June 15...Psychic Connections

Have you ever noticed how when you get a new car, you start seeing the same one, everywhere? Or (for the women out there) if you're pregnant, suddenly everyone in your office, or on the bus, or at the grocery store, is also pregnant?

I read in Parade Magazine, that bastion of useless information, that this phenomenon happens when things become relevant to us. Evidently, there's so much information coming at us all the time--think about the sheer number of people that cross your vision in one day as you travel from point A to point B-- that most of it never registers in our consciousness, until it becomes personally relevant.

Like say you just bought a Dodge Grand Caravan in candy apple red. You looked at it, you studied it, you shopped around for it, and finally you bought it. It's relevant to you, so you start noticing it, even though it was there all along.

I was thinking about this in the context of working on my book. I've come across all these little connections that make me think I'm psychically on the right track.

A central element of the story--a house that may have been a stop on the underground railroad--was inspired by the house I grew up in. That much is obvious.

In the course of my research, I wanted to read some first person slave narratives. I could only find them on microfiche at the local library. As I scrolled through the first few pages, I discovered the original book containing the narratives is housed at the Smith College library. My alma mater. Interesting. I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed if the book was at Podunk U. instead of Smith, but still.

Doing some research on an historical figure I used to create a character for the book, I discovered he had a daughter who was one of the first black women to attend Mount Holyoke--the alma mater of my three sisters. Hmmmm. Not likely I would have noticed if she had attended Vassar, is it?

I took my son to visit two colleges--Washington & Jefferson in PA and Marietta in OH. Both admissions offices had books on their coffee tables (not the same book) about the underground railroad and the colleges' connection to it. Would I have picked it up if they had books on gardening instead?

Am I just noticing these connections because they're relevent to me? Or is there some other kind of psychic connection going on here?

All I know is, after months of mentally berating myself for not making better progress on the book, today I randomly picked up my copy of Writers Digest from February 2008, and the issue is devoted to writing a novel.

I realize this should be no surprise because it is Writers Digest, after all. But the very first feature fairly screamed my name. Stop obsessing about writing your novel, it said, and spend 15 minutes every day doing it. The second feature: roll up your sleeves and pound out your novel. The third feature, about rules for a novel-writing group--something I've been meaning to do for months. And finally, 10 steps to rewriting your novel.

That is indeed relevant to me. Either that or the editors of Writers Digest have been following me around. Or maybe the novel writing gods are tired of my internal whining, which they can hear even if nobody else can, so they're planting relevant information all around me so I'll get on with it already.