Self- help book

You are probably wondering what this blog is all about! Let me tell you.

Let me introduce myself. My name is LaRene Ellis and I have a active licensed real estate broker’s license. I took an hiatus from real estate to write novels. My first book was an fictional young adult Scf-Fi series.It’s about how four white Stones that rules a galaxy. They disappear allowing evil to take over. (Ages 10-17)

Then I wrote my story and how I learned to find a deep joy after I was abandoned at the age of four. Life taught me that a deep joy comes from making the right decisions when you’re faced with a tough trial. If everything in your life was away from you suddenly, do you know how to replace it with more? If you can say yes, don’t purchase buy the book: How To Rebuild Shattered Dream.

My first young adult book

Life always throws you a curve. In November 2008, I was diagnosed with HER-2/neu-Positive Breast Cancer, stage four. Ten years ago, they sent you home and tried to make you comfortable until you died. Now, they have new drugs that might help. The treatment at times has been hard. I found the steps in my book have keep me from becoming depressed and asking why me?

You lose your hair, nails and dignity. The pain from the chemo at times was unbearable. During one stage, I felt like I had my fingers stuck in a light socket for three weeks. It was here, I found that the principle in my book gave me a deep joy, when I applied them. Again, the statement is so true. When you are faced with hard times and you make the right decisions. You experience a deep joy.The trick is to know what is a right decision and I will tell you in my book.

The doctors have given me the okay to return to work. I will continue with the seminars that will teach you how to find a deep joy no matter what you have experienced in life. I’m not sure when I’m going to have it available on-line. If you sign up for an update email. I will tell you and I do not bombard you with emails everyday. Sigh up for updates and I’m looking forward to knowing you all better.

Below, I have some short videos. You can see testimonials from people and a Doctor. I created the videos before I had cancer and I was just learning how to be technical. It seems like a life time ago. If I looked at them now, I would probably shake my head with embarrassment. I’ve changed my approach, since the cancer. Until, I can change them.  You are welcome to click on the links below to see the different video and laugh at them:

Thoughts of Encouragement

I have a short video on anger. You can click on it below:

Anger – Thoughts of Encouragement

Self – esteem and self-love! Is is missing from your life. I have some interesting information for you. Click on the line below:

Self-esteem thoughts of encouragement

One of my favorite quotes! “Man is that he might have joy” This is why? Check out the video below:

Disappointments! I started my life out being devastated with disappointments. I learned some secrets to get them to work for you and not against you. Look at the video below:

You are welcome here! I hope you find some answers or discover a new world of healing.

LaRene Ellis

People are starting to know me as a novelist. I’m surprised to learn how many people want or are trying to become an author of books. It surprises me because it wasn’t my goal to be an author. Before I wrote my first novel, I never ever thought about writing. Instead, I went to great lengths to avoid it.

From what I hear from other authors, I think my story is unique. Most people, I’ve spoken too thought about writing their story a lot. They planned out what they were going to write, the genre, and the outline of how the story unfolded. For me, my story is different. I accidentally discovered a story that was inside of me. Then I couldn’t’ stop it from coming out.

I’ve found people fascinated with this story on how I became an author, So I decided to write about it on my blog, rebuild shattered dreams. Maybe it might inspire someone to discover a hidden talent that they might have been buried deep inside, like me. Sometime, we have no idea what we can do until we have no choice but to walk through our fears and do it. This is what happened to me. I’m so grateful for the experience. It showed a side of me that I didn’t know existed.

Before I tell you my story, I need to point out one more thing. This is important to know. I found writing anything to be emotionally painful. In my book, “How to Rebuild Shattered Dreams,” I go into detail about why a simple note terrified me. Today, I’m going to tell something that I didn’t put in the book. How I was forced to face my fear of writing.

For five years of my life, I had been a real estate agent and enjoyed it. Finally at the end of my fourth year, I decided to get my real estate brokers license. After, I received it. I made the choice to go out on my own. For me, it was the smartest thing, I ever did. What happened next made it possible for me to deal with the changes that were about to take place in my life.

It was November 2000 and for the first time in my career, I had sold my entire inventory. It was strange to have no buyers either. In my area, November and December are traditionally our slowest months in real estate. Ever though, I have written and presented offers on Christmas Eve. This year, it was going to be different. I was tired and grateful to take a break.

