Alysse Aallyn

Category: #BestRevenge

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Loss – Suffering:

    If This Card Chooses You – You are hurting. If you can no longer feel pain, you are numb. Every religion and philosophical system must account for the misery we see around us – storms, flood, volcanos, disease, human frustration and animal predation.

    Warriors Get Used to Loss – Do your dream explore inner and outer pain? How much is fear, how much is anxiety, how much is collective unconscious and shared human history? We fear there is no possible paradise where everyone can be happy all at once. How do we educate ourselves to surf this intolerable dilemma?

    Pain is Joy’s Shadow – Joy is an excess of feeling and so is suffering. When we long to “numb out”, we numb everything. If we live our lives in fear, we avoid the potential excitement of holding our breath on the edge of discovery.

    Warriors Dare to Feel it all. Bravely we take on the feelings of the entire planet to show that we can’t be destroyed by them. Warriors explore and expand the edges of perception and assessment. Philosophical coping mechanisms can be Buddhist – “It’s all illusion”; “Practice taming the wild mind”; or religious – “Suffering brings us closer to God in developing compassion for all creation” and “Birth pangs are necessary to bring new life.” Any way we can keep our mind and soul responsive and deepening benefits the whole planet.

    Don’t Surrender to Learned Helplessness – Too much suffering breeds inertia. We stop even trying to better our human situation while attracting predators to such easy prey. Even worse, we become predators ourselves, bragging to the godless that we are the new potentates. Cruelty breeds endless cruelty. There must be a way to step off this treadmill – there’s enough suffering going around without manufacturing more.

    Warrior Daring Frees the Universe – Imagination itself comes from discomfort, even misery. We see a need to expand our mental repertoire, to magically increase the very dimensions of thought that seem to imprison us. As a species we have broken through this many times. Further epiphanies await.

    Models & Mentors – “You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

    “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” – A.A. Milne

    “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can suffer such deep sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heal them” – Leo Tolstoy

    “What we once loved we can never lose for it becomes a part of us” – Helen Keller

    “Death is not the greatest loss in life, the greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live” – Norman Cousins

    #Haiku: Profit/Loss Analysis

    Does autumn lose summer
    Warmth or
    Gain snowblanket?
    Peonies decide.

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Waterfall – Change:

    If This Card Chooses You – You Instinctively Resist Stagnation. Your conscious mind seeks stasis, which it interprets as “security”, but your subconscious rebels. It demands change! In the meanwhile, outside of your awareness, your unconscious IS changing, evolving fiercely along with the drama playing out in the entropical human race. Tune in!

    Consult Your Dreams – Dreams signal a desire for change. When was the last time you had a falling dream? Or a rushing water dream? A surprise dream or an accident dream?

    Change Is Inevitable – Not just change, but revolution. Revolution is what we warriors are all about. Cultivate flexible thinking. Don’t invest psychologically in rigid, one-way requirements.

    Thought Exercise – What if everything were completely different? What if things turned upside down? This is the kind of planning and strategizing asked of warriors. What’s the “Last Best Option?” Shape your change towards growth by asking, is this making me a better, stronger person, or a more fearful person? More competent, less dependent, more unique, less compliant, more imaginative, less angry, more joyous, less envious? Evolve with me! Let’s streamline!

    Fundamental attribution error says we blame ourselves for world conditions over which we have no control. Check your guilt/anxiety levels. If they are raging, is there anything you can do to ameliorate the causative circumstances? Being without guilt or anxiety is NOT the goal – that would describe a sociopath! But being crippled by guilt OR anxiety when there’s nothing you can do about it is disabling. And we’re in the empowerment department here.

    Manage Your Evolution, or you’re headed downhill. Traveling ever upward along the spiral. What are the attributes you admire? Develop a picture of yourself as a wise being emitting light. Nurture calm, contentment, gratitude – in the midst of a thirst for new ideas and experiences to add to your expanding galaxy of knowledge.

    Be Ready for Anything – Play out the scenarios in your Training Journal. Have a plan A, B, C. Learn chess to help with thinking of several moves ahead. Ask others, “What would you do?” As you read/watch a piece of fiction, imagine yourself inside this problem. You can also learn a lot from history. Start a “What IF? Club” in which members dream up survival scenarios. Play the game Worst Case Scenario.

