a family crest with a wolf and two eagles.

Apparently my life measures out in twelve-year cycles, something to do with Jupiter and Taurus. A new cycle starts this year with an instruction to get some closure on the previous twelve-year cycle, 1998-2010. This will note some excerpts from my journal from that period:

Zonnie Gorman explains that to pray properly, visualize the goal, visualize the path to the goal, and visualize having the thing you pray for.

Lords of Kobol who hear my prayers: Athena (in her war helmet); Aphrodite (love and sex); Calypso (iris and parsley in the garden); Aurora (the dawn); Artemis (the hunter with her bow and arrow. Maybe Hera — I’ll have to look into her attributes.

A good title, not in use by anybody else per Amazon.com– Promises Before Dawn.

Writing rules:

1. Put the characters under extreme pressure and keep them there.

2. Real thoughts, not made-up thoughts.

3. Start from inside the characters, write from the heart.

4. Think of it as a part in a movie.

That which passes through everything, Buddha as neutrino clusters, how the Tathagata cares for all the Bodhisattvas.

Strike while the iron is.

Tattooed across the chest of a slave: WOMELOMO, GAKE MELEWODOME

Means: They do not love me, but I live among them.

If you’re open to everything you see and hear and allow it to act through you, even gods and spirits will come to you, not to speak of men.