Five days into my vacation, I had the most bizarre event take place in my life that has permanently changed my life. I woke up discovering that I couldn’t speak. My voice was gone. When I tried to force a whisper, it caused my lungs to go into long coughing spells. If I laughed, the coughing spells would appear. It sounded and felt like I was coughing up my lungs.

The problem didn’t make it easy for me to go out into public. I wasn’t sick. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. They just called it a virus assuring me that I would have to ride it out. Little did I know that it would take me ninety days for my voice to return and my lungs be able to take a deep breath again.

The winter was long and cold. We had little wind and storms in our area. When you live in the tops of mountains, you can easily get an inversion where the cold air is trapped to the floor of the valley. This happens when you have little wind or storms. Even if no one lives in the valley, it can happen. Our inversion spread from Provo, Utah to Pocatello, Idaho and it was thick.

I struggled to go outside and breath the air that winter. Never in my life had my lungs been a problem for me, so why was the winter of 2000 to 2001 different. My health problems trapped me inside a room in my home. I couldn’t be away from the humidifier or air purifiers without my lungs coughing to hard it could cause my bladder to have problems. They weren’t portable. So every morning, I picked a room and stayed there all day breathing fresh, moist air.

In November 2000, I did not have an email address and I don’t think I knew someone who did. Maybe, I did know someone. I just didn’t use them because I was terrified to write. I do know they weren’t as popular then as they are today. Either way, I had to write down my thoughts on a note pad if I wanted something. Remember, I told you earlier that I found writing emotionally painful and it terrified me.

This virus seemed to perfectly design to force me to face my fears. In the process, I discovered something very special regarding me. Those ninety days, I spent trapped in a room with a humidifier and air purifier has forever changed my life. It changed my career and how I view the world in away, I cannot ever go back…

This post is getting a little long. In my next post, I’ll tell you what happened, during those ninety days. My hope is it inspires you find something special about yourself. I’ll see you next time. Below are a couple of the books, I wrote because of this experience.

Have we hit bottom in real estate? Real estate is usually everyone’s biggest investment. So what is happening within the market? According to Fortune magazine, it has been the lowest in seventeen years. So what does this mean?

Let’s break it down and look at it. The most important buyers in real estate are the first time buyers. They stimulate production of new homes because they usually buy existing homes. For every new home that is built, you need a new person in the market to take an existing home. The demand for housing is what pushes up prices. According to Fortune magazine, the newbies in real estate are coming back. If you want to read more about it, here is the link to it.

The downward spiral in real estate we experienced in this country really hit California the hardest. Analysts are seeing some hope, however. In May, they had an 18% jump compared to May of 2007. Yet, they are not saying it is over. Prices took a beating, plummeting 35% during the same period, according to a report from the California Association of Realtors.

What is happening in California and Florida will come back. Americans love bargains. When the price is right, people will buy again. Jonas Lee, a principal of New York based Redbrick Partners, which buys distressed properties all over the country, says he’s watching California closely, but isn’t ready to jump into the dray just yet. When they do, you know the market has hit bottom.

This is why I think they are waiting. California still has too much inventory. The Santa Barbara County area has been particularly hard hit. You can read more by going to the link here.

The point is real estate is still a good investment. It’s like the stock market. The only difference is real estate takes longer to move up and down. When you need to liquidate, it takes longer than stocks and mutual funds. You really need to remember this and keep your long-term money in real estate if this is your favorite investment.

In some areas the real estate market is slowly moving up. “In May, existing homes gained a 2% to an annual rate of nearly 5 million. The National Association of Realtors said that the number of existing homes sold during May rose 2% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.99 million units in May from a level of 4.89 million in April.

“Analysts were expecting the sales rate to increase to 4.95 million last month, according to a consensus of analysts’ estimates gathered by Briefing.com.”

To read more of the article, here is the link here!

So what happens if you really want or need to sell your home? In my other articles, I’ll talk about how to dress up your investment to get the most from your home. I am a licensed real estate broker and I would like to give you some tips. See you in my next post: Ten ways to sell your home quickly.

