Past Life Regressions

I am often asked about the hypnotic past life regressions that take place in my novel, Queen’s Gold. In the story, a man witnesses a past life where he found and then hid fabled Aztec gold. The story unfolds as he and others try to find the ancient treasure.

But that’s all fantasy, right?

In a word, no.

Past life regressions are very real and very powerful experiences. Unlike having a psychic tell you that you were Cleopatra or Napoleon (and why do they always pick famous historical people?), under hypnosis the past life unfolds in your own mind—you see it, hear it, feel it. You’re the one telling the hypnotist what you see. Actually people can experience the regression in a variety of ways depending on the mode, or sense, they use most. When I am hypnotized, I see the past life in my mind; others may hear it but not see, or simply feel it. I once hypnotized a woman who described the life to me in very clear detail, but after the session revealed that she didn’t “see” anything, but simply felt it all. Whatever modality the brain uses to review the past life, it still conducts the information to the person in a very real and compelling way.

What if you don’t believe in past lives?

Actually belief is not required. This seems to run counter to so much that we have been taught about spirituality, but it’s true. I’ve had clients who have told me flat out they don’t believe in reincarnation, others that they weren’t sure about it, but all were still been able to review past lives in order to understand issues at work in their current lives. For people who are (pardon the pun) dead-set against reincarnation, I tell them to simply view the past life as a metaphor. Applied to their issues in this manner, much like a dream, it can still tell them vast amounts about who they are and why they do what they do.

So how does hypnosis work?

Hypnosis is a very normal and natural altered state of consciousness, a state we all experience from time to time. Have you ever “zoned out” while watching TV? Or driven to work on “auto pilot?” That’s the same kind of altered state as hypnosis. Some misconceptions about hypnosis are that it’s a magical or eerie state, or that it feels very weird, but it’s actually very normal. Some people wonder if they’ve really been hypnotized at all (like my character in Queen’s Gold), just because it feels like such a normal state and they were expecting something otherworldly. The zombie-type states you see depicted in movies and on TV are pure fantasy. 

Induction is accomplished by the gentle use of my favorite things—words. Using only words, clients are invited to visualize a peaceful and restful place in their minds where they can relax and enjoy the experience. The old “vatch de vatch” technique is silly and unnecessary, if it was ever used at all. You just feel as if you are relaxing in a comfortable chair with your eyes closed. You’re conscious the entire time, aware of everything going on around you as well as what your subconscious is revealing to you. I liken it to watching TV in one room while a radio plays in another; you can shift your awareness back and forth between one (the present time) and the other (the past), concentrating on one but still aware of the other. 

There are several things that hypnosis is not.

It is not mind control. No one can force you to do anything you do not agree to. I found that out personally when a hypnotist asked me to describe a meeting in one of my past lives that I knew was leading to a sexual encounter. I simply told him I was not going to talk about it and we moved ahead to something less intimate. A respectful hypnotist will never push such an issue. Usually, if a hypnotist’s suggestion conflicts with a client’s value system, the client simply brings him- or herself up out of hypnosis; they just “wake up.” I always give my clients a “release mechanism” so they can bring themselves out quickly and easily anytime they feel a need to do that. They’re in complete control at all times. 

So what about those stage hypnotists who make people act like chickens? The “control factor” is still zero. Think about it: we’ve all seen or heard about those stage shows—we all have expectations about what happens there. Does anyone really think that if they volunteer to go on stage that the hypnotist will suggest they do something BRILLIANT? Anyone who volunteers is agreeing to play the part, whether they consciously admit it or not. For some, hypnosis (like alcohol) is a convenient “excuse” to act out and not take responsibility for their behavior, but in reality, no one is forcing them to do anything. 

But back to past life regressions …

People who have never experienced it are inclined to say, “Oh, your mind is just making that stuff up,” and that’s certainly a possibility. I’ve found, however, that when I try to guess what’s going to happen next in a regression, I am more often wrong than right. If I were making it up, wouldn’t I know what was going to happen? In addition, most people agree that they would not choose to fantasize about the incidents that come up. I kid my husband about the fact that he gets killed more than any other person I know. He’s had his throat slit, been clubbed to death, been stoned (literally), and been poisoned. I think if I were making this stuff up, I’d chose less traumatic ways to die.

And speaking of death, experiencing it in a past life regression is much easier and more peaceful than you might expect. I know death scares a lot of people to death (?), but in a regression passing over is usually a very simple and painless matter. As happens in my book, it can be done without pain and without emotion and reviewing it does not scar the present-day person. Actually, in my own experience, I’ve found that reliving past lives and deaths has actually taken away any fear I might have had.

And what about that part where people recognize each other from past lives?