    Models & Mentors – “Progress is impossible without change” – George Bernard Shaw

    “Change is the law of life. Those who look only to past and present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy

    “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability but comes after continuous struggle.” – Martin Luther King

    “It is not the strongest of our species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” – Charles Darwin

    #Haiku: Unwanting

    Curbing desire
    Won’t work;
    Evolving desire will.
    Admit it:
    We’ve changed

  • Becoming a Warrior – The Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    . Memory – The Past:

    If This Card Chooses You – Check your conscious/subconscious/unconscious/collective consciousness levels. How comfortable are you with the depth of these levels? Do you ruminate about past events? Are you haunted by what was done & left undone? Do you feel nostalgia for a past that never was? Do you have a favorite period in history or a fantasy universe that you wish you lived in, instead of this one?

    You are the Hero of Your Warrior Saga – Accept your centrality in your own myth. It doesn’t matter what other people think – they are the bit players. Think of your past as a Quest Saga. What did you want? How did it change? What blocked you? What tools have you got at your command? Where do you go from here?

    Rewrite the Past – You absolutely CAN, but first you first must face its full horror and that effect on you. Generally, because we were immature, we didn’t understand what was going on, were co-opted by our persecutors and prevented from fighting back. Things are different now! The hardest thing to accept is that beloved caregivers didn’t want the best for us – they only wanted us to be just like them.

    “I don’t believe in ghosts but I never met a person who wasn’t haunted” is a very wise saying. What haunts you exactly? Or who? Ghosts are malignant – if they weren’t they would be power spirits, fairy godmothers or guardian angels. What malignancies from your past are out to get you and how do they make themselves known? One of Freud’s contributions was to point out that people prefer their neurosis – ie imprisonment – to liberation. Why? What’s in it for you?

    You became YOU. Yes, you have scars – these are bragging rights! You have been through the wars! ‘Rewriting” the past means understanding what really happened, the limitations of those who surrounded you, and exploring your chances and choices today. Just because parents, teachers or “society” sentenced you to play a role, you can step out of it at any time. Buddhist thought is very helpful here. Buddha teaches that life itself is an illusion – a dream. It changes depending on how we think about it. In the present, inside your mind, you hold all the keys to your own liberation. Re-visit Pema Chodron’s Noble Heart and Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now to explore how you can assume immediate control of your life and your mind and turn your past into fuel to power your growth.

    Warriors Know Who They Are – Remember, you’ve got a purpose. You’ve got a future. You’ve thought about your past and worked out conflicts with a mentor and in your Training Journal.

    Warriors Develop A Sense of History – You understand that history is a spiral, not a circle – the same things do keep coming around but in a different form. You see all around you the operation of karma.
    Choosing evil is choosing chaos – it can’t work out for anyone except temporarily. You understand the battle between darkness and light and you have committed yourself firmly to The Light.

    Warriors Are Storytellers – You pass the message on with your life, with your words, with your body, with your very presence. You have become one link in the unbreakable chain of Eternal Perfection and you will have your reward.

    Models & Mentors – “You never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory”

    – Dr Seuss

    “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things” – Cicero

    “In the end, we’ll all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood

    “Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining a task or actually doing it”– Yo Yo Ma

    #Haiku: No-Fault Apology

    Atone?
    Conspire:
    Delete:
    Rewire
    My memory and
    Yours; potent
    Fire.

  • Becoming a Warrior – The Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    The Sun – Truth:

    If This Card Chooses You – You thirst after righteousness. Do you dream of a fully lit landscape? Do you bask in warm rays or feel trapped by skin-scorching light? As the Sun card in Warrior Oracle represents Truth it also sheds light on our efforts to locate, explain and exploit that mysterious force.

    Warriors Are Bullshit Detectors – Throughout life you will encounter people searching for weapons and tools. They will try to make a weapon and a tool out of you. This is why understanding the back and forth nature of partnership is so key. When you are searching for a Teacher you are not searching for a Master. Use Truth to divine the difference.

    You Are a Truth Diviner – Truth is complex. Truth evolves to match our understanding. Dream are incontestably “real” but do they represent “Truth”? Can something be true one day and untrue the next? (see Ambivalence.) Is the storytelling child narrating “the truth”? Are myths true? Is the Bible true? Yes to all these questions. But No, also. Because the most important fact about truth is that, like us, it’s either progressive or regressive. You easily recognize this in your own life. Something that was true of you twenty years ago is no longer true. You have changed. Understandably, in a climate like this, people thirst for Unchanging Truth, and there are a few examples. Benjamin Franklin offered Death and Taxes, Jesus said evil can’t win, and Buddha said life itself is an illusion.

