We Women Writers

Kartar Diamond - From Feng Shui to Memoir: A Writer's Evolution

• Jane Jones • Episode 26

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In this conversation, Kartar Diamond shares her unique writing journey, transitioning from poetry and creative writing to authoring Feng Shui books and a personal memoir about her experiences with her son's mental illness. She discusses the challenges and decisions involved in self-publishing versus traditional publishing, the impact of personal experiences on her writing, and the healing power of writing. Kartar emphasizes the importance of demystifying both Feng Shui and mental health, encouraging new writers to embrace their creativity without self-editing.

Takeaways

  • Writing Noah's Schizophrenia was a cathartic experience for her.
  • She aims to demystify complex subjects, like Feng Shui and mental health.
  • Kartar finds joy in writing and encourages others to explore their creativity.

Quote:

“I didn't know if they would think lyrics to pop songs would be academic enough. So, I just said, This is poetry. Just less rhymey, less catchy, no verse or chorus is noted on the paper. So, this is my poetry, and they accepted me.”

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Jane Jones (00:29)

Hello everyone. Today we have with us Kartar Diamond, who will be speaking about her writing story and the journey to writing her professional and personal memoir books, Feng Shui for Skeptics, and Inoa's Schizophrenia, A Mother's Search for Truth. Kartar is a classically trained Feng Shui consultant who has had thousands of clients and students since 1992. She helps people locally and worldwide with both residential and commercial properties. Her three trade paperback books and six e-books have sold worldwide and educating readers about the most authentic and advanced feng shui practices. Kartar has also incorporated her books, e-books, and case study lessons into her private online school. Welcome Kartar.

Kartar Diamond (01:20)

Thank you. Glad to be here. Once again.

Jane Jones (01:23)

Yeah, it's the second time. Thank you. All right, so Kartar will open the conversation with, Please tell us about this writing journey that you've had.

Kartar Diamond (01:34)

Well, if we go way back to when I was a child and a teenager, I was writing poetry and song lyrics. And then I became a creative writing major at UC Santa Barbara. And at that point, I thought I was going to have to put writing aside because, honestly, I didn't know how a person could even make a living being a writer. And then I went on to do other things for more than a decade.

But I became a Feng Shui consultant, and as a natural progression of that, I wanted to write about it because I'm a teacher at heart. So, my first Feng Shui book called Feng Shui for Skeptics, in terms of what I had in mind initially and what came to be were very different. And mostly that has to do with the publishing aspect. Although even initially, I was trying to write a Feng Shui book after the wave of trendiness had almost peaked back in the late 1990s. And I really wanted to write something different than what was out there. And so, at first, I thought I would write about all the crazy experiences that I've had as a Feng Shui consultant. And the working title was Diary of a Mad Feng Shui Master, especially living in Los Angeles at the time, engaging with people in the entertainment industry. I had a lot of funny stories, but when I was discussing that with a literary agent, she said, No, no, no, no. We don't care how funny the stories are. When people go to the bookstore and they're looking on the shelf for Feng Shui books, they want a how-to book. They want to know how to perform feng shui to the best of their ability on their own. It needs to be instructional. And, at that point, I was also working with a book proposal coach who was quite good and quite thorough. And her students were producing book proposals that were 50, 100, 200 pages. I mean, they left no questions unanswered for prospective literary agents in terms of how great that book was going to be, who the audience was going to be why there's a need for it, etc. Completely rewrote my book proposal. But then I encountered a literary agent who said that virtually all Feng Shui books had lost money. She said every major publisher has done a Feng Shui book, and they're probably not going to want to pick up another title. So, I had that question, do I I self-publish or not? You know, and and the industry has changed a lot over the last 20 years since Feng Shui for Skeptics came out, I'm really glad I did self-publish, because the book's still in print. I still sell it through Amazon. It's become part of my teaching curriculum for my online school, as well as the two other Feng Shui books that I wrote. And as you mentioned, I've got case study lesson plans and e-books. I have a couple thousand pages worth of reading material for my serious students. So, that decision to self-publish worked out really well for me. In terms of what other people are expecting, especially new authors, it's basically a decision where if you want to go the traditional publishing route, you're going to make a tiny fraction of what the book's suggested retail price is because the publisher wants to recoup all of their expenses and their marketing and whatnot.

But there is some prestige involved in having a book published the traditional way, but it's a longer process also. You know, once you find a literary agent, they may want to have it under contract for a year or a year and a half to be able to really shop it around, you know, to other, to publishers. And then once the publisher gets it, they might take another year or year and a half to produce it and get it on the shelves.

And I have heard as of late also that a lot of publishers, they only want to work with somebody who has a big social media presence, you know, like a YouTube influencer who's got a hundred thousand or a million followers who can essentially market their book themselves. So, you know, it's worth it to do for a lot of people, but it's not necessarily easy. So, with the self-publishing, I did something that was kind of in between what a lot of people are doing nowadays, which is that I hired a book development company to help me format it, edit, find a good paper company to work with, etcetera. And they also, this book development company, they did press releases for me and they sent them out to hundreds of magazines and newspapers around the country.

