A Painting Artist

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I met Steph Daniels at a Roger Hamilton wealth dynamics seminar. She was softly spoken and shyly told me she had written and self-published a novel. My publishing attenae went up as I heard her say this. I’m always on the look out for new writers to interview, especially ones who have written about personal transformation, and Steph’s story sounded fascinating: a stint with the VSO in the Sudan gave her insight into how resilient women were as they stayed at home whilst the men spent many years working abroad. She spent over 10 years working in war zones as a nurse and medical anthropologist, researching how relief workers deal with the difficulties of working in such conflictual arenas, and ending with a stint in Darfur where she was in charge of an emergency surgical unit. I wanted to know more, so when she emailed me to say her book, Bendy Elephant had been published, I sat down with her for a virtual chat.

What always makes me smile is how often writing puts a writer in touch with their own story. This was certainly true of Steph. Her first attempts at writing a book failed when she tried to write about the relief workers’ experience. As a very short-term medical co-ordinator for Save The Children in Goma in 1997, she met a boy who had spent many days alone in the forest; only then did she find her portal to write about these painful experiences. I know that Steph doesn’t see her first book attempt as a failure in the traditional sense. She sees it as a practice run. Writing that book gave her valuable insights into how to write Bendy Elephant. Often we can’t get to the main story until we’ve hacked our way through the undergrowth of what is in front of us, presenting as the main story. Steph persevered with her writing, showing up every day to the page, and soon she had the breakthrough that led her to write Bendy Elephant. I admire her resilience.

In telling the boy’s story, she unintentionally exposed in her writing the traumas she had been through as a relief worker, traumas she had struggled to admit to in her writing. Looking through the eyes of her story’s character, she was able to show solutions, whereas in her first book she had found only a dark labyrinth.

I was curious about Steph’s writing process. She explained that she meditates before she starts writing, which helps to connect her to her Divine Self. Her journey to this point began as a young girl, when she dreamed of writing but was scared of writing anything down because she feared her father’s criticism. This is probably the writer’s single most debilitating issue, the inner critic that we internalize and allow to stop us. Through her own life’s experiences, Steph discovered she had more to say than she realised when she began to write directly about the traumas she’d witnessed rather than approaching these from an academic ‘relief worker’ perspective. These stories had an emotional impact that moved readers. She had crossed the rubicon and discovered her true voice.

Steph decided to self-publish so she could have more control over her marketing which she readily admits is a form of torture! However, when pressed, she revealed impressive plans for marketing which include book clubs, radio interviews and an audio version of the book. She is also a participant for “The Next Top Spiritual Writer”

Ultimately Steph’s goal is to inspire others to reach their highest potential. In the depths of countries like Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sudan and others, she discovered that resilience is a form of healing, something she is now researching and plans to return to in her writing.

Watch this space!

Buy your copy of Bendy Elephant.

Photograph taken by Annie Liebowitz for Vanity Fair

When I think about cinematic love stories, and those that have transferred offscreen, I think Bacall and Bogie, Beatty and Benning, and MacGraw and McQueen.

A lot has been written about the last two, and this month’s Vanity Fair publishes an intimate interview with Ali MacGraw who talks about her relationship with Steve McQueen.

The romance was highly charged, all or nothing, “from the start it was either great days or horrendous days and nothing in between” and although she doesn’t explicitly say it was violent, she all but does. But the interesting thing she does say is, “I was 1000% not a victim.”

Her big sin, she says, “was to be inauthentic at the beginning. I didn’t state my case: ‘You know, even though I told you I’d rather be on a motorcycle opening a can of beer, the truth is I’d rather go to Paris.’ If you don’t say who you are up front, then you don’t get to wake up two years later and say, ‘Oh, man, am I sick of doing this!’”

Interestingly, this disconnect that she obviously felt and went through enabled her conversion from model to movie star when she appeared in Love Story. More interesting though is the journey she has been on privately to live an authentic life.

She had me at India.

