Ask the Author: H Raven Rose
Answered Questions (11)
H Raven Rose
After a lifetime of ruthless oppression, Orwellian surveillance, electronic harassment, and bombardment with electromagnetic (EM) activity and extremely low frequency (ELF) waves, despite my increasing physiological disorders and emotional pain, I forgave and forgot everything, and was happy, finally, well and truly happy. Then the covert mind tech researchers were forced to disclose their human behavior regulation project to all involuntary research subjects.
H Raven Rose
If I could travel to any fictional book world, I would go to the locations in the Madeleine L'Engle Time Quintet starting with the settings of A Wrinkle in Time. Thus, I'd travel by tesseract to the Light-and-Love planet Uriel, then visit the "Happy Medium," then go to the dark planet of Camazotz. I'd trip along, time-traveling as necessary, to visit all of the locations, and some of the beings, in each of the fictional worlds.
H Raven Rose
I read according to what magnetises me or what synchronistically shows up in my external reality. For fiction, my current tastes run to reading and re-reading Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Pohl, and Michel Faber. However, this summer I start a screenwriting practice-led research PhD in Swansea, Wales, UK. Being in grad school means that I'll be reading a lot more non-fiction. I'll be writing a screenplay about the first colony on Mars. I expect to be reading many non-fiction science books such as 'The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must' and Buzz Aldrin's 'Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration' as well as reading 'Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet.' As my research involves considering creative writing and creativity in the context of the human brain, brain waves states, I'll be reading non-fiction books related to those topics as well. Happy summer beach reading!
H Raven Rose
The most luminous mystery for each of us is the discovery of our life meaning and Soul purpose. We each awaken into a story-puzzle. Our mesmerizing story is a seven-direction vibrating living, breathing experience. And somewhere, in that story, if the consciousness chooses to seek it, is the meaning and purpose of one's current life. Essential to learn is how we may discover ecstatic Soul expression on our life journey. I have spent much time pondering my hero/heroine's journey and the mythic and Soul meaning of my life and lives. I have no unsolved secret or mystery that would necessarily make a good book plot. What I do have are multiple series of quite mysterious and unlikely circumstances and events. These have manifested in my reality over decades. Any of those various events series has lead me to newality. The newality offered new reality understandings, a glimmer of self-awareness, or solutions to questions asked of the Anima Mundi | World Soul. There are through-lines, joy, sorrow, and solace, in those series of events. Any of those molecular reality peculiar circumstance unfoldings, my actions or inactions, what happened when and what next, might lend themselves to a satisfying book plot.
H Raven Rose
'There are no real endings on this earth, only discoveries.' ~Robert Samuel Peek, 'To Dance with the White Dog'
In truth, I favor solo protagonist led stories, and their heroes, such as Ender from 'Ender's Game.' So choosing a favorite fiction couple (outside of Mimi and George Beresford II who fall in love in 'Mr. Psychic,' a book that I co-write with Dermot Davis) is not easy.
Upon reflection, I immediately thought of a fiction couple that I enjoy a great deal.
An eternal romantic, I love the story told—after her death—of the love between characters Sam Peek and his wife Cora in the book To Dance With the White Dog. I believe in committed monogamy as a shared heart, Soul, and life path, meaning romantic love as a tool for Soul growth evolution as taught by Dr. Barry and Joyce Vissell (sharedheart.org). Sam Peek and his beloved Cora exemplify both lifelong love and the potential for love to be sacred, numinous, and eternal.
In truth, I favor solo protagonist led stories, and their heroes, such as Ender from 'Ender's Game.' So choosing a favorite fiction couple (outside of Mimi and George Beresford II who fall in love in 'Mr. Psychic,' a book that I co-write with Dermot Davis) is not easy.
Upon reflection, I immediately thought of a fiction couple that I enjoy a great deal.
An eternal romantic, I love the story told—after her death—of the love between characters Sam Peek and his wife Cora in the book To Dance With the White Dog. I believe in committed monogamy as a shared heart, Soul, and life path, meaning romantic love as a tool for Soul growth evolution as taught by Dr. Barry and Joyce Vissell (sharedheart.org). Sam Peek and his beloved Cora exemplify both lifelong love and the potential for love to be sacred, numinous, and eternal.
H Raven Rose
I always knew, as a young child, that I would be a writer when I grew up. My mother says that when I was two I would happily pretend to read alongside her for hours (often holding the book upside down). As a girl, I read a book almost every day (I once got in trouble in math class for having a fiction book inside of my textbook, eek). I love to read both fiction and non-fiction, both modern and ancient texts, and feel that books saved my life as a child by offering me gorgeous and uplifting adventures. When I open a book, I enter a world. So, I don't know that I get inspired to write so much as it is part of my Soul path and for the longest while story ideas, characters, dialogue fragments, parts of plots, concepts that I want to explore in a story, have come to me nearly constantly (I've had to instruct my subconscious to focus on existing plots and minimize coming up with new ideas as I have so many ideas already that I may not be able to write them down in this lifetime). Additionally, since my 20s, I have gotten much training in writing (which I continue), and being a student of writing and reading frequently inspires me and facilitates my ability to shape ideas into specific types of content.