So that kind of gave me that launch. And then when I saw how they did it for my second and third books, I did my own press releases and my own marketing. And I found in my industry and everything I've been doing professionally is that the second book helped resell more of the first book, and the third book helped resell more of the second and the first book. So, they, you know, they worked together. I think that's probably true of a number of authors, if not most, that once you've written more than one people, you know, there's that's also that business saying about how you get 80 % of your business from 20%. Yeah. And I have, you know, even now, like just this morning, a lady in Turkey downloaded three of my ebooks, you know, so it works out to have a digital format as well. And that's what a lot of people are doing now with Amazon and various other print on demand or digital books that companies that even came before Amazon started doing it. So, there's different options and people have to figure out, you know, what is going to serve your needs, your demographic, your budget, your timeline, et cetera, to figure out what's best for you. So, I had self-published the Feng Shui books. And then, when it came to writing Noah's Schizophrenia, a memoir, totally different subject matter, I didn't want to self-publish. I didn't want to incur all the expenses and the responsibility. And I thought, well, let's see what's happening in the digital world. And just to go back on that, because I'm a Feng Shui consultant by trade, the books help promote me and my business. They're like expensive business cards. A certain percentage of people who read the books hire me. Whereas with this memoir that I wrote, it was done purely from the aspect of one, it needs to be cathartic for me. I knew it would be. The personal experiences that our family went through having a loved one with serious mental illness, very passionate about it and feeling like it could be a mental health advocacy tool. So different perspective where honestly I didn't really care how much money it made. I wanted to have a healing impact on various demographics that I was aiming the book for.

And so, I started shopping at the traditional way. I got, there's a book out, I want to say the title is something like the writer's guide to literary agents. And it just has listings of hundreds of literary agents. And it lists what types of books they're interested in. You know, I'm going to shop my book to a literary agent that takes only books on science fiction or sports. You look for the literary agents who's going to be rooting for you and interested in your topic. So, I happened to contact this one literary agent who also has a publishing company. So, it was kind of a one-stop shop situation. And she says, we're a digital book company. And so I went with them.

 

And it happened to be in 2020. When that lockdown hit, that was my signal: OK, you're probably not going to have as much business as you usually do. So, now's the time to write that memoir. And what preceded it was about two years before that, I had offered to have a writers group at my house once a month for fellow NAMI moms. NAMI is the National Association of Mental Illness, and it's a family support group. And at the time, I was going to weekly family support meetings and meeting other parents, especially moms of people with mental illness. And it was an interesting kind of organic and spontaneous decision to have the writers group to head it up. I never, you know, taught a writer's workshop or anything like that. But at the end of one of our family support meetings, the facilitator, she always wanted to end it on an up node and remind, you know, parents that they should indulge in some self-care. And so, she would go around the room and say, You know, what are you going to do for yourself? You know, your son might be homeless this week, or your daughter might be hospitalized, but what are you going to do to release the stress? And so, you know, some people would say, I'm going to go for a hike. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm going to go get my nails done. And I said, well, I'm going to write. And by the way, if anybody else is interested, you know, maybe we can get together sometime and write. And like 20 people said, yeah, let's do that. So about a month later, we met for the first time, and we met monthly at my house. And most everybody there had not any kind of professional experience writing. They hadn't even really dabbled in journal writing themselves. So sometimes I would give people a topic, and then the next week they would come back with these little vignettes and things that they were wanting to explore in their own emotions, and I was writing little vignettes about my experiences with my son and with the mental health care system. And it turns out that none of those little passages that I wrote ended up in my memoir, but it was like, you know, the training wheels, was getting the juices flowing so that less than two years later, I was like, ready to go and finally get all that stuff out of my system.

I still feel funny calling it a memoir, but I don't know what other genre you call it because it's not about my life, you know, from infancy to present tense. It's really just a snapshot of about a decade and a half of my life and my reaction to my son's mental illness. So it's as much about him as me, but it's, you know, it's about how we were responding to one emergency after the next. So, very different premise, very different goals, different type of publishing involved.

Jane Jones (13:42)

I would like to this idea that the contrast between writing the Feng Shui books and the writing the Noah's Schizophrenia Mother's Search for Truth. one of them is starting from you wanted to talk about the work that you were doing. And you, what was that like? What was the experience like about taking, first of all, experience of, I'd like to write about what I'm doing, and then the actual doing of it. And then we'll look at the other.

Kartar Diamond (14:16)

Yeah, well again, like I said, I wanted to really distinguish myself from everything else that was out there. And frankly, a lot of the books were very similar. I was coming in as a classically trained Feng Shui consultant with a lot of different information compared to the very popular and trendy new age version of Feng Shui. So I already knew that if I discussed what I do, that it would be unique in and of itself.

