How John and Jeanie Fly Came to Be
I envision John and Jeanie Fly as entertainment that highlights the worldview emerging from understanding the Law of Attraction. Many self-help books have been written covering this territory, but little fiction in which the characters consciously use this approach to the world.
Many books also provide vignette’s highlighting people’s experience with conscious reality creation. What I like about John and Jeanie Fly is that it tells a more inclusive story about people using this understanding as an integral part of their approach to the world.
Finally, I see John and Jeanie Fly as a bridge for people who are interested in the Law of Attraction but feel uneasy about the idea of communicating with non-physical personalities. It’s a work of fiction, with some things that are obviously not true. The reader doesn’t have to accept the validity of channeling, or even the Law of Attraction, to explore these ideas.
The Beginning
One night after the Abraham-Hicks Hawaii cruise in December 2005, I had dream. I wrote it down (essentially the first chapter of the book) and sent it to a small group who had participated in the Abraham cruise seminar. We called ourselves Club Chocolate, because most evenings we would meet in a lounge on the ship, where the stewards would serve us all the coffee, tea and chocolate we could eat. We were all so high from the cruise, feeling we could be, do, or have anything, that some actually wondered if Jeanie and I could really fly.
The immensely positive feedback I received inspired me to continue writing. By September 2006, John and Jeanie Fly: Living the Law of Attraction was completed, and by the end of the year, a sequel (though I originally conceived of them as one very long book). I had no draw to go on the Hawaii cruise that winter. However, when we got an email announcing the Mexico cruise in 2007, I immediately wanted to go.
The first day on the ship, I gave Esther Hicks the manuscript for both books, and Jerry spent the week reading it. It turns out Jerry and Esther had taken their family on the Hawaii cruise that year, and had we gone on that one, he probably would have been too busy with them to spend the week reading. (Esther told me at the end of the Mexico cruise that several times she had wanted Jerry to do things, but he wanted to read the manuscript instead. That felt good.)
My hope was that Jerry would like it enough to pass it on to their publisher, Hay House, and then we would get published. Jerry liked it and recommended some changes that freed me up to take the story in a better direction. Jerry also suggested I talk with Mike Sherlock, their videographer. Mike has written some plays and knows a lot about story structure. He also inspired some ideas, especially how to make the ending of the second book more powerful.
I made the changes, and a few months later Jerry forwarded the book to the president of Hay House. However, they decided to pass on the book. I was never formally told why, but the impression I have is that they didn’t want to publish a fiction author. (Their organization is geared toward teaching rather than entertainment, rarely publishing fiction titles, and then only by their established non-fiction authors.)
After exploring several other new age publishers and some agents, I decided to stop trying. Nothing was falling into place. The story I tell about myself is that whenever I want a job, all I have to do is show up. I’ve never needed to frustratingly search want-ads or send out endless résumés. So I bought a car-racing video game and stopped thinking about the book. I decided to wait until a clear opportunity showed itself, and it did a few weeks later in the form of a book on self-publishing in the digital age.
I always thought the best (and most validating) route was to go through an established publisher. What I realized after reading this book and several related ones, was that a large publishing house was unlikely to take a chance on a new author writing out-of-the-mainstream material. A small house might take the chance, but they have limited promotion budgets, and unless they were students of Abraham or similar teachings, wouldn’t know the intended audience as well as we do. So we would be doing most of the promotion ourselves. We figured getting the book printed was the easy part, and Visionary Play Press was born.
As soon as we made this decision, everything fell into place. We spent a week on the beach in Kitty Hawk, NC (interestingly, the birthplace of human flight), and I serendipitously took the picture for the book cover before we even realized we would need one. Jeanie and I have really enjoyed the process of turning the manuscript into a published work. It’s one of those situations where it’s amazing how busy we were and how much we loved it.
I wrote the book as realistically as possible, imagining what might happen to two people in our culture (us) if they suddenly could fly. Abraham has a process they call Scripting. Basically, it involves writing down as precisely as possible the future you would like to create, similar to creating an architectural drawing before building a house. So I wrote the book with the intent that many of the positive things in it would also happen to us in real life. Some have already manifested, not in the precise physical detail, but in emotional similarity. It’s unlikely Jeanie and I will physically fly, but we can have the emotional and experiential equivalents—and so can you.
Channeling
An interesting aspect of the chapters on the base, is that I wrote the essence of them in one sitting. It was as close as I came to the story being channeled, and I could feel my mother’s energy as I was writing. While never for violence, she was always fond of the military’s structure and precision, and her views are reflected in the presentation of the personnel on the base.
My introduction to channeled material was much as it is described in the book. On a practical level, the source of the material that Esther, Jane Roberts, or other less famous people get is less important to me than the quality of the material. How does it make me feel? Can I make effective use of the ideas?
There is a variety of channeled material available, with much of it focused historically on connecting with one’s deceased friends or relatives, and in other instances, personal guides. The essence of the original books of the Bible could also be considered inspired or channeled material. For the most part, my interest has been in material that presents a worldview, a philosophy that helps me (and everyone) function more effectively in the world.
This is the aspect of the Seth books that interested me most and the area that Abraham focuses on. The principles for using the Law of Attraction are not that complicated or difficult to understand: Focus on what you want rather than on what you don’t want. Make the best of what you have and be eager for what you can imagine.
It is the application of these ideas to our personal adventures that offers an endless opportunity for exploration. It has also been helpful for me to read or listen to material which reinforces these ideas, to counter the constant daily messages in our society that we are victims who have to maintain a constant vigil against forces wanting to harm us.
So I wrote these books as a fun reminder to myself, with the intent that they would be enjoyable to others. I hope you have as much fun reading John and Jeanie Fly as I had writing it.
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