    It is enough to make us think that language is a poor descriptor of experience. The important variable in all this is we, ourselves – humanity. We are the eyes that think, the brain that evaluates, the mind that remembers. You are constantly developing Warrior Skills – Truth Seeking, Truth Telling and Truth Divining – and you are developing definitions. Congratulate yourself. Support yourself and others on this noblest of enterprises. Because to die in the Truth is to pass into the Light.

    The Truth Matters – Lying is the biggest red flag, and the question always is, why? Can your interlocutor not bear the truth or do they not know the truth? Do they attempt to fool others to take advantage? Law asks the question: who benefits? How would they take control if you accepted their falsity?

    Accept the Physics of Reality – Does the Liar promote growth and health, or suffering and squalor? Followers may be sickening and dying slowly, but you can quickly see that in the Liar’s universe, the benefit of others is never as important as leader gratification.

    Understanding Emotional Health – Challenge is necessary for growth. The fact that subjects are uncomfortable is usually a good reason to take a long look. Effort is important but not to the point of depletion. Who maintains the resources that refresh the spirit?

    The Warrior Is Worthy of Support – Rest, health, nourishment, fellowship and learning are the riches of the universe that should be available to all.

    Warrior Challenge – It’s so relaxing when you finally see the Truth. Suddenly you’re in the gulf stream, swimming WITH the tide! This is why fans love mystery stories – they explain what was REALLY going on and you see all past events in a new light with a new meaning. Our daily life seems to request of us one hideous compromise after another until we wake up one morning feeling that we are lying to everybody – ourselves included. The Warrior’s Challenge – should you accept it – is to bring your life more in harmony with what you currently know to be true, all the while seeking a higher elevation of The Truth.

    Warrior Danger – Nobody likes a hard-ass. Is your quest for truth turning you into a rigid, mean-spirited drill sergeant? I used to be authoritatively told that the mysteries I loved weren’t any good, that no way was Raymond Chandler as good as John Steinbeck. Worse, Emily Bronte wasn’t as good as Philip Roth! Ugh! I did appreciate that what was “true” for others was NOT true for me but unfortunately for me, THEY did not appreciate that. So, be humble. You can never see (or reveal) all the Truth. And it will evolve (as hopefully, you will) until you die and in my cosmology, are “perfected” and received into Bliss. You’re not required to believe in Bliss, by the way. Bliss believes in you.

    Warrior Opportunity –Truth, like everything interesting, meaningful and worth doing, is a PROCESS. Welcome aboard! We’re all passengers on this exciting thrill-ride! So buckle up! Assemble a team! Get out your journal! Let’s begin!

    Models & Mentors – “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

    – David Foster Wallace

    “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” – George Orwell

    “Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool you have” – Oprah Winfrey

    “Truth is like the Sun. You can shut it out for a while, but it ain’t going away”– Elvis Presley

    #Haiku: Lady Samurai

    Loyal
    Poise;
    Courage in
    Truth
    Compassionate
    Respect
    Honest
    Honor

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Danger – Risk – If This Card Chooses You – Look out. Are you a worrier? Anxiety driven? Haunted by nightmares and worst-case scenarios? Do you wake up gasping and trying to forget what you’ve just experienced?

      You are Alert – Nightmares mean you’re paying attention. Life is scary, but we need to grow, and growth requires we learn to cultivate risk if we are ever to expand and venture outside our comfort zone.

      The Number One Complaint About Becoming a Warrior? – Fear management. The only way to manage fear? Become a Warrior.


      Study risk intelligently. No point being afraid of dragons if dragons are only symbolic. No point being “afraid” of “foreigners” if the man telling us to be afraid has a reputation for befriending people and then fleecing them.

      1. Don’t rely on rumor and innuendo
      2. Dangers must be proven Real
      3. Dangers Need to be Historically verified by data: “How likely is injury?”
      4. Assemble likely risk-avoidance strategies that have performed well for others in your situation.
      5. What exactly is your situation? Quantify.
      6. Know who your friends are
      7. Be prepared to alter strategy to maximize success and to learn from mistakes

      Warriors Train – Warriors accept, identify and study the challenges. They learn to make sophisticated risk assessments and pick their battles cleverly. To do that, warriors need a Purpose. You get to find out who your friends are. Friends want the best for you, but the relationship must be reciprocal. You have each other’s backs. Know the difference between a Team and a Gang. Gangs work to suck power from individual members and concentrate it in one individual. Teams work for the success of all. Coach can’t win if the team doesn’t win.