But I had to transition out of that mindset of just teaching through funny stories to actually teaching more like the way I do in the classroom and in the workshop, where you go from step A to B to C, and you build on the knowledge. So at that point, it was easy enough to redirect myself because in creating a table of contents, I was able to just extract from the workshops that I had taught as well as even the more advanced material, there's a process of, you I mean, there are logical ways to teach feng shui, at least from the instructional standpoint. And I say that because there are some teachers who will spend a lot of time just teaching theory, very profound spiritual, metaphysical truth. They'll spend a week talking about yin-yang theory or chi flow, know. Whereas a lot of people who take three-hour, you know, intro classes, or who are the casual reader of a book, they want to learn something right away. What can I do? What can I put here? What can I change to change the energy of my house? And I don't really care about the history of feng shui or the metaphysics of it. So, I had to try to reach a compromise where I would teach or write in the books a little bit of theory so that things don't sound just superstitious, right, and out of context. You know, give some theory enough that it makes sense of why we're doing things. And then, you know, you fill it in with illustrations and with samples and stories. Feedback that I got from people in person or through email right away was, Wow, we can actually tell that you've had experience with this and that you've gotten results and feedback compared to other authors who seem to be sort of writing more academically. And in some cases, some authors almost even skeptically like I'm covering this because the LA Times told me to, not because I really believe in it. They always act like the devil's advocate kind of thing. that process.

 

For me, it was easy. I tend to be kind of an organized person anyway. But once you're organized, you don't necessarily have to write from chapter one to two to three to four. Once you've got your sections delineated, know, I might have decided that chapter three is going to be a little boring for me. So, I'm going to just do that later. I'll do that at the end. Now, what I mean by boring is like filling in a lot of charts and things like that. I didn't necessarily write from the first word on page one to the last. You can skip around, especially for writers. On some days, they might feel more creative than others, or other days, or they just have something on their mind. You go with the flow in that sense. And then once you've got everything, then you can go back and edit also find the best place for everything. Yeah. Yeah. So that was part of process.

Jane Jones (18:05)

Gotcha. So just to stay with this a little bit, you talked about that this was something you did. It was something you were an expert in. You're a Master, Feng Shui Master to write something, it is about distinguishing yourself from other people and tapping into your unique way, which is the master's way of communicating Feng Shui in a way that is honors and respects all of those theories, but provides somebody something that they can use. The goal is to one, distinguish yourself, be unique, but really produce something that's helpful and useful right away.

Kartar Diamond (18:53)

Yeah, I've had people say to me, I read your book and now I get it. I read other books that were confusing, or there were gaps. I mean, even that's been the inception of my school because initially I started this very relaxed, low key case study club because people were coming to me who had actually graduated from other Feng Shui schools with very minimal instruction and they were, you know, stamped, now you're a consultant, and they still had tons of questions and no experience. And so I developed this advanced curriculum of case studies. There's now 38, there's going to be 39 by the end of the year. And from that case study club, then I formalized my actual school. So that's, that's like a thing with me. I like to clarify the misconceptions. I like to share with people information that's not common, still, after decades of feng shui being popular, information that's still not largely known. And yeah, it satisfies a lot of my creativity to problem-solve for people and explain things in a unique way. I try my best.

Jane Jones (20:07)

Yeah, so it's very personal, like the books that or any writing that writers do or people that are looking to write, is that it is very personal. You're very clear about who you are and what you want to do, what you want to communicate and how, and using your strengths, being organized, and having this experience, and having how to respond to people when they come to you.

So those are strengths that you have, and you're utilizing them in the course of writing these feng shui books.

Kartar Diamond (20:41)

Yeah, you know what's interesting, though, in terms of talking about being unique, after I had written Noah's Schizophrenia, which is our family's story about our total frustration with the mental health care system, it's a broken system, you know, I wrote the book for several different audiences. One was for family members so that they're not going to feel so isolated and alone and stigmatized as they go through this journey with their loved one. The other demographic that I wanted to reach out to was mental health care workers who may not have had the time or the interest to actually know what it feels like from the parents' perspective. It's actually shocking how many mental health care workers, whether they're therapists, nurses, case-management, they don't just call you up and say, hi, got your son in my office, and I'd really like to get a little history from you. That never happens. So, I wanted to educate the mental health care people more about how they should rely more on family members for accurate input, especially when you're dealing with somebody who has psychosis and might be out of touch with reality for a certain period of time. You need to get an accurate assessment of what's really going on.

And then thirdly, I wanted to reach out to policymakers so that maybe some of the screwed-up laws could change, and things could be better in the future. And then fourthly, I did want to also write for the person out there who may, they may have a friend who's got a level with mental illness, and they don't ask a lot of questions because they're embarrassed or they don't wanna bring up a touchy subject. They want more clarity, but it's still kind of stigmatized. So, they can read this book on the side and go, okay, now I kind of understand more that kind of thing. But in that context, here I am being this author who wants to be unique from Noah's schizophrenia.

 

I can't tell you how many people have said, Oh, my God, it's our story. You know, I can't believe how you went through exactly what we went through. I even encountered somebody whose son went to the same out-of-state school that my son went to that was supposed to be a therapeutic environment turned out to be a nightmare and made him worse. And so it's on this certain level of being relatable where I may not have been that original after all. I might've been telling a composite story of thousands of people, but it still struck a chord because people need to feel in that respect of, yeah, I'm not just this weirdo out on a limb, that this is stuff that happens to other people. So, I just wanted to add that little sidebar in there is that I told the Everman's Story in that memoir.

