Get A Life Coach

You want to change? Do you have the desire to have a new job and a new life? Take a lesson from me, Eeyore. He’s the character who is always telling Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, or Tigger why they can’t go to the one hundred acre wood today. Get a life coach! I have been blessed in the fact that Kathy, my wife, is a trained life coach as well as an expert Ezine author.

By her Socratic questioning, and expert coaching, she was able to allow me to open up and expose the true root of my writing desires and goals. I was able to expose the fear that was prohibiting my moving forward. This has allowed me to slay my writing demon (the blank white page.)

By adjusting and redefining my unrealistic goals and expectations, I have been able to move forward. I have overcome my self made obstacles. Writing a blog regularly has stimulated my creativity. The desire to write well has always been there. My previous lack of action toward the fulfillment of that goal left me disenchanted and disillusioned in my life. By complaining bitterly about my inability to change my life’s experiences, I continued to do the same thing which was nothing.

For many years, I remained on the same path and lack of action, hoping for a different result. Imagine my surprise when I kept getting the same results. Duh? My Golden Retriever looks at me some times with a look (in her cute little blonde way) that says, “What are you, stupid?” The truth is, I’m not. I’m just very slow to learn. Yes. Unwilling to change my behavior patterns to get different results. I was unable to see the big picture that by writing every day will have an immense effect on my future.

There you have it. Over the years, I have attended many sales meetings. They always say to try and get the buyer to say yes at least three times so that they build a box for themselves that they can’t get out of. Guess what? Am I going to have to try and write my way out of this one? Yes, yes, yes!

The More You Use What God Has Given You, The More God Will Give You

The more you use what God has given you, the more God will give you. Those words were posted on a pneumatic workout machine at the Steuben Athletic Club in Albany, New York. My friend Bob and I were training in an attempt to get in condition for a several week ski trip to Colorado and Utah. We had just finished reading the book Seven Summits by Dick Bass. He was the owner of the ski area called Snowbird in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah.

Dick Bass became the oldest man to climb (and summit) the highest peaks on all seven continents. By training for two years before his climbing attempt, he was able to summit all the peaks. He became our inspiration for getting into expert shape. I have never been afraid of mountaineering or skiing and have taken great pains to be among the top percentile of those adventurers.

On the first leg of the ski trip we visited Arapahoe Basin in Colorado where I began researching the history of that Ski Area. During the rest of our trip, I wrote the first chapter of my Historical Novel. I was both excited and anxious to get to my first writing workshop and get feedback for my work. It was received very well and I was encouraged by the participants to continue.

After the workshop, the blank white page became my nemesis. I have a hard time keeping a short story together so a full blown Historical Novel became my Goliath. Resembling the little David character, I would run and hide when the clean pages remained blank. I submitted my first chapter as a short story and received an honorable mention in a Writer’s Digest Competition. I filled the little story with all kinds of facts and descriptions to fill the pages.

Eventually, I moved to Colorado to pursue skiing and left the novel behind. It was too much, Goliath won. I moved on to Aspen, built a successful plumbing business, and bought a house. All the while, the project I had affectionately named Goliath still haunted me. He had become bigger and meaner than any mountain I had ever climbed or skied.

These days, I’m the cowardly lion, holding hands with Dorothy and the Scarecrow skipping to the Emerald City to meet the great Oz. They tell me that he gives out courage. I will get the courage to write. Goliath, he is standing in the road and he’s calling out my name.

This time, I’m writing my blog. I’m practicing. I am using the gift that God has given me. I am picking up my sling to slay the giant. Albert Bianchine

Devour The Classics

Read voraciously and devour the Classics. A good start would be World Masterpieces,Volume 1 and 2. Before each period there is an introduction to the period with a brief synopsis of each writer of the period. They will help familiarize you with great literature of all the periods of history.

I was extremely fortunate to be introduced to great literature at a young age. While perusing the stacks and thumbing through picture books of jet airplanes, I was accosted by a curly haired young man. “Why are you wasting your time with that? Follow me, I’ll show you where the good stuff is located,” said a young Ray Bono. He led me to the literature section and pulled out the largest book I’d ever seen. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer became my new challenge.

Ray offered to discuss it with me weekly, and over the coming year, under his mentorship, I was steeped in great writing. Greek Literature captured my imagination and stimulated many an evening of flights of fantasy as Hercules performed his great labors. I soared through the skies on the winged Pegasus and explored the darkest depths of Hades. All the while, I identified with the trials of Odysseus and rejoiced in his return to his beloved wife Penelope the most celebrated woman in Greek Literature. I was smitten by the adventures in far off lands. I have revisited those great works often, and they have never failed to stimulate my imagination.

Young Ray went on to be the Salutatorian of our High School. I went off seeking the adventures that I had dreamed of after reading those works. Somewhere in my adventures lies a story just waiting to be told. Albert Bianchine

Letting Go Of The Rigidity

In an exercise of The Tenth Insight, Holding the Vision, An Experimental Guide, by James Redfield and Carol Adrienne, you are asked to work on overcoming the fear that holds you back from achieving your goals. The exercise is designed to put yourself in another’s shoes to help develop empathy and compassion. You are asked to jot down the names of three or four people you don’t like or with whom you disagree. Beside the names write out the things you don’t agree with or don’t like about them.

You are then asked to go back and describe each of the people as if you could see their higher purpose. You are asked to use your imagination to speculate what deeper, positive purposes lies behind the outer characteristics that you see and judge.

The final step is to go back to the first step and insert your name in the place of one of the people that you don’t like. You are then asked to describe something you do that is similar to what you don’t like about the person. You are asked to notice how you feel when you go back and read the exercise.

