This is week 20.  The blog hop requires me to answer some questions about my book and then I’ll list the next person to blog at the end.  Let’s get started.

1) What is the working title of your book?  Duran Duran, Leo, and the Universe

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?  I was quite inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” and then some phenomenal events happened in my life that felt like the Universe was really paying attention.  Even though I’ve never written anything in my life before, I felt the words literally leaping out of me and onto the page.  I felt like my story really could help others and that kept me going.

3) What genre does your book fall under?  Mainly for adults interested in enlightenment, humor, life philosophy, New Age, Meditation, intriguing and true stories, memoirs, non-fiction and Spiritual books.

4) Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?  I would love for Reese Whitherspoon to play me, Eva Mendes to play my best friend, and Ben Affleck to play my husband.  I’m hoping the actual movie stars we met in my true story would be in the movie, too- like Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo DiCaprio!

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?  A spiritual awakening through dreamy celebrity encounters that led to an awareness of our connectedness to the Universe and to each other.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?  It was self-published, although I’m looking into regular publishers.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?  Two years.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?  Eat, Pray, Love comes the closest.

9) What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?  I wrote about some health alternatives like energy work that turned into magical experiences for me and are interesting to learn about.  It’s amazing how mystical our bodies truly are.

Look for Twilight to talk about her work next.  I’ll keep you posted.

We go through our lives not realizing the impact that every thought, desire and action really responds like “The Butterfly Effect”.  You know, the idea of how the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings can cause hurricanes on the other side of the world- or something like that.  (From Wikipedia- “In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane’s formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks before.”)  Also from Wikipedia- “The idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events first appears in “A Sound of Thunder“, a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel.” ( RIP this week, Ray Bradbury.)

Another theory that is along these same lines is the Law of Attraction (from Wikipedia- The law of attraction is a belief or theory, that “like attracts like,” and that by focusing on positive or negative thoughts, one can bring about positive or negative results.)  In other words, what you think about, you bring about.

After writing about the experiences in my book, I’ve come to really believe that we are all truly connected in magical, intricate ways.  When I look at all the good, the bad, and the ugly of all that happened to me, it makes a new kind of sense that everything happens for a reason.  If I hadn’t gone through that, then this wouldn’t have happened.  I wouldn’t have learned to trust more in myself, rely more on myself and just believe, as I do now, that everything happens to teach us an important lesson.   Because, we are all in a web, connected to each other-affecting each other on levels that just can’t be fully explained in this life.

Just something to think about, this Happy Saturday!  Please comment on anything that strikes you!

Love and light,

Jill