Rae Roy

I've been reading a lot of things on spirituality partly for a novel I am writing, but it didn't start out that way. I've been on my own spiritual journey for a while now. Tonight I attended a workshop on the things one needs to work on in order to complete their soul. The ChunHwa Centre gives these workshops monthly for an amount you decide to donate ($5, $10, whatever you feel like). He said you have to be scientific and methodical about it. Meditation can help you get there, but only if you are focused. He talked about good and bad stress and how much of the time the stress is necessary for growth or is simply a result of natural bodily function (eating causes stress on our digestive system). We talked about how the key to stress was understanding the underlying cause. After that it's all about good coping techniques. He liked to joke around a bit and would say things like the only way to get rid of stress was to die. We talked about health as a goal for meditation a...

Well I’m hip deep in NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month. November to some means growing facial hair for charity and for slightly insane people like me we take on the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s the end of the 18th day and I’m doing well with 33, 146 words into my romantic fantasy novel, The Page & The Magician, which is a mix of deeply spiritual concepts, modern dating woes, and fantastical characters like a green-skinned, voluntarily beardless dwarf who bakes muffins. And of course, there is sex and glorious battles too. Much of the book happens in Ottawa, Ontario with segues into places I haven’t decided upon yet. This is actually more than I have written on another novel that I’ve been working on for 4 years. I feel a bit ashamed at myself for that, but I know what has been a key differentiator for me with this new novel: character development. Prior to starting November, I used D.N. Frost’s character tarot and did an extremely thorough mapping o...