After completing this exercise, I have realized that there are a few things about myself that I’m not happy with, especially where writing is concerned. I am perhaps the most rigid and inflexible personality that I know of. In my Equine Career I believe that I haven’t worked with any more stubborn or inflexible mules. The more I wrote, the more I realized that my preconceived ideas of writing success are out of touch with reality. I don’t have to be on a beach in Oregon in order to write a Historical Novel about a mountain in Colorado.

Many great novels have been written by commuters into New York City on subways and trains. I doubt that I will mysteriously get a large book contract for an abstract idea about a novel. How about writing it? How about finally interviewing the principles in Colorado that have already agreed to an interview? How about completing the ground work? Do you think I might be difficult to work with? Am I the person that I complain about by putting the cart before the horse? Am I really as overbearing as the person that I thought believed they knew everything about a subject when they were really a novice struggling along? Could I use the help that I had to offer? What and eye opener! Writing well is indeed a journey to self discovery. Albert Bianchine

Writing, The Art Of Healing

It was said by Ernest Hemingway that, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn … it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that.” In Ernest Hemingway, A Reconsideration, Philip Young qualifies Hemingway’s quote. “This rather loose overstatement is generally taken to mean that Huckleberry Finn is the source for the natural, colloquial, and nonliterary prose style in which most modern American Literature, and particularly Hemingway’s is written.

Mark Twain who was disillusioned by the disappearance of the American Frontier, found life closing in on him all around found Huck Finn. Huckleberry found the big muddy and his raft. Every time his world closed in on him, a push of the raft found he and Jim in a fast moving river with trouble far behind them. Our hero never grows past young adulthood and at the crucial growth time he introduces Tom Sawyer.

Hemingway embellishes upon the Huckleberry character by creating his early Nick Adams and his difficulties at The Big Two Hearted River. Nick’s struggle to cross the river is generally attributed to Hemingway’s attempt to heal from his wounds received July 8, 1918 at Fossalta di Piave. Hemingway was wounded badly and for a time assumed to be beyond hope. It is said 277 pieces of shrapnel were removed from him. Psychologically, Nick almost doesn’t make it across the river. Through Nick and The Big Two Hearted River, Hemingway confronts his demon and seemingly keeps it at bay.

Writing is a form of healing, and history is full artists desperately trying. Living is hard, you have to try and survive. In your struggle, if it becomes too difficult, you can Just Open A Vein,like a quote by Red Smith in a book edited by William Brohaugh. Albert Bianchine

"Words. They Are The Key."

Those simple words were destined to spawn my writing career. At a very young age, my Grandmother would buttonhole me and force me to sit and take the word power tests in Readers Digest Magazine. My Grandfather introduced me to the Western Novel soon after I had put down my Curious George books.

After abandoning my dreams of running away to join the circus, I picked up my young manhood dreams from Zane Grey the Western Novelist. I remember distinctly in his novel entitled, Wyoming, the scene opening with the Cowboy standing on the desolate plains. “Sand, sand blowing, shifting like a silver silken sea of clouds.” I was mesmerized and bitten by the great American expansive west.

Laughed out of my grade school music days for playing The Streets of Laredo as my favorite song, I took my album (yes, one of those vinyl plastic things), stuffed it in my backpack and headed for the school bus home. There I was on the bus, a Cowboy Hat wearing outcast, a drifter who didn’t fit in. It was the beginning of the character I was to create and become in my fiction writing. The self-styled lone wolf, I took up skiing and quickly exhausted the eastern mountains.

I soon found myself, Stetson hat and knapsack looking out over the great American plains of Wyoming. The big horns looming large on the horizon, with the Tetons and Jackson Hole Ski Area not far down the road. My knapsack harbored my marbled black and white composition book filled with doodles and short stories. Consumed and possessed by the adventure of the mountains, I lived the life that I had read about in the Westerns. I skied as many of the American Rockies as I was able. I was always trying to find the words to paint the beauty I was fortunate enough to live every day.

Writers are word stackers, shapers, like “Sand, sand blowing, shifting like a silver silken sea of clouds.” Just ask the self-styled lone wolf, the drifter and outrider of society who just stepped off The Streets of Laredo in their mind. Albert Bianchine

"My Bad, But I have An App For That."

When I worked as a performer with the Beaver Creek Children’s Theatre in Avon, Beaver Creek, and Vail, Colorado, we worked in conjunction with Disney and Sport Goofy (Goofy on Skis.) We had several programs for vacationing families, especially the children. We offered a family night out with a picnic in a theatre at Piney Lake, a serene setting in the Rocky Mountains. We also offered a kid’s night out at a local theatre in Vail Village, that allowed families and evening out while their children were entertained. The cast was a wonderful array of people that told elaborate stories and performed skits with approved Disney Characters like Sour Dough Pete, and Sure Shot Shirley.

Many of the stories were performance stories with, audience participation. It struck me that inevitably many of the young children stayed at the back seats of the auditoriums and played with their video games and had no participation with the groups. Unless you physically removed the video games from the children, there is no way they would watch the performances or participate in them(with former parental approval.) They were social outcasts that didn’t interact with any of their peers or the social group.

Now flash forward twenty-five years. Those very same children are now CEO’s and General Managers of many companies. They are supremely technically gifted and computer literate and they have ipods, blackberries, and ipads. Their devices ring, beep and buzz to tell them where they should be with whom they should be and what they should be talking about. If they make a mistake or their device doesn’t remind them. They look at you with a far away distant stare and say, “My Bad.” But you know what?

I have an app for that. You guessed it. My blog.

Albert Bianchine