That definitely happens. In all the past lives that I’ve reviewed and helped others to review, this scenario comes up quite often. It seems that we interact with important people in our lives over and over again. The relationships often change, as do the sexes, but the feelings can be constant and vivid. In my past lives, I’ve encountered many from my current life: my husband, my father, my grandmother, my daughter. When we “meet” someone like this in a past life, we are able to recognize them even though they don’t look the same. Apparently their essence, their soul, is visible to us behind the unfamiliar face.

 So is Queen’s Gold a true story? No; it’s pure fabrication.

With the exception of the past life regression. That’s as real as you can get.

Vanity Presses

In my last post, I discussed the rise of self-publishing and how the perception of it has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. Luckily it has morphed from the proverbial red-haired step-child into a respected and viable option for writers, often successful and even lucrative.

That’s the good news.

In my post, I talked a bit about vanity presses and how they worked in the olden days of traditional publishing. The bad news is, they have morphed also, and still prey on naïve and unsuspecting writers.

It used to be that you’d see an ad for Vantage Press in the back of every magazine ever sold. (I was surprised to find that they still exist, except now instead of a black and white ad, they have a slick webpage.) As I said in my last post, their game is that they get their money from you up front (VP’s webpage estimates between $5,000 and $25,000 to publish a book!), then have little incentive to promote your book. I suppose that if there are any aging millionaires out there who still haven’t learned to use a computer and/or the internet, this might be the way to go. For most of us, however, that kind of initial outlay is prohibitive.

Enter the new breed of vanity press.

Some years ago, I had a manuscript that I believed in yet hadn’t sold to a traditional publisher, so one day I got to searching on the internet and found a place that offered to publish my book—for free! What a deal! What could possibly be the downside of that? Without researching (major mistake), I submitted my pride and joy and they quickly accepted it.

PublishAmerica has lulled a great many writers into a false sense of euphoria by being so accommodating. For absolutely no charge (I believe they still send a crisp $1 bill as an honorary “advance”), they will proofread and edit your book, then turn it into a beautiful and saleable paperback. They will even send out announcements to all your friends and relatives, and of course you can always buy as many books as you’d like at a discount. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Guess again.

When I submitted my book, I was very confident that the story was tight, clean and ready to go, so I declined the editing service. When I proofed the book, I realized that they had put a disclaimer on the publishing page saying that I had refused editing and that the book was being printed verbatim as submitted by the author, or in other words, they were absolving themselves of any editing miscues. Fair enough, I suppose, although I didn’t care for proclamation. As it turns out, I was actually happy that I’d gone that route. After the fact, when I began doing more research that I should have done ahead of time, I read many complaints about their “editing” service. It seemed to consist entirely of running a spell-check of the manuscript, sometimes even changing words the spell-check found questionable—even changing names! I read that many writers found the “editing” to not only be of little value, but actually detrimental to their story. I was glad I didn’t have to deal with that.

While I was still operating under the naïve bliss of my good fortune, I was contacted by a rep who helped me with the cover. Luckily I already had a good idea of what I wanted for the cover, and they were very willing to go with my design. That part, at least, went well.

Next thing was the announcements. I happily sent in a list of every contact I could think of—friends, family, acquaintances. I figured any announcement had to be fairly benign, right?

Wrong.

The announcement included an offer of an advance discount to buy my book, the retail price of which had been set at $26.95! For a 204-page paperback! Clearly three times what it should have been. Oh, but luckily my friends and family had the chance to buy it at the steal price of only $16.95! Only twice as much as it should have been! What a gonga.

Luckily, only one person bit on this. I’d be embarrassed if more people had paid that price for the book. But of course with a retail price of $26.95, the book was not flying off the shelves in any way. As a matter of fact, I am hard-pressed to remember receiving any royalties at all from PublishAmerica, although granted this was many years ago. If I did get any, they were paltry.

But now that the book was published and available, now the real marketing began—selling to ME, the author. All of PA’s selling efforts come from this—weekly e-mails to the authors announcing this or that special or sale and how they can buy their books at a discount. Stock up now! Buy 50 and get 25 free! So now you can see how we’re slipping back to that moldering-boxes-in-the-garage phase, just like vanity presses produced decades ago. Same dog-and-pony show, different name.

In the meantime, I re-read my book and was aghast to find a handful of typos. I verified that they were in my original file and yes, they were. My fault. I really thought I had gone through the book with a fine-toothed comb, but obviously my helpful brain showed me what it thought I wanted to see, not what I needed to see. I sent an e-mail to PA’s customer service asking if I could correct these mistakes. I got a rather offended response saying, well, yes, I could correct the book, but only if I signed in blood promising that I would NEVER, EVER ask for any more changes to the book—EVER! That was fine with me, and I happily sent a corrected file.

