The Private Eye Exercise

I knew they’d catch up with Wishcraft some day. (Well, apparently the CIA did the same thing in the 40’s, but I don’t think they told anybody about it.) Here's what the wonderful Powell's bookstore sent up today:

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says about You New Science of Snooping
by Sam Gosling

Publisher Comments:
Does what’s on your desk reveal what’s on your mind? Do those pictures on your walls tell true tales about you? And is your favorite outfit about to give you away? For the last ten years psychologist Sam Gosling has been studying how people project (and protect) their inner selves. By exploring our private worlds (desks, bedrooms, even our clothes and our cars), he shows not only how we showcase our personalities in unexpected-and unplanned-ways, but also how we create personality in the first place, communicate it others, and interpret the world around us.

Gosling, one of the field’s most innovative researchers, dispatches teams of scientific snoops to poke around dorm rooms and offices, to see what can be learned about people simply from looking at their stuff. What he has discovered is astonishing: when it comes to the most essential components of our personalities-from friendliness to flexibility-the things we own and the way we arrange them often say more about us than even our most intimate conversations.

If you know what to look for, you can figure out how reliable a new boyfriend is by peeking into his medicine cabinet or whether an employee is committed to her job by analyzing her cubicle. Bottom line: The insights we gain can boost our understanding of ourselves and sharpen our perceptions of others. Packed with original research and fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guidebook to our not-so-secret lives.

Review:
In 1942, as the United States was entering World War II, the Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to today's CIA — was scrambling to find promising spies to go behind enemy lines. One of the aptitude exams it developed was the Belongings Test, in which candidates had to draw conclusions about a man based purely on items in his bedroom: clothes, a timetable, a ticket receipt.
... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review)


About the Author
Sam Gosling is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has spent the last decade conducting research on how personality is expressed and perceived in everyday contexts. He has been profiled by the New York Times, Psychology Today, and other publications, and he is featured in

The day I first held Wishcraft in my hands

I can't exactly explain how I felt. It wasn't exactly real. But a peculiar incident made it real very soon...

[more to come as soon as I finish the newsletter]

and then the one that makes me cry

I wish I had read your book years ago, Barbara. I'm 70 now,
> and wanted to be a doctor when I was younger, but my family wouldn't
> hear of it, not for a woman. Immodest.

No one should have this happen
> and your wonderful book will change that for so many people
> like me because I had dreams. SUCH DREAMS!


Okay, that's all I'll put on this blog. But you can see why I can't get anywhere with that foreword. Sigh.

One more story

> I'm a 47-year-old never-married woman who, up until the age of 40 was
> living for others...a high-powered, mega-bucks corporate careerr that
> always felt wrong. I even hated the showplace home I owned (but seldom
> enjoyed). After I was laid off at 40 my life finally became my own.
> With the help of WISHCRAFT, frequent flyer miles, and profit from
> selling my house, I did everything from trek in Nepal, coach running
> in Hawaii, get a Master's Degree, scuba dive in Fiji, and have a baby
> of my own at age 43! Now I teach college part-time and spend the rest
> of my time with what I love more than anything -- being with my
> daughter. SM, NC

Here's another story

"Barbara, I want to thank you for the effect you have had on my life.
> I hated my job and wanted to quit so I could be an artist, dammit, so
> when I got to the part that said you weren't going to tell me to leave
> it, I was ready to quit reading. Boy, am I glad I didn't. I love to
> take photographs. (I was the production manager of a cable network --
> basically a glorified janitor). I always thought 'it's who you know to
> get a gallery showing and I'm too old to go back to school.'
>
> ...Then I buy myself a camera for Christmas and enroll in a beginning
> photo class. I talk about it so my office mate tells me to hang up one
> of my photos in the office. People see it, start talking to me, some
> even give me equipment they haven't used since college and I start
> photographing my co-workers and friends and decide to make a gallery
> of my own house by filling up the empty hallway that leads to the
> second story. Visitors see my pictures and pass my name on to friends
> in need of head shots. An actress at work sees one of my proof sheets
> and a week later I am paid to redo her headshots.     She takes those
> headshots to a casting and the director asks her who did the pictures
> and soon I have a call asking me to place business cards in her
> office...and the business starts coming in.
>
> Last week the actress Teri Garr came up and said to me, "So you're
> the guy taking the great pictures," and two hours later I was
> photographing her, just to give her shots of herself 'behind the
> scenes.' The executive producer of her show saw them and asked me to
> photograph the whole cast...and said he didn't know why I was working
> as a facilities manager (head janitor) when I had so much talent...He
> ended the week by saying let's ee what we can do about making you a
> staff photographer next season.
>
> Here's my point: if it should happen, great. If not, that's great,
> too. I have what I love to do and I can continue to do it whether I am
> paid for it or not. Barbara, Thank you, Thank You, Thank You!!! Howard
> J. C., Photographer. " CA

Argh. Writing a foreword to the anniversary edition

My publisher is getting impatient and I don't blame them, but writing a new foreword is very difficult. Whenever I start writing I always end up entering the more compelling of the hand-written (and hand-typed) letters that I've saved. Don't feel you have to read what follows, but think about how it feels for an author to get letters like these (and this doesn't even count the amazon.com reviews) and if you ever thought about writing your own self-help book from the knowledge you've gained from your own experiences, do it. I've been told by publishers that most manuscripts they get are just re-hashing of everyone else's books, and truth is that when I wrote Wishcraft, I don't think I'd read any self-help books. Still haven't read very many. Don't usually like them very much.