Jane Jones (23:48)

The idea that what you're writing about is going to... written from the desire and the intention to support and encourage people, lots of groups in lots of different ways that you hope to reach, whether it is Noah's Schizophrenia, Mother's Search for Truth, or any of the Feng Shui books. And something I wrote was...in Feng Shui, you're changing the energy of a person's house. You're working with the energy in a person's house to maximize harmony, maximize good flow, maximize whatever it is the person is trying to achieve in their home, right? And then writing is akin to changing the energy within a person's self, where you... You experience, or even then, I want to be careful. I'm feeling like I think I believe that when you're writing, you're changing the energy within yourself. You're looking through the various places, the mazes in your mind and your heart, and the connectivity, and you're pulling out the things and making the best out of what you have, this physical, mental, emotional body. And you said getting it out of my system. When you were writing it, the Noah's Schizophrenia, A Mother’s Search for Truth that you were writing all of the vignettes, and you were just kind of getting it out of your system. And when you're doing that, you're rearranging everything in your, within yourself, your house, in here. And, and so while it's…they're different, they're very similar.

How do you feel now, having, and I want to explore more about the NOAA Schizophrenia Mother Search for Truth in a minute. How do you feel now that you have these two academic technical workbooks and then this one that's just really from the heart and really... From a personal experience. How does that? How's that working in you? Is it as a writer?

Kartar Diamond (26:03)

Well, it does have a holistic benefit because I was able to be passionate about both subjects, but in very different ways. They're so different. In fact, there's some people who have even tried to sit in judgment of me or wonder, here she is, this lady who promotes balance in people's homes and businesses, but what could be more chaotic and unbalanced about a portion of her family life with a son with serious mental illness? Now it is an obvious statement that Feng Shui doesn't cure everything, right? It's about 20 % actually Feng Shui. It first comes your destiny, and then something called luck, and then your... Total environment is your feng shui. And then there's another aspect that has to do with studying and becoming learned and educated. And then there's another part of your life, which is like spiritual and good works, and you just integrate it all into your life. And so, I did find it rather ironic, know, that here I am in one part of me, I have a charmed meditative, very fulfilling life, and yet I have a family member who's a tortured soul, he used to be. Now he's very much better in very concrete ways, which I'm so happy to report. Because he got the care he needed, the professional care he needed all along. So feeling that and understanding that and part of the education in the memoir, was, you know, for the public at large, a lot of people think that any mental illness, including schizophrenia, is born out of, you know, an unhappy childhood, neglect, abuse, what have you, as if we're all born with as a blank slate, and we become who we become because of our environment. And that is clearly not true. There's a certain percentage of the population that is genetically predisposed to mental illness, but certain environmental features, even something as natural as puberty, could bring about the emergence of a mental illness. So, you know, part of it was educating the public about what this really is. It's a brain disorder. There's even a faction of the mental health advocacy community that's trying to get schizophrenia reclassified as a brain disorder, a medical illness, not just a psychiatric illness, so that there'll be less stigma and more money for research. You know, it'd be approached very differently. So as time goes by, I hope that happens as well. But, you know, this is just stuff that I've, this is my life, you know, and what I've had to deal with is, you know, seeing situations that I couldn't cure with a water fountain, right? Couldn't cure with a piece of metal over here or a salt lamp over there, you know? So, yeah, very humbling and ultimately having to rely on a level of spiritual strength that I never knew I would be tested to that extent. All those years as a teenager and in my 20s, doing yoga and meditation, and we feel great. We're high. We're in bliss. But what about it? You know, what happens when you have a suicidal child? You know, so, so, yeah, it's brought me full circle. And I'm glad that I've, you know, been able to express myself verbally. It may have, you know, people are artistic, they're musical. And there are other ways that people cope with these things; sometimes, people are just volunteers and their service to others, which is fantastic. In fact, in the mental health care industry, there's a lot of people who have a mentally ill family member. And that's what got them interested and more empathetic than the average person on the street. They've known it firsthand up close.

Jane Jones (30:21)

It dawns on me that the book and your experience with your son's mental illness and with schizophrenia, and in writing this over here. These two sides of you, it's kind of interestingly balanced, is that both of them demystify, like over here you're demystifying this mental health, you're demystifying the mental health environment, and so it's going to be helpful. No, it's not. And here's some experiences. So be careful, stay away from those. And so, you're clearing the air on that one and clearing the fog. And then you're destigmatizing it. So a person that has this mental illness, so when we, maybe to the very basic level for like when I do my everyday work-a-day world job and I'm...dealing with somebody, or even I'm finding I'm responding in a really unusual way, then it's like you gotta give the person space because there's something else going on there. And you're destigmatizing that so that it becomes easier for people to just give everybody a wide berth and not excuse and not allow, but not judge and condemn and not retreat, right? And then... 

Then the same thing over here with Feng Shui. Some people think that it's not real, and other people think it is. And you're coming with, well, I'm going to demystify it. These are very real concepts. These are really real experience. You try this and see what happens. And then you're destigmatizing it. So, if somebody doesn't like it, it's OK. But if they do want to dabble it, they want to think about it. They don't have to feel like they got to of, you know, sort of only do it between the hours of three and five in the morning where nobody can see. I can study, I can do it because they, and then they can start talking about it in natural ways. And I'm, you know, because the focus of the podcast is about writing, and it strikes me that how often writing comes into what we're doing.

