NOIRE’S HITTIN’ THE BRICKS APPEARS IN BOOK STORES THIS MONTH MOVIE TO FOLLOW SHORTLY!

HITTIN THE BRICKS: An Urban Erotic Tale by Noire

The Novel AND the Film!
Meet Eva Marie Patterson...

In a no-win situation, would you make a deal with the devil?

This here ain't no romance its an urban erotic tale... Little Eva's got a monkey and her body's up for sale. Daughter of the ghetto, abused by friend and foe, Eva's got a secret, it's gonna cost her don't you know?

A deal went down on Rikers, of that there is no doubt. Eva was the trade-off, someone special sold her out. Dreams of fame and big success, Little Eva has no wins. Fiyah does a bid for her, she's gonna suffer for her sins.

Lies, deceipt, and power reign supreme on ghetto streets, its an everyday struggle just to stay up on your feet. Schemes and fiends and playas cut deeper than a knife, the next man's thirst for glory, could cost Eva her life.

So this here ain't no romance we bout to stop and hit the bricks... Cause on the streets of Harlem, the good ones take the licks!

HITTIN THE BRICKS, the hot new novel by NOIRE is now on sale in a bookstore near you! Get your copy of NOIRE'S latest banga TODAY and look for your special DVD offer! Hittin the Bricks is also a film!


Go to www.hittingthebricks.com and check out the cast, whose members include, Alexandra Merejo as Eva, Texas Battle as Mello, Ness Bautista as Fiyah and Reem Raw as himself! Also featuring comedian Tony Roberts, Enrique Almeida, Millie Ruperto, and DJ Kane.

Purchase a copy of the novel Hittin The Bricks, then go to www.hittingthebricks.com for a special DVD offer exclusively for Noire's readers! Visit www.asknoire.com for more information.
















Eva's Birthday Cake Photo Shoot

HAVE YOU EVER been betrayed by those you love? Violated and abused in the worst kind of way? And no matter how hard you tried to fight your way out of a trick bag, no matter how tall you tried to walk, did the cold streets of life lead you right back to your grimy destiny? Have you ever lived with fear? Crying out in the darkness as it charged through your veins and numbed your spirit in the middle of the night? Did you damn your own soul as you despised your fear, because deep inside you knew you adored it too? You there? You feel me? The boot of life been on your neck before? Suffocating you and holding you down? Well, if you've ever felt the pain of treachery, then walk with me for a minute. Let's hit one of the hottest nightclubs in all of Harlem. A cutthroat joint called Bricks. A place where dissin' a shot caller could get a bitch bodied real quick, and wicked fear reigned supreme. Let me go on and break it down for you. My name is Eva Marie Patterson. I fought my fear in a club called Bricks, and this is how my end began.

Eva Patterson and Ramel "Mello" Williams
Alexandra Merejo and Texas Battle

CLUB BRICKS
From the set of Hittin the Bricks






Click on photos to bring up larger in a new window. Visit www.asknoire.com for more information.

Buy HITTIN THE BRICKS on Amazon.

5th of 5 installments, from How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream

If You’re Going to Invest in Yourself You’ll Have to Steal Time for Your Dreams

continued from previous post

Tips on time and work management

Rate everything that crosses your desk 1, 2, or 3. Then make an agenda for the 1s immediately, and immediately delegate the 2s to someone else. Put the 3s in a drawer designated the "3-drawer," setting aside a few hours once a month to go through it and see what's still important enough to deal with. You'll discover that most of the contents of the 3-drawer are even less important then than they were. Napoleon supposedly had all his mail dumped before the bags were opened, on the premise that the important news would have reached him already and anything he neglected that should not have been neglected would make itself known. I¹m sure that Josephine quickly found an alternative method of communicating with her Emperor.

Postpone procrastination! Anthony Robbins says, "The best way to deal with procrastination is to postpone it." Procrastinate with everything except your dream. To make that happen you need to--

As much as possible, solve each problem as it occurs. Postponing the solution automatically increases the total amount of time needed for it. Opening a letter, then stacking it somewhere, is counterproductive. If you know from the envelope that the letter isn't important, toss it in the nearest wastebasket and don't even take it into your den.

Selective pruning

Mencius: Men must be decided on what they will not do, and then they are able to act with vigor in what they ought to do.