      Warriors Test – their and mental physical abilities constantly against life’s games & mazes

      Warriors Transform – The physical pleasure of meeting the moment cannot be overstated. Soon the training itself becomes a rush of joy. You are making love to the universe and the universe loves you back

      What About Defeat? – There are no defeats, there are only lessons. Everything is practice for The Greater Contest.

      Won’t You Ultimately Lose? Truly, we all die, some sooner, some less dignified. This is where your purpose upholds you. Study your models. What allowed Nelson Mandela to be “captain of his soul” after more than 20 years in brutal captivity? Are we just bodies? Or are we also souls? Are our souls so easily defeated? Can we also train, test and transform our souls?

      Remember – a caterpillar’s “defeat” is a butterfly.

      Models & Mentors – “Extreme Fear can neither fight nor fly.” – William Shakespeare

      “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear” – Mark Twain

      “If you try to get rid of fear and anger without knowing their meaning, they will return stronger” – Deepak Chopra

      “We’re more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than reality.” – Seneca

      #haiku: Everything

      Everything you’ve
      Ever wanted
      Is on the other side
      Of fear

    1. Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

      The Goddess – Power !

        What It Means When This Card Chooses You – You are one of the Elect. Most people feel that because the Goddess card represents power it’s the most valuable card in the Warrior Oracle
        deck. But we are all familiar with fires that get out of control, rage-fueled spirals, explosives that blow up in your face and escalating weaponry. Owing to the Goddess’ power, much can go wrong.

        You Have The Power – The true meaning of this card is that you have the force within you to get things done and to bend unfriendly circumstances to your desire and will. Isn’t that what we all want – a little magic?

        You Are Iconic – But the Goddess card is about more than magic, it is about the inherent magic that is especially, irreplaceably You. You have a power no one else has, incorporated in your being, your possibilities, your desires and your memories. This takes a lifetime to accept because we all nervously want to be Someone Else and experience existence through the armor of Having only an Outside instead of just the very vulnerable Inside in which we all feel imprisoned.

        Dreams Instruct You – Your dreams bring all these passions together as psychic poetry, elucidating what you think you want, what you hope you want and what you are afraid you want. The ultimate magic is to seize conscious control of this potent power source.

        Warrior Challenge – The challenge is to truly connect with others, reveal our world Inside, and avoid blasting their apparently impenetrable Outside with our terror, our longing and our fear.

        Warrior Danger – We cannot take hostages and we must never become a hostage. Freedom is a fine line to walk. If we wish to reach out, we must treat others with respect and claim like respect for ourselves. Accept your “experiments”; do not fear them but allow them to take you where you need to go.

        Warrior Opportunities – There will be stumbles and terrors aplenty, also successes that LOOK like stumbles and terrors, but which we only realize on reflection were real leaps forward. This is why we must carefully assess our daily efforts without being harsh with ourselves. Speak gently to yourself as you would to a most beloved child. You are your own Most Beloved Child. It is not selfish to commit to this belief, it is simply placing the oxygen mask over your own face FIRST so that you can administer this life-saving force to others. Find someone with whom you can share your journey, without fear or judgment. This connection will teach us everything we need to know about how to connect with others.

        Fear & Trembling: Where would we get the courage to become warriors? Human history begins with an enormous fear of God or whoever is causing all that lightning, those earthquakes and striking everybody down. Killing small helpless, pretty things was meant to be flattering and propitiatory to this God (I don’t get it either.) then Jesus came with a message about how God was really loving, generous and wanted the best for us. We know how that turned out.

        Becoming a Warrior: As children, we struggled to understand where we fit on the power spectrum. I tried killing a snake and experimented with bullying other children the way I was bullied. I didn’t care for it. The only relief was in thinking about, researching and understanding what was going on. My earliest researches, as for many children, were in astronomy and dinosaurs. The cold magnificence of the planets and the complete wipeout of the dinosaurs gave me a way to stand back from the immediate suffering of the schoolyard. I then moved on to the early Egyptians who tried to solve their problems through magic and art. The art was visually appealing and the magic was emotionally soothing.

        Pick Your Battles: I saw that most schoolyard fights were a reaction to the immediate suffering of pain or confusion, and that they magnified, rather than solved, those problems. There was a manifest holiness about this discovery. It rescued me from the torture of everyday life and elevated me to a plane where every other contributing thinker had already become immortalized.

