The best ideas seem to come while the conscious mind is engaged in mundane tasks or has gone offline for a moment or an hour.  Why is that?

Well, here’s another truism that people love to toss around.  We’re told that we only use 10% of our brains’ capacities.  The presumption is that if only we were able to tap into the other 90%, we would all accomplish feats of astonishing magnitude.  (Personally, I doubt it.  Most people would probably just do more crosswords and sudoku puzzles.)  Do you honestly imagine that nine-tenths of that organ in your head is doing absolutely nothing the whole time you are engaged in trimming your nails, driving a car, making a grocery list?  How is it, then, that so many people find it so difficult to turn their minds off?

The problem is not inactivity but undirected activity.  What if I could show you the switches to throw that would direct your unconscious mind to seek out and find the solutions you need to make your writing time more productive, to put you in the middle of your own creative flow, instead of sniping at your best efforts?

Suppose you need to understand what truly drives your protagonist to behave in a particular way.  Imagine having total access to the mind of every character in a story—not in order to manipulate your plot but to understand at the deepest possible level what your story is and where it needs to go.  And to go there unerringly, authentically, with passion and confidence.

The problem with the conscious mind is that it can only really pay close attention to one thing at a time.  And you simply can’t write a cohesive work of fiction that way.  Your protagonist’s private ambitions have to mesh with your plotline in such a way as to create a believable and dynamic tension in the hearts and minds of your readers.  Every line of dialogue in your novel has to do a dozen things at once to be effective, and you simply cannot hold every intention that you need to fulfill in consciousness simultaneously.

Chances are, at one time or another, you have successfully programmed your mind to handle all the tasks it needs to perform in order to create a story—or at least a scene.  So you know that it’s possible—for you, personally—to do it again.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t bother to call yourself (even with the greatest trepidation and self-doubt) a writer.  It would never have occurred to you in the first place to try to create a work of fiction.

So somewhere within you, hidden in the clutter of your DNA or in the lessons of your early childhood development, you have the code snippet for each writerly task that you need to perform.  The problem is getting that program to run when you need it to, getting it to handle the right tasks at the right time.   This is doable.  It is absolutely something you can learn.  There are many courses available for training the mind to focus on specific, goal-oriented tasks; however, most of them are geared to business applications like boosting sales, enhancing productivity in the workplace, or finding creative solutions to marketing and distribution challenges…

Not exactly the stuff of fantasy.

As a writer, I have found the techniques behind this kind of mental programming fascinating, applicable and full of promise, even though the specific language and focus has always been a little to the right of where I need my own mind to go.  Intriguingly, the holistic brain-mind techniques employed by such courses tend to mimick, reinvent, or retool the creative processes that writers and other artists have relied on for centuries, adapting them to business, education and training, or other more generalized and often more mundane applications instead.

The creative process remains elusive by definition.  Its nature is to walk through the walls of its own house, to color its blueprints yellow-orange and to test psychological hypotheses on corpses and newborns interchangeably, if that’s what it takes to get a story told.  The muse may be imperious, impervious to your pleas for attention, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t be seduced, that she doesn’t, in fact, want to be romanced.  It doesn’t mean that you have to wait for inspiration to strike, when you have within you the power to call down lightning.

You do have that power.

Isn't it time you learned how to use it reliably in the creation of your own fictions?

The Dragon Reveries is a series of guided meditations that lead you step-by-step into a state of the most productive reverie you have ever experienced.  You will be taken to a place deep within, from which you will direct your own levels of mind to create living, breathing characters with real fears, ambitions, desires and complicated relationships that are so fundamental to good fiction.  You will discover the organic structure of your novel, short-story or any other form and how it is driven by the specific interactions of those characters in an integrated and cohesive world of magic—or of hard-edged realism, if that’s what you require.  You will create lush, sensual environments laden with the power of honest emotion and compelling drama.  You will write the best, most original fiction of your life.  If you are a published novelist, you will become a better, more publishable novelist.  If you’ve never finished a first draft, you will find the power and motivation to get from beginning to end of manuscript after manuscript.

