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Over the last eight years I've learned that it's possible to transform your life, whether it be your emotional outlook or career path. It's never too late to transform your life into what you've always dreamed about.
I allowed myself for years to get pigeoned holed in my career path and not exploring my deepest desire to become an author. Sure I remain working in corporate America (a girl has got to eat), but I've allowed myself to concentrate on writing time and networking over the last eight years. It's hard work crafting a manuscript, submitting, connecting with the gatekeepers of the slush pile and hoping your writing will resonate with an agent, editor, or publisher. But oh so worth it, when you hearing an amazing YES, we'd like to publish your manuscript!
It's never too late to make that transformation in your life that will make your heart and soul sing! I dare you, if there is something you've been yearning to do... such as... learning how to play a musical instrument, paint, sing or a new career path....the sky is the limit. Take the time to seek out experts for advice, weigh your options and spread your wings. You never know what will bloom!
I'm proud to say my fifth children's book is now with the amazingly talented illustrator, Jack Foster and thanks to Guardian Angel Publisher, Lynda Burch for giving me a chance. I'm sitting on pins and needles waiting to see the illustrations and how Jack will make the story come alive.
Three cheers for your blossoming transformation!
I'd enjoy hearing how you have transformed your life through the years!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Best wishes, Donna M. McDine Multi Award-winning Children's Author
A Sandy Grave ~ January 2014 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ 2014 Purple Dragonfly 1st Place Picture Books 6+, Story Monster Approved, Beach Book Festival Honorable Mention 2014, Reader's Favorite Five Star Review
Powder Monkey ~ May 2013 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ Story Monster Approved and Reader's Favorite Five Star Review
Hockey Agony ~ January 2013 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ New England Book Festival Honorable Mention 2014, Story Monster Approved and Reader's Favorite Five Star Review
The Golden Pathway ~ August 2010 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ Literary Classics Silver Award and Seal of Approval, Readers Favorite 2012 International Book Awards Honorable Mention and Dan Poynter's Global e-Book Awards Finalist
0 Comments on Blogging from A-Z 2015 Challenge - Transformation as of 4/23/2015 8:19:00 AM
Ever wanted to change a behavior or habit in your own life? Most of us have tried. And failed. Or, we made modest gains at best. Here’s my story of a small change that made a big difference. Just over two years ago, I decided, at the ripe old age of 55, that it was time to begin exercising.
Imagine that you have a one-time-only chance to become a vampire. With one swift, painless bite, you’ll be permanently transformed into an elegant and fabulous creature of the night. As a member of the Undead, your life will be completely different. You’ll experience a range of intense new sense experiences, you’ll gain immortal strength, speed and power, and you’ll look fantastic in everything you wear. You’ll also need to drink the blood of humanely farmed animals (but not human blood), avoid sunlight, and sleep in a coffin.
Now, suppose that all of your friends, people whose interests, views and lives were similar to yours, have already decided to become vampires. And all of them tell you that they love it. They encourage you to become a vampire too, saying things like: “I’d never go back, even if I could. Life has meaning and a sense of purpose now that it never had when I was human. It’s amazing! But I can’t really explain it to you, a mere human. You’ll have to become a vampire to know what it’s like.”
In this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice about what to do? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to become a vampire until you become one. The experience of becoming a vampire is transformative. What I mean by this is that it is an experience that is both radically epistemically new, such that you have to have it in order to know what it will be like for you, and moreover, will change your core personal preferences.
“You’ll have to become a vampire to know what it’s like”
So you can’t rationally choose to become a vampire, but nor can you rationally choose to not become one, if you want to choose based on what you think it would be like to live your life as a vampire. This is because you can’t possibly know what it would be like before you try it. And you can’t possibly know what you’d be missing if you didn’t.
We don’t normally have to consider the choice to become Undead, but the structure of this example generalizes, and this makes trouble for a widely assumed story about how we should make momentous, life-changing choices for ourselves. The story is based on the assumption that, in modern western society, the ideal rational agent is supposed to charge of her own destiny, mapping out the subjective future she hopes to realize by rationally evaluating her options from her authentic, personal point of view. In other words, when we approach major life decisions, we are supposed to introspect on our past experiences and our current desires about what we want our futures to be like in order to guide us in determining our future selves. But if a big life choice is transformative, you can’t know what your future will be like, at least, not in the deeply relevant way that you want to know about it, until you’ve actually undergone the life experience.