Just as the vitality of a tree can work against the tree unless an experienced arboriculturist is engaged to prune the weaker branches, dreams can be dangerous unless you understand their peculiar fertility. As work creates more work, one dream breeds another, usually grander than the one before. Success has ramifications, breeding all kinds of activities; and, unless you recognize that and infuse "regrouping" time into your success agenda, you'll suddenly find yourself "too busy" to be successful again.

I’ve often been accused of being “an enthusiast.” If you’re a dedicated writer, so are you. But enthusiasts must protect themselves from their enthusiasms. To accomplish this, I suggest the following.

• · Hold a monthly "drop" meeting with yourself. The object of the meeting is to select activities that can be dropped for a month, with a promise to reevaluate their importance at your next meeting. I go through my project files monthly and force myself to table or discard the weaker ones, thereby constantly improving the quality of the projects I work on. As you become experienced in the Type C life, you'll recognize that one of its strangest characteristics is the necessity of killing the little monsters--that once were bright dreams--nipping at your heels. The smaller dreams must now be pruned away so that the bigger ones can thrive. Of course it's even better to kill them off before they begin, as Albert Camus said: "It's better to resist at the beginning, than at the end."

• · Don't feel bad about the discards. Celebrate them. More than sacrifices or disappointments, they are symptoms of your disciplined progress. Just because you can do something, after all, no longer means that you must or should do it. That was the old you, dominated by the Accountant, before your Mind's Eye opened to engage you in an entrepreneurial career transit.

• · When evaluating new projects, keep in mind the sign that psychologist Carl Jung had framed above his desk:

Yes No Maybe

"Maybe" is crossed out as well as 'No" to remind us that it's the "Maybes" that devour our time and dream energies. If the answer to an incoming idea or request isn't definitively "Yes," it's definitively "No." Never Maybe. Maybe kills countless ambitions and splendid plans. "We are what we pretend to be," says Kurt Vonnegut's narrator in Mother Night, "so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

You may also find it useful to go through the following checklist:

• · Is this a good idea (or opportunity)? Yes or No.

• · Is this idea directly connected with my dream? Yes or No. If the answer is No, pass it along to someone else "with no strings attached.²

• · Does this idea fit into my present agenda? If not, is it such a good idea that I should revise my agenda to accommodate it?

• · Is the world ready for this idea?

• · Am I ready to spend years making it real?

It's extremely important to consider both internal and external "timing" when it comes to evaluating new ideas and opportunities. Many of us waste time on good ideas whose time has either come and gone, or won't be coming for too long a time to make its present implementation productive. Of course, thanks to the predictably unpredictable impact of chaos on our lives, we can never be certain about timing. But we can be certain about our gut reaction to the checklist.

So long as you live, be radiant, and do not grieve at all. Life's span is short and time exacts the finalreckoning.--Cepitaph of Seikilos for his wife (100 B.C.)

Buy How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream: A Guide to Transforming Your Career on Amazon

Read If You’re Going to Invest in Yourself You’ll Have to Steal Time for Your Dreams from the beginning.

SAN FRANCISCO BOOK FESTIVAL CALLS FOR ENTRIES BEST BOOKS OF SPRING SEASON

SAN FRANCISCO _ The 2009 San Francisco Book Festival has issued a call for entries for its annual program celebrating the best books of the Spring season.

The San Francisco Book Festival will consider non-fiction, fiction, biography/autobiography, children's books, compilations/anthologies, teenage, how-to, cookbooks, science fiction, audio/spoken word, history, wild card, gay, photography/art, poetry, unpublished, travel and spiritual works. There is no date of publication deadline.

Our grand prize for the 2009 San Francisco Book Festival winner is $1500 cash and a flight to San Francisco for our gala awards ceremony. The winning author will also have a choice of a free vendor table at our family of festivals day events, including events in New York and Hollywood.

Genre category winners will receive a combination of books, software, cash awards and free vendor tables at our New York or Hollywood Book Festivals.

Submitted works will be judged by a panel of industry experts using the following criteria:

1) General excellence and the author's passion for telling a good story.
2) The potential of the work to reach a wider audience.

ENTRIES: Please classify your book and enter it in the following categories. Multiple entries must be accompanied by a separate fee for each book.