Not Italy, although Italy was OK, but I was too distracted by her pasta eating …

But in India her journey deepens and so does her writing. Maybe she planned it this way, or maybe it was happy coincidence. Nothing, I have learned recently, about this book’s arrival, was coincidental.

Writing like this:

“If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be … a prudent insurance policy.

I’m not interested in the insurance industry. I’m tired of being a skeptic, I’m irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don’t want to hear it anymore. I couldn’t care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.”

Yeah, she had me at India.

I’ve been thinking for some time now that the power dynamic between author and publisher has shifted, in favour of the author. Which is great news. This has happened, largely because the options to self-publish and distribute have grown up and become respectable, rather than being a disadvantaged teenager. This respectability has given authors an opportunity to generate more income for themselves, rather than giving the lion’s share to the publisher, and therefore also build their brand, and touch their tribe.

The author Nick Kettles is doing this with his book, ‘The All-Seeing Boy and the Blue Sky of Happiness’, which recently garnered an endorsement from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Impressed with this achievement, and curious about how he had done this, I have interviewed him for my blog. His insights into his creative process are worth reading, if you are struggling to find an audience and publisher for your book. His secret is so simple, and yet easy to overlook in a marketplace that thrives on noise …

Read the full interview.

To read more interviews with authors who have broken the rules and achieved success, please subscribe here.

What happens when you create a bigger game for your book?

I had been introduced to Nick Kettles after I told a friend I was looking to interview authors with self-publishing success stories. Intrigued by the title, The All Seeing Boy and the Blue Sky of Happiness on Nick’s promotional card, I looked up his web site http://www.newmythcreate.com to read his biog. I wanted to know the backstory, so called Nick for a chat. We connected, and discovered we shared similar values. I was impressed by the way he had created his own market for his book by combining intuition with large doses of ‘bare-faced gumption.’ My kind of person.

I started by asking him why he had chosen to self-publish vs. publishing with a mainstream publisher. It turned out that this wasn’t his first choice, and that like many authors, he came to self-publishing after being rejected by 10 mainstream publishers. At this point, Nick’s story was sounding all too familiar.

“I was appalled by the lack of dialogue and patronizing feedback from publishers who just didn’t see the market potential for my book, and were so risk averse.”

The rejections, however, proved to be a spur for him not to give up. Instead of shoving the manuscript in his desk drawer, as most disheartened authors do at this stage, he followed his intuition which was telling him that the book did have a valuable message to impart. This was an intuition which would ultimately result in the book receiving an endorsement from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. But that was all to come.

Nick decided to take the risk himself, and to explore publishing the story as an ebook. He had a sideline interest in ebooks, having completed a non-fiction ebook proposal for A C Black. Although the proposal was rejected, the research he had done for the proposal turned out to be useful. He knew that the way to successfully market the ebook was to create a viral campaign where it was forwarded on via email, a strategy he had seen work successfully in the personal development niche.

Before launching his ebook, Nick did his due diligence. He recognized that if his book was ever to be picked up by a mainstream publisher, they would need to see statistics to mitigate their risk. So he set about collecting them, partly, at this stage, out of revenge to prove them wrong. Some of the results were surprising:

The first thing he did was test his manuscript with 5 readers, all of whom were ‘blown away’ by the story. This gave him confidence to keep going.

He then asked a well-known print publisher “how many downloads would I need to get before you are interested.” The publisher didn’t have an answer, but guessed around 500. This didn’t seem to be a huge and unachievable number, as Nick knew from his reader feedback, (chosen carefully to represent a cross-section of parents, children and professionals), that there was an audience interested in the book’s message.

He targeted 50 expert endorsements and received 35 good ones, reader comments from authors like William Bloom, Dr. Aretoula Fullam, Carl Honore (author of In Praise of Slowness) and Susie Anthony (author of A Map to God).

And finally, he created a WordPress blog to promote the free ebook.