Not long after that, I got an e-mail that the corrected book was available for purchase. I ordered a box, eager to be able to hand out a perfect book instead of the flawed first rendition. Imagine my shock when I checked the new books and found they had every one of the typos still intact!

Grrrr. E-mails flew, complete with the original one saying the book was fixed and ready for sale. I got a replacement box and checked immediately. Yes, typos fixed. Ok, but now I’ve got another box of unacceptable books to store in the garage along with the original box I bought.

*sigh*

Luckily it wasn’t too many years before I caught on to the self-publishing options now available. After publishing one or two unsold manuscripts through Create Space and being thrilled with the process, I was on a roll. I began the process of retrieving my rights for the older books of mine that had gone out of print or were no longer being promoted by their traditional publishers. After the fiasco with PA, I was particularly happy with Create Space’s level of cost of production, from which I could set a retail price that was patently affordable.

Finally, with several books under my belt, I sent an e-mail to PA saying I wanted my rights back. I told them I would NEVER buy another book from them (and obviously no one else was, either, at that price), so they might as well surrender my rights to me. Our contract was for 7 years and I was still a few years short of that, which they pointedly reminded me. I reiterated that they would most likely never sell another book and so recouping their “costs” was just not going to happen. They finally relented and agreed to sell my rights back to me—for an “administration fee” of $99.

At this point, cutting all ties to them was worth the price.

So the moral of the story is—do your research. There are a lot of options out there for writers; just do very diligent research on the companies offering their services. Particularly search the forums where writers talk about their experiences. Just reading the “what authors are saying” page on a company’s website is not enough. There’s a site called Predators and Editors that is excellent on this subject. Likewise, there is an excellent site for indie writers about more trustworthy companies.

There are some very good companies out there (Create Space, Lightning Source) and there are also some very bad ones. Keep in mind that the cost of printing these days is very cheap compared to yesteryear, and you should never have to pay thousands or even hundreds of dollars to be published. As a matter of fact, through Create Space you can literally—and I mean literally—publish for about $10 if you’re in the US. This is the cost of a proof and shipping (depending, of course, on how many pages your book is).

I don't know about you, but this does not seem like rocket surgery to me. Spend upwards of $25,000 to have someone else publish your book, or do it yourself for $10?

You decide.

The Pariah of Self-Publishing: NOT!

I follow a lot of writer’s forums online (LinkedIn, Goodreads, etc.) and there’s been a lot of debate over self-publishing vs. traditional publishing. Almost every day a newbie or wannabe author/writer will ask about the pros and cons, and all the old mythology immediately starts to surface. Those of us who have already self-published (and some quite successfully, thank you) are quick to point out the benefits, but there are always a few (often with hidden agendas) who pooh-pooh self-publishing and offer up all the old stereotypes.

I am happy to report that those stereotypes, with a few exceptions, are dead.

It used to be that the only reputable way to get published was traditional; that means getting an agent, having said agent send out your manuscript (all 40 pounds of it) to various publishers on either coast, waiting, waiting, waiting, getting back non-informational reject letters (“doesn’t fit our brand; best of luck”), and repeat ad infinitum (or ad nauseum). If a writer wanted to do anything other than this carved-in-stone formula, they would have to go to what was then called a “vanity press.” Vanity press has somewhat gone the way of the dodo, but it does still exist in slightly different forms. More on that later. Essentially a vanity press would print anything you asked them to, if you were willing to pay their price. This was very often in the thousands of dollars and came with much ego-stroking and promises of fame and fortune. The reality was often heart-breakingly disappointing.

The main problem with a vanity press was that they had their money up front. Once they did, there was no incentive for them to do anything to promote your book. You paid them to print it and they did; then you ended up with an empty bank account and countless boxes of books in your garage that you were left to sell or promote however you could figure that out. They had your money; you had your tarnished, dust-gathering dream.

Anyone who knew anything about publishing knew that if you weren’t published traditionally, by a recognized house, you were probably a hack, so any book with a vanity press brand was immediately pigeon-holed as crap. Some have even said such authors became pariahs, which may be true. It was as if once you had succumbed to the lure of the sham, you were branded a fool and no worthwhile publisher would even glance your way. You were dead in the water.

That was in the old days.

Over the last 20 years, publishing has undergone a huge transformation. For some reason (unknown to me) the industry began to pull back into a very fearful and conservative replica of itself. Instead of working to discover and develop the next up-and-coming brilliant author, publishing houses fixated on only proven authors and instant best-sellers. Instead of taking a chance on undiscovered genius, houses banked on household names and sure blockbusters. Uncovering and developing rough talent (of which there is never a shortage) lost out to almost assured (remember Sarah Palin’s book?) million-sellers. A never before published author had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anywhere with the big houses.