The last time, we talked. I was trapped in a room within my house. My constant campaigns were a humidifier and air purifier. Quickly, my bedroom became boring even though I had a television. I watched movie and read books. In the past, they had been a wonderful way to spend my time. Now, I found myself becoming quickly bored of the constant diet of them. My mind craved for something different. What? What could I do when I couldn’t speak a word or leave my new friends.

In real estate, I was constantly on the go physically and I had to use my mind daily. You are always thinking about how you are going to sell someone’s house or help a buyer find their dream house. With nothing to think about, I was lost. This was a new feeling and it left me frustrated and panicky. What if I never get my voice back?

Years ago, I met a woman who had lost her voice and all she could do was whisper. It was something permanent with her. The thought seemed to torment me. Would I become like her? I needed to think about something else. But what?

It was nice to see my children. I’m a mother of six. They were all adults at this time so I was really left me to myself. My oldest son didn’t live too far from me and he would stop by often on his way home from work to see how I was doing. It surprised him to find me one day in my office with my air purifier and humidifier. It took work to move everything back and worth.

He wondered, what could I possibly being doing in there? I couldn’t use the phone and I had no email address. Quickly, he started to pressure me into divulging my activities. Successfully, I sidestepped them. I didn’t want to tell him why I was there. It embarrassed me to tell him that I was writing a story. I started to dread him stopping by. I was having fun and I didn’t want my newly created world to be shattered by him telling me that I couldn’t do it.

I would like to take you back to why I decided to move my friends into my office. After a couple of day in my bedroom, I decided to move into my office, looking for something to keep me from going stir crazy. It was worth the work of moving everything, if I could find something to entertain my mind that would allow me to avoid my thoughts. The woman I talked about earlier had permanently lost her voice and could never speak above a soft whisper. I remember her story was surrounded by a mysterious illness. My situation was so unique it reminded me of her. It concerned that I would end up like her?

I wanted to do something that would help me not think about her. So I moved into my office finding nothing that I could do without my voice. Shortly after being in my office, an idea came to me. What if I could write a story? Immediately, I went into a panicked state. The thought had triggered my past emotional pain. (If you want to know why I had a fear to write, you can read about it my book, How to Rebuild Shattered Dreams.)

The panicked feeling dissipated when I promised to never allow anyone to read it. Secluded in my office, I felt protected and the story seemed to ward off my negative thoughts. Little did I know that I was about to embark on the most fantastic journey. It was beyond anything I had ever imagined.

I had no clue that I was a creative person and my mind was starved to be one. Since, I had never allowed myself to ever think or do anything with writing. I used to make fun at being a writer. My favorite phrase was, “Why write it when a picture could replace a thousands words.” If it weren’t for this experience, I would’ve never discovered a hidden talent, love and passion for something that I had thought to be unattainable.

One thing, I did years ago before this experience. I took some classes on how the mind worked. We learned that our thoughts are always vibrating and moving. This is why sometime, we can be talking with someone and we both get the same idea or thought at the same time. We both happened to latch onto the same vibration as the thought. So our minds had the same thought.

I wanted to be a receiver of a new thought. Today, I needed it to be a story. So I asked my mind to connect with a wavelength of one and bring it to me. Being a mediating state, I kept my mind clear, waiting for something to happen. How long I sat there, I do not know. I just sat there until it happened.

“Time Out, I hate time Out.” The words started to flow into my mind and I immediately started to type them into the computer. The story changed my life and I dearly love it. This post is getting long. So I’ll continue the story in part 3. If you want to keep up or start from the beginning of my journey to becoming an author. You can subscribe to my email update; you’ll receive the previous post and the future ones.

The words of the story started to pour out and I quickly became entrenched in these people’s lives. I knew a paragraph ahead where the story was going and there always seemed to be a new twist that I wasn’t expecting. There were no preconceived ideas on where the story was going. I just let it flow. If I had planned on writing it for someone else to read, I wouldn’t have made it past “Time out. I hate time out.”

There was another factor that would have stopped me from writing the story if I had known before hand. When I finished writing my story, I was shocked to learn it was placed in the Sci-Fi genre of literature because it took place in another galaxy. I do not like mythical creatures and wierd monsters so I had always shyed away from reading Sci-Fi. Yet, I dearly love Star Wars. They are no mythical creatures or monsters in it. George Lucas wrote a story of a struggle between good and evil that took place in another galaxy and so did I.