• General Non-fiction
• General Fiction
• Children's books
• How-to
• Spiritual
• Photography/Art
• Gay
• Poetry
• History
• Teenage
• Biography/Autobiography
• Audio/spoken word
• Compilations/Anthologies
• Best Unpublished Short Story
• Cookbooks
• Science Fiction
• Wild Card
  

In addition to honoring the top selections in the above categories, The San Francisco Book Festival will award the following chosen from submissions:

1) Author of the Year- Honors the outstanding book of the competition.
2) Book Design of the Year - Honors outstanding and innovative design.
3) Publisher of the Year- Honors the top publisher based on materials displaying
excellence in marketing and promotional materials, as determined by our judges.

FESTIVAL RULES: San Francisco Book Festival submissions cannot be returned. Each entry must contain the official entry form, including your e-mail address and contact telephone number. All shipping and handling costs must be borne by entrants.

NOTIFICATION AND DEADLINES: We will notify each entry of the receipt of their package via e-mail and will announce the winning entries on our web site (www.sanfranciscobookfestival.com). Because of the anticipated high volume of entries, we can only respond to e-mail inquiries.

Deadline submissions in each category must be postmarked by the close of business on April 25, 2009. Winners in each category will be notified by e-mail and on the web site. Please note that judges read and consider submissions on an ongoing basis, comparing early entries with later submissions at our meetings.

TO ENTER: Entry forms are available online at sanfranciscobookfestival.com or may be faxed/e-mailed to you. Please contact our office at 323-665-8080 for fax requests. Applications must be accompanied by a non-refundable entry fee of $50 in the form of a check, money order or PayPal online payment in U.S. dollars for each submission. Multiple submissions are permitted but each entry must be accompanied by a separate form and entry fee.

Entry fee checks should be made payable to JM Northern Media LLC. We're sorry, but entries must be mailed and cannot be delivered in person or by messenger services to the JM Northern Media offices.

Entry packages MUST include:

1) One copy of the book;
2) A copy of your official entry form or a reasonable facsimile;
3) The entry fee or receipt for online payment;
4) Any press/marketing materials you wish to send. Marketing is used as a tie-breaking
consideration by our judges.

Entries should be mailed to:

JM Northern Media LLC
attn: San Francisco Book Festival
7095 Hollywood Boulevard
Suite 864
Hollywood, CA 90028-0893
Phone: 323-665-8080

AWARDS: The San Francisco Book Festival selection committee reserves the right to determine the eligibility of any project.

The 2009 San Francisco Book Festival is part of the JM Northern Media family of festivals, which include the DIY Convention: Do It Yourself in Film, Music & Books, New York Book Festival and Hollywood Book Festival. The San Francisco Book Festival is sponsored by The Larimar St. Croix Writers Colony, The Hollywood Creative Directory; eDivvy, Shopanista and Westside Websites.
# # #
CONTACT:
SanFranciscoBKFest@sbcglobal.net
323-665-8080

Guest Post: OBAMA PASSES GARRISON KEILLOR’S COOL TEST

By Garrison Keillor

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating, it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor — he said, “I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.” The French junior minister for human rights said, “On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.” When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference — the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis — you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he’s going to see “United States of America” and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early 90s, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of The Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could’ve written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote “The Naval War of 1812,” and in my humble opinion, Obama’s is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons. His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

So enjoy the afterglow of the election awhile longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails — imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes The First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels. Have a good day.

Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, “Liberty” (Viking).

Guest Post: NEW YORK TIMES CONFIRMS HOLLYWOOD IS BETTER BET THAN THE STOCK MARKET [via Laura Yellen]

Two movies from iDeal Partners Film Fund had premieres last week at Sundance: “Arlen Faber,” a romantic comedy with Lauren Graham, far left, and Jeff Daniels, and “Motherhood,” a day-in-the-life comedy with Uma Thurman.

New York Times
January 25, 2009
SCENE STEALER
Suddenly, Hollywood Seems a Conservative Investment

By BROOKS BARNES
LOS ANGELES

WHEN it comes to Hollywood financing, the sky doesn’t fall so much as it just changes color.

When the movie factory needed cash in the 1980s, it tapped individual investors through brokerage firms. That strategy ran its course, and in the 1990s German tax credits became the next sales pitch: Funnel money to our movies via a legislative loophole, Mr. Berlin Financier, and you can take immediate tax deductions.

More recently, the likes of Goldman Sachs, along with giant hedge funds, poured billions of dollars into groups of movies called slates. The idea was that investing in a dozen or more movies at once, with the return calculated in aggregate after all had been released, was a sure-fire way to invest wisely. In many cases, though, it wasn’t.