        Study & Strategy: I read everything I could get my hands on in history and biography (research) and in fairy tales (magic). When I fell in love with the novels of C.S. Lewis and Rumer Godden, the world judged my taste good – when I discovered Agatha Christie, it did not – but it turned out everyone else was reading her too. Agatha is a short course on human nature (original sin) and a proponent of both the scientific and Socratic methods. She’s great training for a Warrior. I wrote it all down in my Training Journal.

        Claiming Your Power: By the time you’re a teenager you can see you have some power – some mental, some physical. The question is developing it and finding appropriate gurus. Avoiding the dominance/submission game.

        Keep Going – Recognize that you have been touched by the goddess and honor her by being grateful for the glorious gifts of life.

        Models & Mentors: “I did not deceive you. I permitted you to deceive yourself.” Agatha Christie

        “An Indian proverb says everyone is a house with four rooms – physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. Most of us live in one room or the other but if you don’t visit each room each day you are not a complete person.” – Rumer Godden

        “You are never too old to dream a new dream or set a new goal” – C. S. Lewis

        “You have to believe in yourself” – Sun Tzu

        #Haiku: Wyvern

        My power
        Beast bristles
        Fire;
        Eats critics
        Guards path
        Sleeps in my
        Mirror

      1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Aspiration – The Future –

          Being a warrior means you never give up, you modify goals and you redesign maps.

          My explorations into True Crime had taught me what people REALLY do. Clearly, there’s no necessity to make up plots; in my next novel the challenge would be explaining what humans get up to and why.

          After the weirdly destructive father/daughter vibe of my last full-time job I became interested in three real stories – a kidnapped toddler where the FBI became convinced the parents were lying, a father in Florida pulling out all the stops searching for his missing teen (later found to have been murdered by a serial killer) and a father pimping out his own daughter (later revealed to be a kidnap victim.)

          I swirled all these into the psychological thriller Find Courtney, where a college student helps a distraught father search for her missing roommate, only to discover that he is definitely NOT what he seems. I whipped the paintings of Edvard Munch, tales of long-dead fan dancers and arson scams into a fine froth of first-person storytelling.

          I got an offer from the first publisher I submitted it to, an exciting Bridgehampton start-up promising the personal touch. It was published to wonderful reviews, but there were unseen cliffs ahead! Luckily warriors are good at managing hard landings and surprise outcomes.

          #Haiku: Find Courtney

          In the
          Dead
          Killer’s house;
          Who needs
          A sexy pirate
          Playing Daddy?

        1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

          Symbiosis – Interdependence –

            During pursuit of my never achieved degree in Rehab Counseling (at Springfield College) I worked three years at Easter Seal. There were good things about it but it was not a happy experience. I taught Career Exploration – that was the fun part, trying to open the eyes of frightened people diagnosed as “disabled” to the possibilities out there. I knew very little about computers – just coming into vogue – and Easter Seals refused to get me training – but I passed on what little I could figure out. We worked on resumes, interviews, goal setting, and seeing yourself through the employers’ eyes.

            While I worked there Easter Seals built a glamorous new building and moved all “managers” out. It was carefully explained to us that anyone actually providing services to clients was unimportant, replaceable, and would be paid as little as possible – being a manager, on the other hand, was a high-status, remunerative, important occupation.

            I saw I needed a new job, pronto and used my new skills to get hired at a non-profit start-up of ex-addicts hoping to influence legislation. As the sole “office help” I enjoyed creating business practices from the ground up. I kept track of members and planned member events. Unfortunately, my boss was a very angry man (he once threw a book at me) and was usually seething about what he saw as my completely misplaced confidence and independence. After three years, we had enough work to hire an office helper; but I was not assigned to be her supervisor. This was actually fine with me because I was busy managing a family and writing on the side. You hire a poet at your peril, and I don’t think I could conceal my distaste for office politics. Office Helper observed this dynamic and began immediately planning to take my job. This only worked briefly – once I was pushed out she lasted a month.

            I was determined to keep up the good relationships I’d forged, but it turned out to be impossible. Their world was just not my world. In the meantime I had one child in college and another finishing high school – I thought I might make it on a part-time job and on paper I certainly had the skills. The weird interplay with my ex-boss – officially fatherly yet boiling with suppressed sexual rage – gave me an idea for a novel.

