Starting today, you can write the Weblog that you've always dreamed of creating. You can have better professional relationships, more financial success, personal wealth, and physical well-being. The keys to a satisfying life and a vibrant, thrilling, passionate world of intimacy and explosive sexual performance are yours for the taking. What you need are the hidden secrets of Power Blogging.

The best part is that the road to excellence doesn't have to be long or arduous—in fact, there are many shortcuts available. The problem is that we're busy people. If you had the time, you could read the works of the classical philosophers from Hume to Russell, the ancient sages from Musashi to Confucious, and the collected wisdom of every work from the Tao Te Ching to Chang Po-Tuan's Secret of the Golden Flower.

The reason we have churches is that few of us have the leisure to fully unlock the mysteries of the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Carlos Castenada's Yaqui chronicles, and the intricacies of the mystic Hebrew Kabbalah. So we listen to experts because to fully delve into these systems would be the quest of a lifetime.

Then you'd want to try fire-walking, Tai Chi, Chi Kung, Zazen, ninjutsu, Tantric meditation, Yoga, and Buddhist chanting. And you'd still have to comb the collected knowledge of the physicists, the poets, the visionaries, and the eccentricities of Sartre, Ram Das, Leary, Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson. You could do all these things, and risk mental illness, psychic burnout, and total organ failure.

There is a better way. The Raven has done all of this work for you, and has cross-leveled the hieroglyphics of the past against the cutting-edge developments of modern psychology, marketing, neurolinguistic programming, and New-Age spiritual comparative analysis, synthesizing the touchstones of the collective unconcious into a series of simple, practical procedures that can free you from the bondage of writer's block and fully unleash the fires of burning self-actualization that you've been straining to release.

We call it Power Blogging, where the best writers are constantly and consistently at the crest of peak performance, where ideas flow like magic from fingers to keyboard. and you can get there in a series of simple, easy-to-follow steps:

Prepare the Ground: The pharoahs inscribed the walls of their tombs in arcane glyphs that even they couldn't read. You can do the same thing. On the walls around your writing space, tack up 3X5 cards inscribed with foreign phrases like non sum qualis eram and homme moyen sensuel. Your "pyramid of babel" will trigger your subconscious and stir the underpinnings of your consciousness.

Plant the Seed: Visualization and belief are two sides of the same coin. You won't reach your peak unless you desperately desire to reach it. Affirm your commitment by looking into the mirror each morning and saying, "I deserve the Nobel Prize for blogging!" As the body follows the head, your skills will obey your intention.

Water the Garden: Since you may not have access to peyote and mescaline, we recommend starting each writing session with a generous glass of tequila. Sorcerors and shamen across the ages have known the efficacies of desert herbs in breaking down the barriers between this world and the eternal. Your inhibitions will melt away like ice beneath the noonday sun.

Nurture the Seedling: We've known for years that you can't determine the location and the velocity of an electron at the same time. Creativity obeys the same law—it vanishes the moment you look for it. Distract yourself with music or an uncomfortable chair: Allow your inner voice to come forth by tricking the drunken baboon of ego into paying attention to the inconsequential. Stretch your limbs, touch your toes, breath deeply, and begin to write with a clear mind.

Destroy the Predators: We are prisoners of our own language and culture. We can't see our own nature from the outside, because we're trapped in the confines of what we think is real. Believe in the impossible, annihilate self-doubt, and vanquish the roadblocks on your path by harnessing the tigers of the trivial. Just as the largest worlds exist in the insanely microscopic, just as we know more about outer space than we understand about the deep sea, look inward to embrace the universal.

Prune the Sapling: The smallest bush bears the largest flowers. To grow strong we have to cut away the inessential. Nurture your inner critic by redlining the obvious. You aren't competing with others, you're defeating your former self. Just as walking is the continuous act of falling forward, let the gravity of what wants to happen flow into existence by getting out of the way.

Reap the Harvest: It might happen overnight, and it may come in fits and starts, but you'll experience flow, when you're fully engaged in what you're doing, when every part of your being is in harmony with desire. Look at your hands when you're dreaming, catch the faint glimmers of the farthest stars from the corner of your eye, be aware that you're crafting the perfect, but don't notice it.

The final step, of course, is realizing that there are no shortcuts at all. Hit [delete] and start over.

12:19:32 PM