Now that the economic crisis has washed away much of that money, a new pickup line is starting to waft through the air in deal-making hot spots like the Sundance Film Festival. The new line is this: Wall Street, real estate, the art market — all of those other supposedly stable investment areas — are now such a mess that Hollywood is one of the safer places you can park money. Although the movie business has been hurt along with nearly every other industry, it’s proving far more resilient to recession than most.

“I can legitimately say: ‘Hey, wait a minute. My company is outperforming almost everything,’” said Jana Edelbaum, co-founder of an independent financing and production company called iDeal Partners Film Fund. “I think that’s a pretty strong selling point.”

Ms. Edelbaum has been pressing a lot of palms lately in preparation for the premieres of two iDeal movies last week at the Sundance Film Festival. One of them, “Motherhood,” is a day-in-the-life comedy starring Uma Thurman, Minnie Driver and Anthony Edwards. The other, “Arlen Faber,” is a romantic comedy starring Jeff Daniels and Lauren Graham (of “Gilmore Girls” fame). Each cost less than $12 million to make and has multiple distribution offers.

NOW three years old, iDeal operates out of New York, with financing to make about eight movies. It manages risk to investors through a variety of routes: preselling its films to foreign distributors, casting commercially tested actors, taking advantage of state tax incentives for filming. With that approach, Ms. Edelbaum at the outset was able to promise her investors a risk floor of 70 percent on the chance that none of iDeal’s films succeeded.

But as iDeal rounds the home stretch on its first batch of movies, Ms. Edelbaum is projecting at least a 15 percent return for her investors and — if something big happens with “Motherhood” or “Arlen Faber” — as much as 40 percent.

“Obviously, I want to make as much money as I possibly can,” she said. “But I am being dreadfully realistic and conservative given the current environment. It’s the non-Madoff approach.”

Ms. Edelbaum is far from the only independent producer promoting herself to investors with a calmer-waters pitch. The Exodus Film Group, a Venice Beach, Calif., production and financing company, focuses on animated films and has had a slow start, with its recent “Igor” selling a sluggish $19.5 million in tickets.

Coming Exodus entries like the animated “Bunyan & Babe,” featuring John Goodman as the voice of Paul Bunyan, are more promising. But John D. Eraklis, the company’s founder and chief executive, says investors aren’t waiting to find out.

“We have witnessed a surge of existing investors interested in upping their commitment as other opportunities have become less compelling,” Mr. Eraklis said. “I recently had an investor tell me that we no longer occupy the high-risk portion of his portfolio.”

Anybody making the Hollywood-is-safer argument just six months ago would have been laughed out of town. Complex accounting methods, tremendous competition, soaring costs — it wasn’t exactly a safe part of the woods for even the most sophisticated investor.

All of that terrain is still intact, of course, but compare it with imploding investment banks, plunging real estate prices, a whipsawing stock market, Warhols sitting unsold and Bernard L. Madoff. At least in the worst instance of Hollywood investing, you’ll probably catch a glimpse of Angelina and eat some really good shrimp.

“Is investing in movies more attractive now because of what is happening elsewhere in the economy? Yes,” said Daniel H. Black, a partner at Greenberg Traurig, the large entertainment law firm. “Does that mean all the risk is gone? Absolutely not.”

The big studios probably won’t be able to rely much on this pitch. Their upfront needs are too big — Universal’s last round of private financing, which closed in September, totaled about $3 billion — and Wall Street and the real estate market may sort themselves out before their current slate deals expire.

The biggest players in the investment world have also soured on entertainment because they have been burned badly before, said Amir Malin, a partner at Qualia Capital, a media-focused investment firm.

But for independent producers — especially ones that operate in a transparent manner — the strategy could offer a lifeline. They are in a particularly tough spot because they have almost no hope of tapping the debt markets, there is a dwindling number of buyers — with outfits like New Line folding — and costs are soaring. (Marketing an independent movie now costs more than $25 million, according to the Motion Picture Association of America).

What do investors have to say? Daniel Crown, the former chief executive of Crown Theaters, his family’s movie theater chain in the Northeast, said he recently put money into iDeal — but not because he has cinema in his blood.

“If you can find the right film executives, people who consider themselves fiduciaries more than producers, it’s one of the best bets you can make right now,” Mr. Crown said.

“Just remember that it’s over when you start taking yourself so seriously that the project stops becoming a commercial movie,” he continued, “and starts becoming an art project.”