            Seawracked

            He lost her
            Spoke too soon
            As men are wont
            Words freighted by an inner logic
            Fell to earth and lay
            Prey to busy bristle-footed worms
            Tidily dismantle
            Subject, verb & predicate;
            Sucked out sense and left
            The elegiac bones to rot
            Amid kelp-wigged rock & glass-rope sponge
            Cheek by jowl with
            Long dead fishermen’s wives
            Punished now for ill-set dough and
            Worse-set hair
            Mouths agape in imitation of
            The badly sutured wounds of childbirth
            Secrets told; corpses left to nourish
            Nature’s counting-house
            One season only; sharing space
            With shattered petrels
            Feathers spewed like pillow-stuffing
            In passing frenzy of love-struck boy s-
            Strewn among the shavings of these once great ships
            Built by hearts & backs of men
            Who loved their daughters far too well –
            Losing them to sailors
            Crueler than the great sea-god himself;
            He who stirs our sleep these nights
            With grief-crazed cries of loons
            Casting on the waters for their
            Far-flung children
            Lost forever now
            As we are lost as
            He lost her.

          1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

            Ingenuity –

              I loved writing, I wanted to be a writer, so it certainly seemed that I should come up with a writing solution for my financial problems.


              “Gothic” novels were popular when I was in my 20’s; historical romances featuring aspirational heroines from the wrong side of the tracks who catch the eye of a moneyed, powerful man. I was a big reader of Victorian and Romantic literature which is loaded with fascinating true stories. Take Thomas Love Peacock, friend of Shelley and author of Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle; a member of the landed gentry who saw a village girl sewing in a window and adopted her into his family for the rest of both their lives. Seemed like there was a story there! I also was a fan of ghost stories, especially Edith Wharton’s lovely After, where you see the ghost but only realize it afterwards. How about a ghost that adapted to the viewer? I had great fun writing this novel during a long, snowed in winter in Maine, sent queries to agents alphabetically and picked the first one who liked Devlyn and wanted to represent it (her name began with “C”.) I continued receiving rejections from lackadaisical agents long after the book was actually published, such is the state of the literary world.

              She sold the book relatively fast. I took the train from Washington DC to New York city and was taken out to lunch by my editor, who seemed likeable enough. She said I was so pretty, maybe they should make it a series. The money they offered wasn’t anything you could live on, but the print run was over 100,000 copies! That had to mean something.

              Then the publisher was sold. My editor was fired. My second editor and I did not hit it off. She seemed to dislike gothics and be embarrassed by them, she wanted to represent “memoirs.” I was stunned. Memoirs by definition are nonfiction. If she didn’t like fiction, what was she doing in this job?

              Not much, as it turned out. She was out, and I was offered a third editor, whose specialty was Westerns. I kid you not. Aren’t all “genres” really the same?

              I attempted to cultivate other editors. I attempted to cultivate other publishers. It was depressing how often sex appeared to be part of the deal. I was used to making my own choices in that area and I was not remotely turned on by any of these guys. Eeeeew, followed by “Ick.”

              I got a new agent. My Warrior ingenuity was playing out but soon, it would be “played out.” Because I was an artist. A key feature of Being a Warrior is not becoming a mercenary. Because that’s something different. I had things I wanted to write for me. I couldn’t explain what they were, because the only way to find out was to write them.

              #Haiku: Devlyn

              Ghosts mirror
              Fear, says brave
              Thea; this killer’s
              Motive laid bare –
              “Revenge”.

            1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

              Legacy –

                Difficult to become a warrior without resources. It’s probably not impossible, but it seems to require more psychic strength –or perhaps just the ability to engage a team – than I’ve ever had. On the other hand, I’ve always been able to make the most of whatever resources came my way. It’s the gift I’d like most to pass on to my children, because it helps you persist in the slog and outwit your pursuers.

                I can’t tell you how many job interviews I’ve had where I realized they wanted me to come across as more ruthless, and I just couldn’t do it, even for the purposes of Shapeshifting Performance Art and Fun Impersonations, both of which I was familiar with using on a daily basis and enjoyed. But this was survival we were talking about, the magic metamorphosis of confusion into livelihood. My interest in personal transformation led me to studying a degree in Rehab Counseling and this particular interviewer seemed to want me to express a desire to punish my clients. Maybe that was when I realized I was in the wrong business. I wanted to teach these people how to become warriors.

                How To Become a Warrior

                In heaven the victors
                Celebrate with their rivals
                Not taking it personally
                But loving.
                Forgiving.
                “You thought WHAT?
                I was wrong!”
                You went WHERE?
                It’s so nuts!”
                How we’ll laugh while
                Scars dissolve;
                Iridescent plumage
                Shivers off our beautiful selves
                Unconditionally
                Eternally
                Mysteriously
                Revealed.