Over a period of 18 months, the book was downloaded over 450 times, and was translated into German. Not bad, although it hadn’t reached its tipping point yet. Nick began to question, ‘what next’, and to wonder whether it was time to quit. This proved to be another turning point, as he began to explicitly state his intention for the book.

Around this time he had been involved with playing The Bigger Game, which is a personal transformation model based on a board game which allows you to unfold a mission and purpose bigger than yourself. Nick’s goal up to this point had been the promotion of the universal message of loving kindness. He was motivated by a sense of adventure rather than money, and although he was somewhat irked by the publishing industry’s response, he was happy going solo.

Nick had written the book for his godson, out of a desire to create and share to move someone – he wrote it for an audience of 1 he really loved and at the heart of the book (some would say ‘the book’s message’), was the Tibetan principle and practice of ‘loving kindness’. As Dr Jo Nash, Lecturer in MA Psychoanalytic Studies at Sheffield University writes:

“This story is an evocative tale about how thoughts determine our experience,
and illustrates a simple technique for transforming our own and others suffering
through the practice of loving kindness.

A rather special tramp initiates a small boy into the magical world of ‘blue sky
thinking’, based upon an ancient Tibetan meditation practice of compassionate
visualisation. This aims to alleviate others suffering and create positive intentions in
the practitioner’s mind stream, so opening the heart. The results of blue sky thinking
are a re-enchantment with the world through an experience of the transformational
power of generating loving, compassionate feelings towards others.”

Knowing how easy it is for writers to be disheartened, I asked Nick what had kept him going. His reply goes to the core of what the book is about.

“I had a stake, a clear vision for the book, which was to spread the message of loving kindness to the world. The stake was a belief that fueled my actions, and was a place to recover to when I lost my way.
I got stuck however, and lost motivation and it was at that point we got His Holiness the Dalai Lama to read the book.  That helped me to re-align my stake around a tangible cause – and suddenly the book was no longer dedicated to one child – my godson – but to 100,000s of Tibetan children”.

Nick believes that having a bigger wish for humanity creates a different alignment for a book’s success, rather than saying it is simply to meet a need in the market. This took him out of his place of ego and getting something back – it was no longer all about him, the ego of the writer.

One of the steps in the Bigger game, is to ask what kind of action related to this project would make you gulp? Nick, together with his partner Priya, brainstormed together, and decided to send the ebook to 10 prominent Tibetan Buddhists, including the actor and activist Richard Gere, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Out of those 10, he received only one reply, which was this:

“His Holiness is happy to have a copy of your e-book “The All Seeing Boy and the Blue Sky of
Happiness”. His Holiness liked the story and hopes it will help to spread the message of
loving-kindness among the readers. His Holiness sends his appreciation and gratitude to you
and your colleagues for this wonderful piece of work.”
Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Ambivalent about appearing egotistical in using this quotation to promote the book, Nick kept this quote to himself for 2 months. Eventually his partner Priya encouraged him to share the comments, so he went back to His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Office and asked for permission to use his quote. They agreed, and suggested using the book to promote the Tibetan Children’s Villages.  Nick agreed, and republished the book with a new introduction dedicating it to raising awareness of the Tibetan Children’s Villages’ mission to care for Tibetan children refugees whose purpose it is to meet the most critical educational needs of Tibetan refugee children, in Dharamsala, India.

Nick had finally found his bigger game for the book.

To date, the ebook has a readership of 1000, throughout 18 countries, and is slowly edging towards its tipping point.

If you have been inspired by this story, and would like to help promote the book’s message, please forward this article which contains the ebook link, on to as many people as you like. The ebook is free to download and share.

Reflecting on the many breakthroughs and learning points throughout this process, I asked Nick if he could have mapped this outcome from the beginning.

“I’m a curious person, and I treated this as an adventure. The strategy unfolded through trial and error, but it was underpinned by my strong intuition to share the message, and by my desire to create a personal touch by involving people in the project. However the real transformational shift happened when we made the dedication to a specific and tangible cause, rather than just the promotion of  a universal spiritual message.”