Transformative experience cases are special kinds of cases where important ordinary approaches that people try to use to make better decisions, such as making better generalizations based on past experiences, or educating themselves to better evaluate and recognize their true desires or preferences, simply don’t apply. So transformative experience cases are not just cases involving our uncertainty about certain sorts of future experiences. They are special kinds of cases that focus on a distinctive kind of ‘unknowability’—certain important and distinctive values of the lived experiences in our possible futures are fundamentally first-personally unknowable. The problems with knowing what it will be like to undergo life experiences that will transform you can challenge the very coherence of the ordinary way to approach major decisions.
‘Vampire Children,’ by. Shawn Allen. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr
Moreover, the problem with these kinds of choices isn’t just with the unknowability of your future. Transformative experience cases also raise a distinctive kind of decision-theoretic problem for these decisions made for our future selves. Recall the vampire case I started with. The problem here is that, before you change, you are supposed to perform a simulation of how you’d respond to the experience in order to decide whether to change. But the trouble is, who you are changes as you become a vampire.
Think about it: before you become a vampire, you should assess the decision as a human. But you can’t imaginatively put yourself in the shoes of the vampire you will become and imaginatively assess what that future lived experience will be. And, after you have become a vampire, you’ve changed, such that your assessment of your decision now is different from the assessment you made as a human. So the question is, which assessment is the better one? Which view should determine who you become? The view you have when you are human? Or the one you have when you are a vampire.
The questions I’ve been raising here focus on the fictional case of the choice to be come a vampire. But many real-life experiences and the decisions they involve have the very same structure, such as the choice to have one’s first child. In fact, in many ways, the choice to become a parent is just like the choice to become a vampire! (You won’t have to drink any blood, but you will undergo a major transition, and life will never be the same again.)
In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. If that’s right, then for many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it. In the end, it may be that the most rational response to this situation is to change the way we frame these big decisions: instead of choosing based on what we think our futures will be like, we should choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become.
Follow the glittery line that runs through this picture book and turns itself into all kinds of things: the waves above an octopus, the veins in a leaf, the wrappings curling around a mummy, and the trapping threads of a spiderweb...
Also try: Squiggle The dot Follow the Line Sparkle and Spin Color of his own Not a box Alpha beasties Little green
I enjoyed this interesting essay about YA spec fic and YA bodies by Karen Healey in Strange Horizons. [Warning: It contains spoilers, though she does alert the reader first.] It addresses a specific kind of transformation and gets at one reason YA spec fic may be so popular with its primary audience.
And it got me thinking. People of all ages are nearly always in some state of change — whether it’s moving from kindergarten to your first real “grade” — or getting used to the impacts of arthritis. Maybe that’s why most fiction these days must have a character arc. (This has not always been true — in some eras, for instance, didactic literature and drama was completely accepted. In such works, the point was not a transformation in a character but the attempt to cause a transformation in the reader or audience… to persuade them to a certain view or behavior. And classic Greek literature is often based on the idea that in crucial ways, people can’t and don’t change — that old fatal flaw business.)
So are we in a transformation-oriented time and/or culture? (An impact of the pace of technological change, perhaps? Or…?)
And what other major life transformations, besides puberty, do you spy frequently explored in spec fic (even if in a veiled or metaphorical way)?
– Joni, who isn’t keen on her own body’s current transformations, which have nothing to do with puberty
Posted in Joni Sensel Tagged: transformation
5 Comments on Transformations, last added: 12/25/2009
“So are we in a transformation-oriented time and/or culture?”
Ha! This made me chuckle. A certain magazine aimed at women born prior to 1970 has built their whole platform around the theme–Reinvention!
Parker Peevyhouse said, on 11/28/2009 9:50:00 AM
Ha! You gotta love Greek drama with its fatalistic fun.
I love when books explore the point when a young person takes a new view of morality–a more complex view. I suppose that’s included in the transformation to adulthood.
Laurie Thompson said, on 11/30/2009 5:53:00 PM
“So are we in a transformation-oriented time and/or culture?”
Um, did you miss the election? CHANGE is where it’s at, or at least it was last year.
More seriously, though, yes, it does feel like we’re in a more transformation-oriented culture right now. Apathy is down, activism is up. Scary new threats (and old ones, too) are getting heaps of media attention (and sensationalism). It’s not cool to not care about something–everyone seems to have a cause. Whether you fervently desire change or desperately wish to avoid it, change is something that’s on all of our minds. And with the power of global social media, individuals can have more of an effect on their issue of choice than ever before. With all that going on, why would we want to read about somebody standing still?