Guest Post: ALL CITIES MEDIA ANNOUNCES COLUMBINE SURVIVOR FILM, APRIL SHOWERS

[via producers Joel Eisenberg and Tim Owens]

Columbine Survivor's Film, "April Showers," Gives Back.
All Cities Media and EMO Films Request Your Support.
Spread the Word.

Since 1990, Eric Shaw's All Cities Network has referred hundreds of millions of dollars in business to its membership base. But what is perhaps even more important is the ongoing charity work that is the cornerstone of All Cities' success: Give, give, give ... and you will receive in return. In that spirit, we ask for your support via the most effective means possible; we ask for you to spread the word. If you would care to utilize your databases to reach as many like-minded friends and associates as possible, all the better. So many are suffering ... and All Cities Network can help.

As recession grips the U.S. economy, one of the few industries that have remained constant is filmed entertainment. While studios and production companies may also be down sizing, the fact remains that consumers are still paying, substantially, for movies, regardless of theatrical, home viewing or otherwise. Enter "April Showers," the upcoming Columbine inspired feature written and directed by Andrew Robinson, a survivor of the tragic Colorado school shootings of nearly ten years ago. "April Showers," which opens theatrically April 2009, ten years to the date of the tragic scenario, is set to redefine to very nature of film distribution. To be released overseas by TriCoast International, the film is being released domestically, in theaters across the country in one week intervals, with 50% of producer and investor proceeds going directly to groups and organizations responsible for making a difference in young peoples' lives within the community that film is playing in. These funds will be donated to schools, school districts, programs within schools, scholarships, law enforcement funds, law enforcement offices, community centers, tolerance and acceptance programs. Exhibitors are currently considering donating their portions as well.

This unique distribution model is the brainchild of writer/director Robinson and producer Jenna Edwards. The team behind "April Showers," majority financed by All Cities Media cofounder Joel Eisenberg and Timothy Owens, collectively EMO Films, recognizes that it is imperative to give back to the community in a fashion that will inhibit further like tragedies. Also in the works is a day-and-date digital release platform, and upcoming DVD release. In all instances, a percentage of the proceeds will continue to be donated to worthwhile causes.

We call on all All Cities Network members and prior guests to spread the word about "April Showers." Regardless of whether you have a child in school, know of someone who does or are concerned about safety in our neighborhoods and school systems, we ask for your support. Please visit www.aprilshowersmovie.com for ongoing information about how you can help further our cause. The more people who are aware of our film, the more aid our institutions will receive.

Thank you.

Joel Eisenberg
Co-Founder, All Cities Media
818-891-2223

Guest Post: HUMANITY AS PHOENIX WILL RISE FROM ASHES OF RECESSION

By David Angsten

Collective Catharsis

When will we finally emerge from the financial fog of the economic crisis?

Infectious Greed has posted this marvelously metaphoric photo of the city of Vancouver trapped in a temperature inversion. It reminds me of the "cloud-wrapped shores of Hades" encountered by Odysseus on his voyage to the Underworld. We currently find ourselves in a similar foggy hell, a seemingly unnavigable darkness, where "an endless deathful night is spread over its melancholy people." (The Odyssey, T.E. Lawrence)

As I noted in the introduction to my novel Night of the Furies, the dark voyage of Homer's hero is known as the Nekyia, the 'night sea journey.' The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung saw the Nekyia symbolically as a journey into the unconcious--the source of the creative and instinctual forces of life.

Mythologically, the night sea journey motif usually involves being swallowed by a dragon or sea monster. It is also represented by
imprisonment or crucifixion, dismemberment or abduction, experiences traditionally weathered by sun-gods and heroes: Gilgamesh, Osiris, Christ, Dante, Odysseus, Aeneas. In the language of the mystics it is the dark night of the soul.

All the night sea journey myths derive from the perceived behavior of the sun, which, in Jung's lyrical image, "sails over the sea like an immortal god who every evening is immersed in the maternal waters and is born anew in the morning. ["Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth,"CW 5, par. 306.] The sun going down, analogous to the loss of energy in a depression, is the necessary prelude to rebirth. Cleansed in the healing waters (the unconscious), the sun (ego-consciousness) lives again. (NYAAP)

Perhaps our current economic 'depression' is a societal version of this cyclical descent. The economy collapses, business undergoes a painful dismemberment, forcing us all to 'sacrifice'--a collective crucifixion--all as a necessary prelude to rebirth.