Download The All Seeing Boy and the Blue Sky of Happiness by Nick Kettles
To contact Nick Kettles

Amanda Seyderhelm
November 2009

Ursula K Le Guin’s review in Saturday’s Guardian newspaper, of Margaret Atwood’s new novel – The Year of the Flood, is worth reading purely for the quality of her writing, and critical analysis. That is, the quality of Le Guin’s writing and analysis.

As I studied the illustration in the review, I noticed it was by Clifford Harper. Something about the way in which the two women faced one another in the illustration, both standing on the rooftops of different buildings, perfectly illustrated the radical subject matter of this novel. These women are what Atwood calls The Gardeners, an eco-religious sect who farm rooftops.

Le Guin says: “Their hymnbook rhythms and Blakean dodges are appropriate to their sentiments, which aren’t as simple as they might seem at first:

But Man alone seeks Vengefulness,
And writes his abstact Laws on stone;
For this false Justice he has made,
He tortures limb and crushes bone.
Is this the image of a god?
My tooth for yours, your eye for mine?
Oh, if Revenge did move the stars
Instead of Love, they would not shine.”

In an endnote in her book, Atwood invites us to hear these Gardeners’ hymns, which are printed about every third chapter, and sung on her websites, and to use them “for amateur devotional or environmental purposes”.

I looked up Clifford Harper’s website, and found there just a stunning summary and collection of these radical black and white illustrations, which speak, as he says, louder than words.

http://www.agraphia.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/29/margaret-atwood-year-of-flood

In my confessions of a cancer survivor post I referred to the time when I began writing again in a writing group. This process felt like picking up the dropped threads of my life. The weekly writing group enabled me to restitch my wounds, a bit like a new tapestry.

I was reminded of this again yesterday when I visited The Draycott Festival in Draycott, Derbyshire. Homes, gardens, businesses and public places were transformed into exhibition, workshop and performance spaces, showcasing paintings, textiles, jewellery and sculptures. I was especially interested to see Alysn Midgelow-Marsden tapestries and Laura Mabbutt whose work consists wholly of natural fibres. The Festival is in its fourth year and is organised by Alysn Midgelow-Marsden who owns The Beetroot Tree in Draycott.

The Beetroot Tree is a space offering workshops in different mediums, which is much more than art and craft as therapy. It’s the remaking of something new, the creation of a new vessel, reshaping, remodelling, rethreading. Of course it helps to have a space like The Beetroot Tree to create inside. This is a Jacobean barn which Alysn and her husband have sympathetically converted into a gallery space, cafe and workshop studio. At the back there is a tiny shop which stocks most of the tools and materials to create the arts and crafts exhibited in the gallery. With wooden floors, tempting muffins and teas in the cafe, and a pretty garden with iron sculptures, this is a special place to enjoy and envy – at least if you are like me, who dreams of creating such a place! Congratulations Alysn for building your vision.

I recommend Alysn’s book The Continuous Thread of Revelation in which she explores the myriad possibilities of textiles.

I wrote a story yesterday about my friend Judy who has been diagnosed with a recurrence of her breast cancer, and how sad I am about this. In writing this, something profound happened. Not only did it tip me into my own grief about the recurrence I had four and a half years ago, but judging by some of the comments I received on Hub Pages, people appreciated my honesty, it touched a nerve. There are plenty of resources on this hub if you or someone you know is going through this.

I want to thank and acknowledge my friend Birte Edwards who encouraged me to write this story and blog about it, and has asked me when she can see my paintings live as the flat screen doesn’t do them justice! Well Birte I’m going to work on that.

I was sharing this with her during our weekly Mastermind group. We are both members of a very special online community called WEST, which stands for World Entrepreneurial Success Training. Nothing is off limits in this group and one of the many benefits I get from being part of this community is the chance to brainstorm and get my questions answered by experts who have become friends.

Thanks to everyone for your encouragement and comments.

This video is a supplemental intro to the original post you can find on this blog http://apaintingartist.com/blog/?p=67