I’ve also heard it said that this is the key difference between commercial fiction vs. literary. Commercial fiction is about the belief that people can (and must) change themselves and the world around them. Literary fiction is about characters coming to terms with their desperate, and ultimately hopeless, struggles to really change anything at all. I think the first is a little more hopeful and lots more entertaining, which is probably why commercial fiction sells.
Joni Sensel said, on 11/30/2009 8:46:00 PM
I actually think this country’s obsession with change goes WAY back beyond the current times, and is part of our founding theme — the pilgrims CAME here for change; the westward expansion was all about change (and conquering is a big change); our youth culture celebrates change, not stability or reliability or experience; and our lack of value of historic buildings or other structures (compared to Europe, anyway) is another example — “knock it down and start fresh” is sort of the US motto in so many ways.
I think I’ll do some followup post to this one, because I want to keep thinking about it (and hope somebody else will, too).
Laurie Thompson said, on 12/3/2009 10:03:00 AM
Joni,
I think you’re absolutely right that this country was built on change and it’s a running theme throughout our history, but… I also think that it’s become a singularly divisive one in recent times. The current political divide seems to revolve around it (maybe it always has–I can only directly observe the times I’m living in). One faction defends the status quo and fights to resist change by drawing on nationalism, “This is the greatest country in the world–let’s not mess it up!” The other faction seeks to continually improve on a good thing, even if it means taking your lumps and learning some hard, and potentially painful lessons. As you know, I’m firmly in the second faction, but I can certainly understand the viewpoint of the first. Change is always risky, and it’s human nature to fear what what we don’t know. That’s, personally, why I like to read about characters confronting it and coming out the other side with some measure of success.
“So are we in a transformation-oriented time and/or culture?”
Ha! This made me chuckle. A certain magazine aimed at women born prior to 1970 has built their whole platform around the theme–Reinvention!
Ha! You gotta love Greek drama with its fatalistic fun.
I love when books explore the point when a young person takes a new view of morality–a more complex view. I suppose that’s included in the transformation to adulthood.
“So are we in a transformation-oriented time and/or culture?”
Um, did you miss the election? CHANGE is where it’s at, or at least it was last year.
More seriously, though, yes, it does feel like we’re in a more transformation-oriented culture right now. Apathy is down, activism is up. Scary new threats (and old ones, too) are getting heaps of media attention (and sensationalism). It’s not cool to not care about something–everyone seems to have a cause. Whether you fervently desire change or desperately wish to avoid it, change is something that’s on all of our minds. And with the power of global social media, individuals can have more of an effect on their issue of choice than ever before. With all that going on, why would we want to read about somebody standing still?
I’ve also heard it said that this is the key difference between commercial fiction vs. literary. Commercial fiction is about the belief that people can (and must) change themselves and the world around them. Literary fiction is about characters coming to terms with their desperate, and ultimately hopeless, struggles to really change anything at all. I think the first is a little more hopeful and lots more entertaining, which is probably why commercial fiction sells.
I actually think this country’s obsession with change goes WAY back beyond the current times, and is part of our founding theme — the pilgrims CAME here for change; the westward expansion was all about change (and conquering is a big change); our youth culture celebrates change, not stability or reliability or experience; and our lack of value of historic buildings or other structures (compared to Europe, anyway) is another example — “knock it down and start fresh” is sort of the US motto in so many ways.
I think I’ll do some followup post to this one, because I want to keep thinking about it (and hope somebody else will, too).
Joni,
I think you’re absolutely right that this country was built on change and it’s a running theme throughout our history, but… I also think that it’s become a singularly divisive one in recent times. The current political divide seems to revolve around it (maybe it always has–I can only directly observe the times I’m living in). One faction defends the status quo and fights to resist change by drawing on nationalism, “This is the greatest country in the world–let’s not mess it up!” The other faction seeks to continually improve on a good thing, even if it means taking your lumps and learning some hard, and potentially painful lessons. As you know, I’m firmly in the second faction, but I can certainly understand the viewpoint of the first. Change is always risky, and it’s human nature to fear what what we don’t know. That’s, personally, why I like to read about characters confronting it and coming out the other side with some measure of success.