And in these two areas of your life, writing is a part of that. And I know in the book you mentioned the lyrical writing you did when you were a child, and you mentioned it earlier, if you could talk about that, because I seem to remember it had to do with some of the processing feelings or something, the lyrical writing that you did as a child.

Kartar Diamond (32:51)

Well, I've always been a fan of music, and from a pretty early age, I was just constantly listening to the radio. I think I used to have the radio on while I was sleeping at night, in fact. And yeah, by the time I was an early teen, I was writing a lot of lyrics. I played guitar. I eventually became a bass guitar player for a while. And that just seemed natural. It's like breathing; other writers can understand this, where there's almost just a thing you have to do, you know? And I suppose people who are actors might feel the same way, that it's just how they express themselves. Somebody else might be a sculptor, and they just, and for me, you know, most of the time I'm in a great mood when I'm writing, and I get almost in like a trance state, but I have used writing to cope too. Like there were times when things were really out of control with my son, and maybe I didn't know where he was that day or night. And I'd go write an article on Feng Shui, you know, Feng Shui and Doorways, or Feng Shui and Pets. And I would use it as a way to distract myself and calm myself down. So, you know, so there's a reason for writing, whether somebody ever has any commercial goals or not, you know, it is what it is. It's like a meditation. Some people walk, and that's a walking meditation. You gotta have your eyes open when you're doing that kind of meditation. But writing is just something that I did start as a young child. I had a couple hundred songs, and they were, you know, when I look back at it, I still have the notebook with some of those songs. And I've wondered whether I should type them up neatly and make a little digital book to give to my son someday because he's actually a great musician. And before he became ill, I assumed he was gonna be a professional musician. His teachers used to tell me that all the time. So it runs in the family and sometimes creative people are eccentric at the very least, and then maybe more than that. So when I submitted a...an application to go to school at UC Santa Barbara, where they have this College of Creative Writing. It's a funny thing that I just flashed on recently, where I didn't know if they would think lyrics to pop songs would be like academic enough. So, I just said, This is poetry. Just less rhymey, less catchy, no verse or chorus is noted on the paper. So, this is my poetry, and they accepted me. I had a full scholarship. I promptly bombed out. When I was a kid, I was a slow reader. I was into writing, but not really into reading. And then, I don't know how it happened. Somebody must have given me a book, but I started reading science fiction. And I loved it. I started reading more, and I started reading faster. And so the key, the aha moment was, I just, you I need to read books that I'm in and stories and things that I'm interested in. Here, you know, my slow reading, non-reading former, you know, persona. So, I think that, you know, for people who are writers, they're gonna be passionate if they're interested in the topic. In fact, it would probably be a real bummer to have to be writing, you know, like technical manuals or instructions on how to use some apparatus, you know, if you're real, if your real heart was in writing histories or romance novels, whatever it is. 

Jane Jones (36:48)

Yeah, we have a writers group where one of the women is a Science Fiction writer. And I, we hear what she's writing and we're really enthused and excited about it. I, it's not something that I would ever think to write. And, and I, doesn't bother me because she's, she's doing it. So I don't, I don't have to do it. Right. And it, you're doing what you can do. You said earlier that the way you go about writing stuff is when you were talking about the Feng Shui books, is that you had a chapter, and that chapter is sort of the spine or the outline, and you can build on one or the other. And when…

Kartar Diamond (37:38)

It's like a recipe, you know, you got to mix the wet with the dry, and then you put it together, you know, so it's instructional, the thing that it doesn't make sense to talk about something unless you've explained something else prior to that, bring it all together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would hope so.

 

Jane Jones (37:56)

Yeah. So what would you say was the most profound thing or the, one of the profound things that you take to heart relative to your experience of writing in general and then writing in the two genres?

Kartar Diamond (38:11)

My most profound.

Jane Jones (38:14)

What makes you, what's the most, the thing that comes to mind that, let's say that you're most thankful for, that you are really, when you think that you know that you had that experience in the writing that you're grateful for.

Kartar Diamond (38:30)

Well, I'm grateful that I was somehow propelled to write even though I didn't get the proper career coaching that I could have and should have. For instance, when I was at UC Santa Barbara, there were classes in Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, where you were supposed to read everything that that author wrote and then write some comparative analysis of everything. And being kind of a slow reader, I was not able to keep up with the reading. It was like 1,000 pages a night. And I never knew about that whole aspect of college life where you take stimulants and you don't sleep. I was fully in my yoga practice at that point and going to bed at 9 and waking up at 3 in the morning to do two hours of yoga and meditation.

So,I didn't have the work ethic maybe that was needed to get through those courses. But there came a point where I really panicked. I ended up signing up for some kind of computer programming class at one point, which I almost failed because I was like, how am I going to make a living at this? I mean, reading about dead authors and poets, and like, I'm doing something here that's wrong. Now in retrospect, if I had gotten a degree in creative writing, I could have gone in lots of different directions. I could have gotten into publishing, editing, teaching, maybe even continuing to pursue the songwriting, the lyric writing. And I'm I'm just mystified that my parents and other people around me didn't say, you know, talk to a career coach or just get that degree and you're going to find that that's a resume credentials to get you into advertising or you know just a lot of different things that I I can see myself now how I could have had a lot of fun with script writing and advertising and journalism and I wrote a letter to Robert Hilburn the Times LA Times rock music critic back in the mid 1970s I loved him I was enthralled I thought he had the coolest job in the world and he said, just write, write some, you know, review some David Bowie albums for your school newspaper, you know. So, I'm glad that I managed to, you know, break through and write in spite of the fact that I didn't know that I could make a living doing it. I didn't know how it could enhance the career that I ultimately chose. So, yeah.