In a fascinating essay in The Spectator, Tom Stacey speculates that we need the occasional war or economic collapse:

I perceive something in the collective soul of man which from time to time secretly needs the catharsis of economic collapse or war, or even both of those grievous things. And I also perceive that, as that secret need grows in the soul, so is it ineluctably met.

...One way or another we get the cathartic catastrophe, the ruthless purge of the shallow motives and inducements we had grown habituated to responding to, and their replacement by certain profounder, more basic incentives: staying alive, fending for those we love, and maybe fighting and even dying for a cause or a country and the half-forgotten principles that define it.

Being forced to face the looming abyss leads to a kind of deepening, a profound reconnection with fundamental truths. Hell may be the very thing we needed all along.

Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld, Jan Breughel, 1598 (click HERE to enlarge)

4th of 5 installments, from How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream

If You’re Going to Invest in Yourself You’ll Have to Steal Time for Your Dreams

continued from previous post

THE STOP WATCH METHOD OF TIME MANAGEMENT

Where does the time go?

The nonproductive Type C: "I don't know where the time goes.”

Once your Mind's Eye takes over: "It doesn't go anywhere; time's in your face all the time! It's knowing what to do with it that counts.

The most familiar macro tool is the to-do list. It's excellent for getting specific small objectives accomplished, but ultimately you'll want to move on because using the to-do list to control your life ends up wasting too much time. Yes, you get the important little things done. But you can't write, “become an internationally recognized screenwriter” on your to-do list. The to-do list doesn't motivate or inspire you because it doesn't deal with goals and dreams, only with objectives. That's why even the shortest to-do list often gets neglected, ignored, postponed, constantly "carried over" from one day to the next. There’s a rebellion going on inside you. Accomplishing the list may satisfy your Accountant, but your Visionary is longing for more and feeling cheated…

As it recognizes the unique power of both his Accountant's and his Visionary's perception of time, our teller's Mind's Eye knows that the yin of Accountant time and the yang of Visionary time are both valid, simultaneous, and equally important in their places and for their purposes. Telling them both that they're correct, and that they can take turns, his Mind¹s Eye negotiates with the Accountant to allow a conservative, cautious amount of time during which the "success dreams" of the Visionary can be explored. Without the Mind¹s Eye's intervention, he was constantly conflicted over his use of time. With his Mind’s Eye’s help and negotiation, he begins to steal time for success, using his Goal Time Work Sheet [described in the book] to carve hours from the twenty-four hour clock and to mine, methodically, the breakthrough energy of the Visionary...

Time to schedule time

No time you spend is more important than the time you spend scheduling your time; and that needn't be more than a tiny fraction of the time available to you. But scheduling your time is doomed to ineffectiveness unless you begin from the reality baseline of knowing what you've been doing with your time, and confronting your own lack of awareness about where your time has been going…

Once your knowledge of your time usage has allowed you to make new goals and objectives regarding the use of time, how in this busy, busy, busy world do you enforce the objectives for yourself? How can you schedule a life that is one, long, endless shrieking, demanding interruption? After all, you can only turn off the phone for so long without losing your illusion of control, and all contact with reality.

How to make '"the clock of life" your clock: the stopwatch

Mercury's contemporary caduceus for taking command of your time is the stopwatch. Here's how you use this magical wand:

You know the clock on the wall will keep ticking away relentlessly until the day has gone by. You even know how it keeps ticking at night--why else would you awaken at 5:59 on your digital bedside clock when you've set the alarm to go off at 6:00? You know the telephone seems wired to that damned clock, life's interruptions seem wired to it, the myriad distractions that flesh is heir to seem wired to it--and you recognize that, as a result, you yourself and your dreams have been wired to the Accountant's clock for way too long. Your world has been defined by that relentless, uncreative clock. You are desperate to realize your Goal Time.

Today you stop the world by purchasing a stopwatch. I suggest buying the simplest one you can find, one that allows you to stop the seconds and restart them, without the other countless modes that will drive you crazy unless you're training race horses. Hang the stopwatch above your computer, your telephone, your work table--above whatever altar serves the god of your career transit dream. Promise yourself that, no matter what happens on that wall clock, you will work on your dream at least one hour before you go to bed tonight.