Luckily, the cavalry was appearing on a distant ridge.

The large publishers’ reluctance to take a chance on new authors left a huge void in the writing world, but it wasn’t long before forward-thinking entrepreneurs were popping up to fill that gap. Small presses began appearing all across the country and the world. They didn’t need to have a New York address or populate a 5-story building in Manhattan. Many were small mom-and-pop businesses, started on a shoestring and willing to consider unknowns. At the same time, the internet was ushering in author’s showcase sites where writers could put up a sample of their writing and publishers, editors and agents could peruse at their leisure. It was a match made in heaven.

Then everything changed – again.

Digital printing, print-on-demand (POD) and the immediate transfer of data over the internet spawned the new and now wildly successful industry of self-publishing. Now for the first time, writers could publish their own works easily, affordably, and produce a quality product which paid for itself as readers ordered books. There was no huge cash outlay, there was no huge inventory to warehouse, no huge gamble to take. The old, slow, expensive process of printing, warehousing and shipping large quantities of heavy tomes was replaced by a sleek, cheap and efficient process that brought almost instant results.

The shackles had been thrown off.

So if self-publishing is so great, why does the debate rage on?

From my point of view, people who argue against self-publishing either have their own agendas or they are laboring under old stone-chiseled misconceptions. Here are a few of the arguments you’ll hear:

Self-published books are badly written and are rife with spelling errors, typos and bad grammar. Partly true. People are different and of course some writers may not have the best command of the language and/or believe they don’t need an editor or proofreader. Most, however, have a good understanding of their own limitations and are not shy about calling on outside help to polish their book. We writers are artists; we are creators and when we create a story, we want it to be the best it can be. This argument is most often promoted by (you guessed it) people who work as editors.

People who self-publish are just lazy and impatient and are not willing to do the work or to wait for a traditional publisher to accept them. There are some calcified brains who honestly think that self-publishing is just too easy and that “fact,” in and of itself, is a good argument against it. What they’re not considering is that some authors may have been working on their book for many years and may have spent many more years shopping it to every agent and publishing house they could find, only to be passed over again and again. Most writers are not cranking out a book every three months, slapping a cover on it and pronouncing it done. All the writers I know take their time, write their best and polish, polish, polish until they feel they have an interesting, satisfying story.

Self-published authors become “unpublishable” and are pariahs in the industry. False. By now everyone knows the story of the Celestine Prophecy, how it was self-published but became a huge seller and was picked up by a traditional publishing house. It’s not the only one, just the most famous. Self-publishing does not preclude being traditionally published. As for being branded a pariah, let me ask a question. Last time you bought a book, did you look at who published it? If you did, were you aware if the company was a self-publishing company or not? And if you were, did it influence your decision to buy or not buy that book? I’m guessing the answer to those questions is most likely no. We don’t buy a book according to who published it. We buy books because we want to read the story. We don’t buy an author because of who published their book; we buy them because we like their style and story-telling.

People who self-publish produce inferior books. False. Self-published books these days are quality products with crisp printing and beautiful and eye-catching covers. I would challenge anyone to pick up a self-published book and a traditionally published book and compare them. I doubt they’d find any differences. In one of the online forums, there was actually a guy arguing for offset printing (which just happened to be his business), saying it was still cheaper per unit price—but of course that’s only if you order a run of 5,000 books or so. Not only did this guy have his own agenda but he was advising writers to continue using an outdated and antiquated form of publishing that is expensive, bulky and unnecessary.

What’s really too bad about all this bull is that most of these shrill voices (1) have little or no real experience with the self-publishing process itself and (2) they promote themselves as experts, condescending to advise the lowly unpublished authors about the “truth” of self-publishing. They bank on their criticism and know-it-all manner to lead the newbie by the nose away from self-publishing and (ironically) toward whatever outdated method their business is based on. I find these tactics reprehensible.

Luckily, so do hundreds and thousands of my fellow self-publishers. Take a look at some of these online forums and you’ll see these sharks surface now and again, starting off with a very “helpful” post that includes some of the bashing above. Then watch the fun. My fellow self-publishers don’t suffer these sharks gladly. They zero in, tagging the false comments, rebutting with facts, ripping apart the advice to harken back to the old ways (“Ignore that man behind that curtain!”). It usually doesn’t take too many zinging comments before the shark turns tail to go look for more placid waters to hunt in.

Writers have discovered that they have the power.

And they like it.

Next time: The Evolution of Vanity Press