Jane Jones (41:14)

You didn't really you didn't have any a lot of outside support or encouragement. Did you have very many roadblocks or?

Kartar Diamond (41:28)

In the writing in particular?

Jane Jones (41:30)

In the writing and when you were younger, and as you're growing, and then in the course of these books, any roadblocks where people said you shouldn't do that, that were negative people like women with the Feng Shui, she said You know, leave the jokes at home, let's write a how-to book that…

Kartar Diamond (41:49)

Yes, my crazy stories with you know all these people in LA. No, I'm just, you know, I'm grateful for things that, you know, worked out the way they did. Although I wasn't thrilled that I was going to self-publish, you know, I kind of wanted to have that prestige, that status of, you know, having some New York publishing house do my book. But later on, when I realized how much control that I had, that's important to me. I mean, even the titles of my books are a little... strange, but I like them. There's sort of like a subtext going on with all of them. Like the Feng Shui Matrix, Another Way to Inherit the Earth. I'm sure that a regular publisher would have said no no no, you need to write the 14 steps to Feng Shui Romance you know you know everything is about benefit, benefit, benefits spell it out for the you know, the reader, and so I would have been edited to a point that I might've been kind of unhappy. In fact, I was just thinking about this the other day. I ended up working with a literary agent who did foreign rights. And he would go to Frankfurt every year, and he would take all these American authors, and he'd get them translations. And I had my books translated into Spanish. And Russian, and Indonesian.

In Malaysia, they just reprinted it in English. But I felt kind of frustrated when the Indonesian publisher, they took my lovely cover, and they made this really ugly black cover. I should have pulled it out of a box to show it to you. And they changed the title, Feng Shui for Skeptics, Real Solutions Without Superstition. They changed it to Simple Feng Shui that wasn't the point or the essence of the book at all. In fact, it was kind of the opposite, you know? And so, you don't have control with what a publisher's going to do, you know?

Jane Jones (44:03)

Yeah, it dawns on me because I have read the Feng Shui for Skeptics and I've had lots of conversations with you before. In fact, my first introduction with you is in Thousand Oaks. Right. You did a workshop on Thousand Oaks Boulevard right by Rancho Road there, somewhere right in that area. And my coworkers and I went to went to your class. 

Kartar Diamond (44:25)

Akashic Record Bookstore.

Jane Jones (44:27)

Yes, the Akashic Record Bookstore. Yeah, I don't think it's there anymore.  Yeah, I think she closed, but anyway, well, I should go look, I should drive up there and see. And then this book is that what you do, and what We Women Writers is attempting to do is to give people their own experience of something. Like when you read a book, if the book is, and this is one of the things that was really frustrating for me when life is like, and it's still, dips and has its turns and things, is that long time ago, I would pick up a book and it would be telling me, this is how to fix your problem. And if you do this, if this, if you feel like this, this, this, and this, and this is happening, do this, this, and this. And I would do that, and it didn't work. And then they say, well, but if you haven't, because you didn't do it long enough. What do mean I didn't do it long enough? And then now they start putting qualifiers as to why it didn't work. And it was very frustrating because what I now, for me realize is that people have an experience of something and they find what works for them. And then they turn it into a system and they say, Here's my system. This will work for you. And what I expect, what I experienced from your books, is here's a system. See what you think. And you got any questions? I'll, you know, I'm here to answer them.

And like we women writers and then, my Pebbling Writing, Creative Writing course is about, this is, this is not going to so much about my depths of my story, but more like to the extent that this is how this came about. And this, these are the key points and you can apply these points anytime, anywhere. You figure out how to make these work. But if you, if you would like a structure, here's a structure, but in that structure, make it your own. And so when you are doing this, it's particularly helpful to women who are learning to write or are still writers and finding that they're still trying to find their own way of doing things. They can read other people's writings and to the extent that I'm permitted by your writing, and the thought and the intent of your heart that goes into it, I'm free to experience it the way I need to, and then I can figure out what helps me. And so, when you do this, are you aware of that, that that's the way you're teaching or that's the way you're writing?

Kartar Diamond (47:12)

Partly, but you might point out at some point for me the areas that I'm not aware of. Like, I know that in Noah's Schizophrenia, I had a number of flashbacks where I would take myself and sometimes my son back to a moment before he became mentally ill, and where our mindset was, particularly for me. And then fast forward, okay, here we are now. And boy, I'm looking at things very differently now.

And so I just, yeah, I like to give people that leeway and that experience to change your mind or see things from a different perspective. I write with a lot of analogies, so that people, almost like storytelling in and of itself, so that people can pick up sometimes kind of lofty or spiritual concepts in a more concrete way. So I know that's one of my styles.