I am interested in connecting with the greatness that is in you now, with the foment of a revolution in the way you approach your craft.  Whether you write heroic, swash-buckling epics or gentler fantasies where horses wish for beggars to ride them, from slick urban grit to pastoral Wiccan dreams, from paranormal romance to erotic horror—anything at all within the spectrum of fantasy and beyond—you will find that your path follows the sinuous trail laid down in The Dragon Reveries.

• There are 18 reveries in all.  In the very first one, you will become acquainted with the process of reverie itself, laying a new interior foundation for your own work as a writer.  Here you will connect each of your own vital centers of creativity to the needs of your story and begin the process of incubation.
• Next, you’ll build the social infrastructure of your fictional world from the outside in, discovering who your characters are and what they bring to the creative—and collaborative—process.
• You will plumb the depths of your own psyche for the two major fuel sources that will power scene after scene, chapter after chapter, crisis after crisis.  You will always know how and where to locate your own sources of energy to keep your story moving powerfully and compellingly forward.
• You will learn new ways of listening to your own story-telling instincts, to your muse, to your characters, to the needs of your story.
• You will gain the perspective you need in order to keep your plotlines from getting hopelessly tangled.
• You will know how to maintain and nourish the vital connection that your stories must have with your own spirit, so they never go flat and meaningless.

There are entirely new skillsets available to you in The Dragon Reveries, including ways to invent your own, even newer skillsets that can address needs that may arise as your unique story-telling process unfolds—needs created by the creative process itself.  You will become your own machinist, in effect, providing exactly the tools you need to accomplish any task a story might require of you.

There has never been anything like The Dragon Reveries before.  I developed the course out of my own need for reliable access to the creative engines that drive my fiction.  Course after course, book after book, workshop after workshop have taught me what all of the elements of fiction are and how they must fit together.  Many of my own teachers, living and dead, have inspired me.  But not until I learned how to induce my own states of reverie in a controlled and predictable way did I begin to understand my relationship to the creative process.

Out of that understanding and through that relationship, I have developed The Dragon Reveries and its companion volume, The Fantasist’s Handbook.  Together, the two works provide the guidance and the instruction that relatively few writers in the course of history have ever stumbled upon.

I am keeping the cost of this series low for the simple reason that I want you to be able to get it and use it, even if your finances are limited.  You can try it, in fact, for free.  If you order now, the first two Dragon Reveries and the first two chapters of The Fantasist’s Handbook will arrive in your inbox in downloadable form (that’s four mp3s and two pdfs) for you to experience on a trial basis for a full 30 days.  If they do not live up to my claims or your expectations, you may simply cancel your order, having paid absolutely nothing, and keep the downloads as my thanks for giving them a chance to work for you.

If you see for yourself the kind of controlled power that a deliberate, guided state of reverie can bring to your writing, then you will continue to receive two new reveries and two new chapters every month (one per week) for approximately 8 more months, continually expanding and deepening your creative capacities over a total of 36 weeks.  At that point, you will have everything you need in order to work through any fictional project from inception to completion, story after story, novel after novel, screenplay after screenplay.  You will have gained incomparable confidence in the creative flow and in yourself as a channel through which it courses, unimpeded and uninterrupted, time after time after time.

The combined cost of both The Dragon Reveries and The Fantasist’s Handbook is less than most workshops that give you a couple of hours of theory and some writerly banter, and far less than a weekend retreat where you get more of the same and maybe a few meals and a bed.  What you get here is more valuable, more powerful and far more useful, in fact, than what most MFA writing programs have to offer.  And while the process is certainly applicable across any genre you might write in, The Dragon Reveries are tailored specifically to your needs as a fantasist.  I just don’t think it gets any better than this, but I’m biased, and in case I’m wrong, you can cancel at any time.  The total cost for both the reveries and the handbook is $136. or just $17. per month.  The first month, again, is absolutely free and without obligation.  Click here to get started right away.

Thank you,

P.S.  There is only one problem.  I’m a writer like you.  I have to reserve time for my own muse, and it’s simply impossible to know in advance how much of my time will be required by the simple business tasks associated with making The Dragon Reveries and The Fantasist’s Handbook available online.  For that reason, I am limiting subscriptions to the first 1500 responders absolutely and without exception.  I reserve the right to stop enrollment at as few as 500—or even sooner, if I need to.  The best way to guarantee that you get in is to sign up now, with the understanding that you can cancel anytime within the first 30 days and owe nothing.