And I never forget something I read a long time ago, when I bought one of the first 'blank books' they now sell at bookstores: "Being original consists of being entirely honest."

Don't be daunted. Being completely honest is a lot easier in this genre than in fiction. No veins to cut. And no one will forgive you for being a drunk.

But I digress. Here's what I wrote my editor yesterday:



Hi K

Still having trouble writing the foreword for WISHCRAFT 30th Anniversary, but I got started once again. And once again I went looking for the letters I'd received from readers, this time the only remaining box of hard copies, hand written and typed letters, mostly from a long time ago.

I'm only a quarter of the way through it and once again, I'm swamped, can't write the foreword, am calling for help. Gotta see what other people write in their forewords, because what I have below can't be right.

Not only that, some of the clips I've copied from the letters have me all choked up, especially the last one. I haven't yet found the original but the last lines are burned into my brain.

So I'm sending the whole thing to you. Why shouldn't you suffer too?

NOTES FOR A FOREWORD TO WISHCRAFT30

It's hard to believe that 30 years have passed since I held the copy of my first book in my hands, staring at the letters, WISHCRAFT, on the cover of the dust jacket, and, right under it, my name. The minute I saw it, I stepped, for a brief moment, into a time bubble and just stared at it.

The cover was beautiful, but it was also kind of weird-looking. The design department decided that the title looked enough like Witchcraft to put the words in a kind of Hebrew-ish, Kabbalah-ish font. The title didn't need any help. Even in a modern font, the paperback was continually called Witchcraft, and years later I'd find it on the 'occult' shelves of small bookstores. (One of these days I'll tell you how that mistake and that font saved me from a mugging in Central Park on that very day.)

My life didn't really change, not at first. I was still an overworked, hassled, single parent of two boys as I had been for over ten years, and I was still just scraping by financially, to say nothing of the fact that I was almost 45 years old at the time, which, in 1979 was considered kind of old for anyone, especially a woman.

But at that moment, with this huge-looking hardback book in my hands, I might as well have been Cinderella at the ball because I had become a published writer. I still shake my head as I think I did then, not quite believing it.

I'd always had a secret fear that I'd just pass through this life and no one would ever know I'd been here. But that day, everything became okay. It was on the record. I wrote a book, and I knew it was a good one because it was based on a painstakingly designed, 2-day workshop I'd been running (unprofitably) for almost 3 years. I knew how that workshop helped people. I saw impossible dreams turn to realities right in front of my eyes. I heard from teams born in that workshop that were still operating 12 years later. (One, in Champagne-Urbana has now closed its doors after 29 years of meeting almost every week.)

I hoped WISHCRAFT would help people just as much, but I wasn't sure if that was possible. I had carefully recorded every one of the workshops (that's about 10 workshops at 12 hours each, which added up to a lot of audio cassettes) because I knew the workshop was well worth saving. But in a workshop, people work face to face in small groups, and I was there to make sure everyone got what they needed and things rolled right along. I'd gotten most of the important words on paper, but wasn't sure that a book could give readers the same benefits.

A few weeks passed, things were back to normal, and then the letters started coming in. Handwritten letters, hand-addressed and stamped envelopes, a few every day, and then more and more until, after six months, I had cardboard boxes full of letters piled high next to the audiocassettes in my closet.

I couldn't believe the things people were writing me:

"What, me? Do something that would make me *happy??!!* You can't be serious! But this book is fabulous! You've inspired me to want to know more about what I really want. I see now why I've been discontented and now I want to give something else a go!" JJ, IL

Thanks for WISHCRAFT. I read it through in a weekend and have gone back now to do the excellent exercises. I can't begin to thank you for moving me away from all that 'affirmation' stuff and getting me on track to quit talking and start doing. I always hoped someone would step up to the plate and put into words what I was looking for, what I really want. Step by step you moved me right into clear sight of it and the fog has lifted." Preston S., Des Moines, IA
....

"Having my kids help me was an inspired idea. One of my children is now typing my bibliography for exams next week. Yesterday I sent them both with backpacks off to the store 3 blocks away to do some shopping and give me time to write. They are 13 and 8; They had 'no problem' shopping -- although some of the items they chose were a little unusual! You're perspective is so sensible, and so uncommon. You've done a lot for me already. Thank you.
Liz C, NY
...

"My family kept pushing self-help books at me, and I have to tell you that, WISHCRAFT is the first self-help book that ever spoke to me. I love your down-to-earth approach, your way of planning as a way of creating a 'passionate' path, but most of all your belief that positive thinking isn't enough. What a relief! Okay, finally I'm ready to listen. Thanks." James M., Dallas, TX
.....

"I'm not very good with words but I do want to say thank you and let you know how much your words have helped me. Your book, by far, is the only one that has helped me out of feeling hopeless and overwhelmed. I've had dreams, but they seemed so impossible that I kept going around in circles, never really getting anywhere. For the first time I'm taking one step after another and each day getting more of the life I want. How did you know how to do that?" Wallace S, Fresno, CA


As time went on, the letters got longer...