Each day, I found myself spending eight hours a day in my office writing. At night, I found my condition, making it hard to sleep. The experienced taught me that I like to take a deep breath in my sleep. This would cause me to wake up coughing hard and it sent me running to the bathroom. My bladder didn’t do well when I went into these coughing spells. For some reason, I would never just cough once. It would go on and on. Then I would be quiet for a period of time.

For some reason, my coughing would happen around five in the morning. I would lay there trying to go back to sleep but my mind would wonder where the story was going next. So I would get up and move my humidifier and air purifier to my office. This shocked my family. I’m not a morning person and seldom was awake at sunrise. They are really beautiful. I never appreciated sunrises until I started to write.

My oldest son lived less than a mile away and he would stop by to see how I was doing. When he found me in my office working on something mysterious, he became suspicious. He wanted to know what I was doing that seemed to make me so happy. I tried to discourage his interest but he seemed to be relentless.

When I told him, he wanted to read my story. There was no way. I wasn’t going to let anyone destroy my newly created world, by laughing at me. The joy of living in my secret world was wonderful and I was weary of criticism. Day after day, he would stop by and ask to read my story. Finally, I broke down because he promised not to laugh. He had never done anything to break my trust in the past so I let him into my world.

Each day, he stopped by to exchange pages. To my amazement, he was excited to know what was going to happen next. It wasn’t only me. With the holidays coming up, we met as a family. Everyone was there but one son who was living out of the country. At the table, my oldest son started to ask me about the history of these people. Where did they come from? What was there culture like? Why was it so different from ours? Without thought, I knew and would write it down on my pad of paper that I carried everywhere with me. He happened to be at the opposite end of the table. So everyone read my answers as the paper traveled to him. I still didn’t have a voice.

My second to the oldest son asked to read the story. He shocked everyone. This boy or man had never read anything for fun. He made fun of those who did. He read but for information only. I trusted him and made him promise to not share it with others outside the family.

A couple of days later, I heard from my second son. One morning, he called to leave a message on the answering machine that he was angry with me. The night before he had stayed up until two in the morning reading. He was upset to hear the alarm clock go off at six in the morning, telling him it was time to get up for work. He was caught in the intrigue of the story and discovered how fun reading for pleasure could be.

They pushed me to publish the story. Yeah! I wasn’t going there and I refused. It took me two months to get through the first book. Instantly, I knew there was another one. So I continued writing because I had no voice. The first of the year is your prime time to get listings in real estate. With no voice, I was still trapped in my office. So it meant that I wouldn’t be able to bring in new money for about six months with my pipeline dry.

My sons and their wives wouldn’t let up on getting the story published. I finally consented to doing it. Shortly, I mysteriously stopped coughing and I could take deep breath just fine. My voice was back so I could go back to real estate.

To keep my promise to my children, I sent the first book to a local small publisher who accepted manuscripts as a contact. I hoped they would tell me that the story would make a lousy book.

Instead, they told me I had a very strong story. They were going to turn it down because it wasn’t written in story form. They were interested in seeing my new writings. This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted them to tell me that the story was weak. I knew it wasn’t written in story form and they would refuse it.

I was disappointed because I knew their answer meant work. For the first time, I really wanted to lie to my children but I couldn’t do it. Everything, I had ever taught my children were on the line. Could I practice what I preach? This was the hardest situation, I had ever been in.

When I did the research on my story for genre, I had written fiction, Sci-Fi/ fantasy for young adults. This is the hardest arena to get into. There were so many books to compete with. They are hard to market too. What had I done? My kids were watching me expecting me to live up to everything I taught them about not quitting. In my heart, I didn’t want to get started but I had promised them. So I put my heart and soul into it, hoping they would appreciate my sacrifice.

This is what kept me taking one more step. You probably don’t want to know about the rest. So I won’t go into how I got it published. It wasn’t easy. This is how my career got started. My example to my children kept me picking up myself and moving forward. Many times, I had wished that I never let my oldest son read it. Then I read an email from an excited fan and it gives me the courage to take another step forward. I would’ve never published it or started a new career, if had kept it to myself.

You can read the first chapter at Stones Quest history.