Today, or on any other day, you can use the power of eight (infinity) to clear your energy and rejuvenate yourself. Make a quiet place for yourself where you will not be disturbed. Sit upright but in a comfortable position. Breath deeply from your belly until you begin to relax. Imagine a white light glowing at your base (red) chakra (see chart below for chakra locations and colors). See that light begin to glow red. From that center imagine a ribbon of light flowing toward the front of your body, around your side and into your back. The ribbon flows around your other side, making a figure eight. Let the ribbon flow a few times, growing brighter and more intensely red each time. As you visualize this imagine that your most basic concerns (money, survival issues, fear) are released into the light and burned away. When you feel moved to, disconnect the ribbon and let the light return to the chakra.

Repeat this with the six remaining major chakras as follows:

sacral (orange)–creativity, sexuality
solar plexus (yellow)–power, ego
heart (green)–love, caring
throat (blue)–communication
brow (indigo)–imagination, visualization
crown (indigo)-spirituality, enlightenment

After you have cleared each chakra, take a few more cleansing breaths then open our eyes when you are ready.

This is a much simplified version of the Infinite Spectrum meditation created by Laurelle Shanti Gaia. Ironically, or maybe not, you are supposed to do this meditation daily for eight weeks to completely clear the chakras.

For a fun chakra test, go here.

Born a woman, became a man, gave birth to a girl and became a dad. Is that a rhyme? Guess not, but it is weird.

At long last, an explanation for my glaze cravings. Neuroscience Marketing takes on Krispy Kremes and your brain will love you for it.

Connie Briscoe offers this post on Virtual Book Tours. There’s a lot of good information here.

Editorial Ass tells how not to piss off your editor (before she is your editor).

Elaine Viets waxes humorous (but oh, so true) about the Spitzer debacle.

And finally, Ann Christopher wins my heart with her post at Access Romance titled Die, Winter, Die. I’ve never been too fond of winter, except for the perfectly timed Christmas Eve snowstorm. As we speak I’m twisting the knife in old man winter’s back myself.

Evil is only misunderstood energy

To this I say, hmmmm. I’ve never seen evil as some unified force like Satan or the devil that wreaks havoc on humans. Whatever evil there is in the world we do to each other. A Khalil Gibran quote comes to mind:

Of the good in you I can speak, but not the evil, for what is evil but good tortured by hunger and thirst. When good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts, it drinks even of dead waters.

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, I’ll tell you. When you write crime fiction, especially if your characters are three dimensional, you have to have some theory as to how they got that way. Some folks like to say he was just crazy, or inexplicable motivated but I can’t go that route. I feel a compulsion to know and thereafter impart to me readers exactly what my villain is about. And since I don’t believe folks are born evil or tormented by un-manmade demons, their backstories need to be complex and plausible. As a reader, those are the types of stories I enjoy as well. As a mother I’m glad neither of my kids is out in the back torturing bunny rabbits of something. That’s not a good sign in fiction or in life.

Physicists figured out the complex mathematical equations for making objects invisible by bending light around them last year.

A group of engineers at Purdue University in Indiana have now used those calculations to design a relatively simple device that ought to be able to – one day soon – make objects as big as an airplane simply disappear.

David Copperfield and friends must be quaking in their boots about now.