Or two hours. Try one first, then expand slowly and naturally in the direction of that Goal Time. Keep it as simple as you can and still make it work for you. Using the stopwatch allows you the freedom to write, but also ensures the constant sense of disciplined progress toward the success you’ve mapped out for yourself. Nothing is more satisfyingly inevitable than the achievements that time creates from small, stolen increments. One hour a day is thirty hours a month. Thirty hours a month will inevitably produce results, especially if you've programmed the three parts of your mind effectively to make the best possible use of that one hour. Imagine how quickly a writer marketing his work will move forward, having assigned five hours a week to marketing calls and letters. He realizes that the faster he gets through those No’s, the sooner he gets to the Yes. And it just takes time to get through the "No’s."

If the one-hour-per-day approach doesn't work for your unpredictable schedule, or makes you feel too disciplined, make it a weekly approach. One of my workshop students was having trouble keeping to his contract that he'd put in two writing hours per day. After several give and takes, we came down to the real reason he was having problems: He was leaving his day job in order to be free, and the daily discipline we’d been discussing made him feel enslaved again. I asked him if he'd be comfortable committing to a weekly number of hours, to bringing in his stopwatch to the next session with ten hours on it.

"And I could do them in whatever configuration I choose?"

"Absolutely. The whole idea is to find a way of tricking your mind into allowing you to live by your own clock."

He came in the next week with 10:06 on his stopwatch, and the weeks after with 10:04, 9:56, 10:10. He'd found a way of using the magic wand to give him that necessary illusion of freedom and control combined with the satisfaction of real progress in committing hours to his career transit.

You can get time out on a regular basis by stealing it. Now that you've embraced your career transit and are living the entrepreneurial life, don't forget to give yourself the benefits that your day job employer was forced to give you. Sometimes we are so excited about doing the things we love on a daily basis that we forget to give ourselves a break from them. “I don't need a vacation. My life is a vacation!”

Everyone needs vacations. Most people need them because work is exhausting. The entrepreneur needs them because vacations bring perspective and creative insights that are unavailable under the daily pressures of the career transit. "To do great work," Samuel Butler wrote, a person "must be very idle as well as very industrious." The entrepreneur, as both employer and employed, must schedule his vacations, with alternate dates in mind in case "something comes up" that forces a change. You are accomplishing just as much if not more when you "go away for the whistle" and allow your mind to play.

Buy How to Escape Lifetime Security and Pursue Your Impossible Dream: A Guide to Transforming Your Career on Amazon

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Read If You’re Going to Invest in Yourself You’ll Have to Steal Time for Your Dreams from the beginning.

DR. BAZAN SIGNS UNA VIDA AT NEW ORLEANS BARNES & NOBLE

Bayoubuzz.com:

Jan. 22 Book signing of book by Dr.. Nicolas Bazan - Una Vida : A Fable Music and the Mind.

Barnes & Noble –3721 Veterans Boulevard, Metairie
504-455-4929

Presentation and signing of the book will take place at 7 p.m.
Dr. Bazan's motivation for writing this novel is stated in his own words as follows: " Our work at the LSU Neuroscience Center is going very well. As you know the battle to conquer diseases - such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, macular degeneration ,depression, epilepsy, and so many others - is not a story of continual everyday successes. It is a slow journey through a complicated maze that is often fraught with setbacks and unexpected twists and turns. Experiments do not always yield the results anticipated, and scientists like me and my colleagues often find that we do not have the means available to solve the riddles of the mind and sight we so desperately seek to unravel. But don't think for a moment that a neuroscientist's objectivity means he doesn't have personal thoughts and emotions about the lives that have been affected, and that have been lost by the diseases we study. After years of those thoughts and emotions building up inside of me, I searched for a way to express what our work is really like in a way anyone could relate to. I decided to write a novel that gave me the greater liberty of expressing my own worries, motivations, doubts, aspirations, joys and reflections about the work we do on the always-expanding frontiers of neuroscience. My first novel mirrors many facets of my own personal and professional life, including why I strive to understand and combat the ravaging diseases and disorders that afflict the eyes and the brain".


In Dr. Nicolas Bazan's brilliant first novel, neuroscientist Alvaro Cruz finds himself haunted by a recurring dream of a banjo player in an elusive cornfield that leads him on a personal quest to uncover the mysterious past of a New Orleans street singer known as Una Vida. Stricken with Alzheimer s, Una Vida can only offer tantalizing clues about her past through her mesmerizing vocals, incredible recollection of jazz lyrics, and the occasional verbal revisiting of a fascinating life that s fading quickly and forever into the recess of her mind. As Cruz searches for Una Vida s true identity, he learns profound lessons about the human psyche, the nature of memory and himself.

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