Jane Jones (48:08)

You said about that you find yourself writing, you're compelled but not in a negative, not in a hard way, but just energetically compelled to sit and write. Do you ever have times where you need to write but you for some reason are resisting it?

Kartar Diamond (48:28)

No, I almost never have a writer's block. In the subject of feng shui, there is so much to write about. And then sometimes I do think commercially. Like, I'll give you an example. I recently reread all of my 37- 38 case studies that are part of my advanced curriculum for students.

And I wanted to reread them. I caught a few typos also, but I wanted to edit them in case there was anything in any of those case studies that was to what I call period eight specific. So in Feng Shui, we live in certain time cycles and 2004 up until 2024 was period eight and 2024 and now until 2044, it's period nine. So with all the examples that I was giving in those case study lesson plans, I wanted to make sure that I could now add some period nine-relevant information. And so as I was updating, and I was kind of enjoying reading some case studies that I hadn't even looked at in more than a decade. And then as a commercial part of my mind, I thought, all right, I need to write in my blog post excerpts, do a little thing. So, I ended up in the course of a month, I wrote 37 blog posts, just, you know, excerpt on, you know, the case study for Feng Shui and round houses or, you know, excerpt from the case study on a house that's in a locked phase. And so I turned it into another reason to write, you know, just a little, another marketing technique, another way to promote the case studies, but also a chance for me to extract from the case studies, something that I hadn't written about or not at length to the public. So, my brain just kind of works that way now. And I think it helps with my SEO, because I don't really do anything else to promote myself. And then somebody from Romania.

Jane Jones (50:36)

It comes, you pop out and pop up on Google searches and stuff.

Kartar Diamond (50:40)

I do, yeah, that's kind of amazing.

Jane Jones (50:43)

Yeah, yeah. So the experience you have of writing is, and I would wish that more people would have that experience, even if it's intermittent, that they find that it's a pleasant, it's something that's almost joyful, if that's the word I could use. It's very harmonizing. It's in harmony with who you are, and that that's a big plus for you with the work that you have to do. And then also makes sense to me that that would be a real big plus knowing that you were going to go from technical writing over to this other, really highly emotional, highly stressful environment to be able to then pull that together. Would you

Kartar Diamond (51:27)

But think about where I started, though, as a kind of a loner teenager writing, you know, I was writing some love songs. It was always unrequited love, but I was also writing this bizarre David Bowie Steely Dan, you know, inspired cryptic, bizarre stuff. And so I started from that before, you know, a certain part of the mind very free flowing, and then reigned myself in later on with a certain subject that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And then there are some people who will write on a variety of topics. There's actually, I reviewed his Feng Shui book. Now I'm blanking on his name.

He wrote, probably 50 books. He wrote a book on Astrology and Feng Shui and Palm Reading and Dreams and Numerology and Face Reading. He was into the Occult, basically. And he had a system where he could take a subject, study it to a certain length and enough to be able to put a book together, and then had this huge series of books on all kinds of things, esoteric.

So there's some people like that. I'm just thinking right now I had a client years ago, she passed away, Amy Wallace. She was a well-known writer, literary. Her father, Irving Wallace, was extremely famous. And her and I used to talk about things besides Feng Shui,and for her, writing was torturous.

I mean, she was paid huge royalties for her books and whatnot, but it was a very long drawn out, difficult process. I mean, she was always happy with her result, but she didn't enjoy it at all. She's like typing there on a typewriter in the 1980s, you know, very old school. And so, you know, as we're, you know, having this discussion and different people are listening to it, you know, for some people it's not just that easy or they have writer's blocks and you know, I was thinking that just to write about anything, let's say you have a block about something that you really want to write, you're afraid to get going, you know, like I'm looking at a cup on my desk right now that has pens and pencils. So maybe I'll write an article about the secret life of these pens and pencils and know what they're spying on me, or, you know, it's like I could write about something else, maybe a grocery list. And then that might get the juices flowing, you know, or maybe go for a walk. You know, when people walk and they start alternating their arms and legs, it's just like people who play Tablas and the Drums, you know, there's different ways you can get out of a writer's. In fact, after we're done with this, I'll start doing a Google search probably like how do you get out of a writer's block? yeah, there are ways.

Jane Jones (54:41)

How do you, writing during the writer's prompt, we find in the, with the pebbling is I created these, this way of looking at something, and there's a creative writing piece, and then there's a starter, and then there's a five-minute time thing. And I had to kind of pull that together because I had to find a way around the sort of the pea soup, the hurdles I was immersed, surrounded with. And so I had to try to find really short little pieces, and then they didn't mean anything. There's no, it's not loaded. It's not, it's just like, that's cute. And then when you share with somebody, the somebody comes with a totally different experience of the prompt that I come with. And so then that's, then that's even bigger for me, and helpful. And then whatever my mind is trying to sort out, I seem to be able to handle it easier because I've given myself an opportunity to just relax and take it easy. I track very easily with what you just said. Yeah, it's a difference. If you wanted to, were you gonna tell somebody to support or to encourage a woman to write, what would you suggest? What would you say?