H Raven Rose
I often work on more than one project at once. Keep in mind that I have numerous projects in various stages of development as I sometimes let ideas simmer for a number of years (if not decades) as they sort of organically blossom. Also, sometimes I have a story structure or other creative issue, related to a particular incomplete story, and I often allow my unconscious to take its time manifesting and presenting the story solution. I currently have a tale called Mr. Raven in development. It is the story of a little boy who is dealing with terrible life circumstances (a parent lost to suicide, homelessness, and alcoholism in his family) all the while that he is coming to terms with his very special shamanic experience of reality. As of January 1, 2016, I am in Florida, so I have also begun more actively thinking about and writing the sequel to my sci-fi book, the story of an alien invasion from the DNA level, 'Bugocalypse' (as the series character Lacey travels from Los Angeles to Marianna in Jackson County, Florida in the second book). I had great fun on January 1 visiting Florida Caverns State Park where the father of my character Lacey is hiding out.
H Raven Rose
Aspiring writers will benefit from reading and writing as much as possible and doing, in my opine, much inner work. I spend a great deal of time alone and, although I consume much content (books, films, plays, and such), I have been willing to live quite simply in order to pursue my creative and spiritual passions and explore consciousness, philosophy, and reality, and cultivate my creativity. I have rarely, for long, done anything that kept me from being able to read and write as much as possible; I have tended to gravitate away from situations, people, and circumstances which would negatively affect my Spirit or creativity in order to avoid compromising my consciousness and ability to create. I advise aspiring writers to find a way to create a simple life that affords them the ability to read and write as much as possible; this could mean giving up almost everything (although not shirking responsibility to one's mate or children) in order to afford this type of freedom. My other advice is to plan for a long game with writing, it will take you a good 20-30 years to see periods of marked progress, visible improvement, in your writing. Lastly, as Ayn Rand stated, only the writer is qualified to critically judge their own work; we start where we are as writers and have a lifetime--however long we are each blessed to live--to ardently seek instruction, practice, and improvement in our writing ability.
H Raven Rose
I love this question! :) The best things about being a writer is the opportunity to align with my creativity and spirituality for a very specific intended outcome (to write books and screenplays and create other things). I am in love with creative, spiritual, and life flow, and being a writer has honed my sensitivity to whether or not I am in alignment with those abilities, processes, and energies. Also, a good writer cultivates their omniscient meta-view of the story world that they are creating; I find that cultivating my omniscient meta-view for characters and their world is conducive to facilitating and enhancing my own personal transformation work (psyche exploration, integration, and individuation). Certainly, I find thought and ideas to be valuable, including philosophy and other conceptual constructs and ways of relating to reality, and writing is a fine way to explore such experiences and things.
H Raven Rose
I used to have severe writer's block... it took me 8+ years to write my first feature screenplay. Part of my undergraduate thesis in screenwriting, through my degree program at Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, required research, so I studied alternative and traditional story development techniques for screenwriters (in the context of hemispheres of the brain) and did research in which tools might facilitate word flow. Related to that, I discovered that many tools from expressive arts, shamanism, and spirituality, and depth-psychology transformation activities, including inner child work, sub-personality work, Dr. Lucia Capacchione's CJEA non-dominant hand journalling and drawing (I completed her CJEA training program in 2002), psychosynthesis, gestalt, and more, are useful tools to access, process, and release writer's blocks. So, although writer's block is rare for me now, I still use the same tools that have always worked for me.
H Raven Rose
I'm a screenwriter, as well as author, and a number of horror script projects for other writers (those writing scripts who want script notes or editing from a trained and experienced screenwriter) came my way this year. I co-wrote a horror script and did some script notes and a line edit on other horror projects. I was horrified to see so many writers create projects that didn't honor the horror genre requirements (every story requires a certain structure to fulfill readers/viewers). I'd never written a straight horror project, like my most recent book 'Dread Zone,' yet many of my stories have horror elements. So I conceived of an idea about four girls on a road-trip gone wrong. I was reading 'Nausea' by Sartre at the time that the story idea was emerging, which affected my prose style and character development for the tale. The entire story came to mind quite rapidly, over about four days, though it took much longer to write. I wrote the screenplay first and then did the novel adaptation. It includes a character who experiences angels and the supernatural who is learning to trust her intuition. In 'Dread Zone,' her learning to trust her intuition saves her life.
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