So groovy I have a hard time even describing it. You just have to watch.

I’ve had one of those nostalgic mornings where I checked up on some old friends via the magic of the Internet, and ran into a video of this guy:

This is most definitely the Gary Sullivan I remember! We used to hang out together and write, draw cartoons, drink way too much coffee and alcohol, sleep on beaches … and one thing that it doesn’t seem to mention anywhere that I found online, the guy is an amazing musician. I remember him playing piano, guitar, and … maybe even the sax?

I lost track of him after we both “grew up” and entered the adult world where we would actually have to hold down jobs and pay bills. I drifted off to Texas and he made his way to New York, where, I’ve just learned, he founded a entire poetry movement known as “Flarf.” (See: Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously)

Yep, that’s the Gary I remember. I also remember a cartoon he had published in San Francisco for years called “Reverend Gary’s Church of Fun.” It was brilliant. He’s a great artist.

His passion now seems to be combining poetry and cartoons, the results of which are his series of books Elsewhere (a copy of which I have around here, somewhere) and his comic series “The New Life” which appeared in Rain Taxi.

His latest book is called PPL in a Depot. It’s a collection of plays.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention he’s also a playwright.

Yep, that’s the Gary I remember!

I’ve evolved quite a bit since starting this site.

When I first conceived GroovyMojo, I was recovering from divorce, recovering from the dot.com crash, and working at a fall-back job doing computer support.  I was rather lost at the time, and decided I needed to rediscover my path in life.

As I did some introspection of my own passions and interests, and searched for new things to help me on my way, this web site came about.  When I first put it together it was an experiment, just to see what I could do.  And I put the context ads on it to see if it would support itself.  When people asked me, "What’s it about?" I didn’t know how to answer.  "Everything, I guess," is what I’d finally say.

"Groovy" means good, and "mojo" means magic.  I wanted some good magic in my life.  I write science fiction and fantasy, so I actually think about magic quite a bit.  I think I’ve come to understand it, the way it really works, and it’s not actually supernatural.

Magic — real magic, not trickery — comes from thought, intention, and deed, all together.  The magic part comes from the synergy of the three.  Synergy, an over-used buzz word, is the term for the total being greater than the sum of the parts.  It a real phenomenon.  And that is how I define magic in our mundane world.

You mix a positive attitude, a lot of thought, solid realistic goals, passion, and action, and you get groovy mojo.

Good magic.

Good things start happening because you draw the good things to yourself.  Your success builds upon itself, and gets stronger.  You achieve goals and set new ones.

I worked myself into better jobs.  I achieved my goal of becoming a full time professional writer.  Then, as I realized — in a professional sense — what I really enjoyed is creating and maintaining websites, I worked myself into a position where I do that for a huge multinational corporation.

Even better, I’ve found someone who I love without measure, a person that I seemed to be designed for at a molecular level, and she for me as we11.  I can’t imagine someone more perfect.

Groovy mojo works.  It worked for me.  If it can work for me, it can work for anyone.  The requirements are that you have to believe, and you have to want it, and you have to be determined to study the ways that you sabotage yourself and develop ways to keep it from happening.

It’s an ongoing process.  You don’t set it up, get it going, and step back from it.  You have to live it.

That’s why, when I stumbled upon the quote, "Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself," I instantly knew that had to be my mantra, and so I made it the theme of this website.

So now if someone asks me what this website is about, I know what to tell them.

It’s about creating yourself.

Last year a lovely and talented writer named Jennifer turned me on to Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

Thank you Jennifer.

Thank you.

I’ve had this book for months and I haven’t even finished it. I can only read about two pages before I suddenly have to put the book down, rush over to my desk, and write something.

This book is so unique you can judge it by weight. It’s light, yet it holds more inspiration per ounce than anything I have ever hefted before in my life. It’s like condensed inspiration, slowly and lovingly rendered down to almost pure form.

I know I’ve touted this book before, maybe here, definitely elsewhere, but even if I’m repeating myself it deserves to be repeated. I sometimes wish I’d discovered this twenty years ago, but no. Things happen for a reason. The universe has a timing all its own. Something brought Jennifer and I together one morning at a Starbucks, and I think her gift to me was to tell me about this book. So the book came into my life at a time where I can really appreciate it, and savor it, and let it inspire me one page at a time.

I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who writes. Not just novels, but poetry, business reports, sales receipts, shopping lists … even if you don’t write at all. It teaches you in a very Zen way to appreciate life as it happens.

It’s a writer’s job to notice things. Moments. Instances. If you notice them, you appreciate them. Then you can write about them.

But the real gift here is that you learn to notice them.

Thank you again, Jennifer.

And thank you Natalie Goldberg.

A writer’s trick for keeping words flowing is to do timed writing practice every single day. Doesn’t matter what you write, and doesn’t matter how many words. Just pick a time and start writing. Say, 15 minutes, and set a timer, and write constantly for those 15 minutes.

This is an established practice that’s been around since the 60′s. But here’s a new twist on it.

Go to FutureMe.org and set up an account. It’s free.

This is a place where you write letters to yourself to be delivered to you in the future (up to 50 years in the future).

Every day go there and do a timed writing exercise and set it to be emailed to you one year in the future. Or longer. Or shorter. Whatever you want.

But it would be so cool to read all the random stuff that was in your mind a year ago today. Who knows what will turn up? What it will inspire? What forgotten thing it will remind you of?

Make sure you click their Google Ads everyday so that they can afford to send you the email a year from now!

…from MojoWriter.com