Kartar Diamond (56:02)

Well, I think a lot of people new to writing they start editing themselves right away. And I think you just have to liberate your, just write anything and everything. Nobody's gonna see it besides you anyway. So, I think that's part of it is just don't, just let it be stream of consciousness if that's what needs to get you going. And I mean, all I can say is that it's been very gratifying for me. It's like trying to describe chocolate to somebody who's never had chocolate. Just go for it and start writing. If you're just doodling on the page or there's other exercises. One thing that I used to do as a lyricist is that I would listen to a song and put totally different lyrics to that melody. So maybe there's a way that somebody could plagiarize in a good way just to get their juices going. 

I'm reading something just now that I bought a $400 book, a very rare book, off of eBay. There's something in it that's quite special, but I've looked at it, I've thought, I could do this. I think I could do this also. I think I could replicate this, and it would be very entertaining. This certain, what they did was they did sort of an I Ching version of  another Chinese art form. And I looked at it and I thought, know where they're coming from. It's like they're speaking in a certain coded language. And just as an exercise, I think I could do that too. Yeah. I'm in a whole other school of feng shui actually. But yeah, there's a lot of different things. I mean, probably even doing puzzles might work, you know? Just get that brain going, get some Ashwagandha, and some focus factor.

Jane Jones (58:01)

Right? Take in and being kind to yourself, as you said, like, no, the editing, just try whateer it is you have to do, don't edit because like nobody's going to see it anyway. If you want to, people can just tear it up and burn it and flush it down the toilet, or they can, you know, put it in the garden and ashes, and you know, it's not going to hurt anything. It's, you know, it's going back and it does what it does when it comes out of your pen on the page or your pencil on the page. So, I want to ask, when you write, do you write with a computer or do you write handwritten or a combination of the two?

Kartar Diamond (58:40)

It’s been all on a laptop. You know, my Feng Shui books were written mostly in airports, my airplanes. Not only because I wanted to write, but I'm kind of a nervous flyer and there would be a way to completely zone out the turbulence is that I'm like working on chapter four. So yeah, so I, in fact, my handwriting's gotten kind of bad because I've gotten out of the habit, like most people have, you know, writing with a pen. But no, I find that that helps. It's easier to edit yourself because it's cleaner, you know, and like going back to thinking about my client who was writing on a typewriter, you know, make one mistake and you got to write the whole page over again. It's just so much easier, you know, our computers.

Jane Jones (59:31)

Yeah, or you have your pen and your paper and you have a you make a mistake you put a line through it and then if you're trying to listen to somebody you're talking or you're at a conference or something and you start doodling and you're doodling all of your paper and you look at it sometimes I have the experience of the doodles look like frantic because I want to get out of here. I don't want to be sitting here. So it's like, it's telling me something. And, and, but the handwriting can be particularly useful in, in connecting very quickly to what is yourself and, to have the typewriter on any keyboard, it's, it's not necessary. It's not bad. There's just different, different experiences.

Kartar Diamond (1:00:14)

I don't know if it's true or not, but I had heard kids these days are not learning cursive in school.

Jane Jones (1:00:19)

It's coming back. They took it out of the school system, and they're bringing it back.

Kartar Diamond (1:00:24)

Yeah, I mean, it's a whole, it's like a lost art practically, you know.

Jane Jones (1:00:28)

It is, you see some of the artisans with the brush and the Asian, the Chinese, how they write, and the Jewish scribes and the other Middle Eastern countries, and how they write their script and everything. It's beautiful, and our kids hardly know how to print. 

Kartar Diamond (1:00:49)

or spell LOL.

Jane Jones (1:00:54)

I'm really resistant to all of that. I'm not going to give in. I'm not doing that. Sorry. It's just I've got to keep hold of that. So, writing is just a really neat experience. But you did mention, and just we'll wrap up, you mentioned that it could be sculpting. It could be anything that you find that you like, that you're doing, you're expressing yourself, that you're interested in, that you like, that brings you some joy. Just to begin with those things.

Kartar Diamond (1:01:30)

There's compulsive interior decorators too. They make the space perfect.

 

Jane Jones (01:02:01)

There's a cut there, one of my daughters-in-law, she does that work and I keep telling her I'm gonna fly her here to have a look at my apartment and fix it. I keep trying to clean it up and move it around, and yeah, for me it's just too much stuff, but in too small a space. So my solution is a bigger space, but it's not working right now.

Kartar Diamond (01:02:29)

The creative people are often messy. Don't beat yourself up. 

Jane Jones (01:02:33)

Good! I used to say when my kids were little, you know, would, it has to be messy or something and I go, you know, one day the kids are to be gone and you're going to wonder who's making the mess. And, and it's true because it's usually it's like, you know, I can blame the kids, but it's usually me that's making the mess because it's still there. So it must've been me all along.

Anyway, we'll sign off and thank you so much for your time and your generosity and sharing the story of your Feng Shui books and then your Noah's Schizophrenia, Mother's Search for Truth. Yeah, we appreciate you very much.

Kartar Diamond (01:03:15)

You're very welcome. Visit my websites.

Jane Jones (01:03:20)

That information is all going to be in the reference information on the podcast. it'll all be there. Thank you.

Kartar Diamond (01:03:28)

Thank you.