Stephanie Gunning Enterprises LLC

OFFICIAL POLICY NOTIFICATION

As of today, July 17, 2020, our company, Stephanie Gunning Enterprises LLC, is no longer offering “referral fees” / “commissions” / “overrides” / “mandatory gifts” to any individuals who refer clients to us.

To clarify our position: At SGE LLC we have never had a formal affiliate program. However, there has been some confusion among some of our allies and colleagues that our occasional voluntary “thank you” gifts were formal commissions. To avoid future confusion and ill feelings with these friends of ours, we simply won’t be offering them anymore—from this date forward.

If you have been a referrer, we hope you will continue to tell your friends and colleagues about our services, and we encourage you to do so because you respect the quality of our work product. We value the trust that you place in us when you send someone you know to us.

Past agreed-upon gifts to referrers for introductions to new clients up through July 17, 2020, will be honored. In general, these will be paid as the income is paid to our company, and not prior to that date. That said, the date on which any gift is offered to a referrer is ultimately subject to our discretion and not the date on which any specific introduction has been made.

All legal contracts with SGE LLC clients are private matters between our company and our clients. We are committed to our clients’ well-being, confidentiality, and publishing success, and we are very proud of our recent achievements on behalf of our many award-winning clients.

A main reason for our issuance of this official statement of policy is that we believe offering commissions to referrers sometimes may blur the lines of relationships with our treasured clients and create the appearance of professional conflicts of interest.

If you have been a past referrer to us for editing, proposal writing, publishing consulting in the past, or any other service, we thank you heartily for your kindness in sending your friends and loved ones to do business with us. We appreciate your support and promise always to do our level best to take good care of those whom you send to us for the types of services we offer.

All the above said, Stephanie Gunning and SGE LLC reserve the right to decline to do business with anyone of our choosing. We reserve the right to alter this policy at our discretion in the future. This is an internal matter.

We wish all of our past clients and referral partners well.

If you have any questions about this policy, please email us here: contact@stephaniegunning.com

from The Writer’s Book of Inspiration

Writing is love. It’s the beating heart pulsing on paper. It is music, magic, and mystery, an effort to gain mastery of forces, of impulses, of desires, of ideas, of life. To those who feel an intense magnetic pull to write, little explanation of the phenomenon is required. You know who you are. You also know the pull is only the beginning. There is a reason others look upon those who write as they would mythical creatures, like unicorns and dragons: Writers have the power to name and to reveal. Once you sense this possibility in yourself, you likely will be hooked on it forever.

Yes, writers are admired. But writers should also be suspect. Watch out. Everything is fair game to writers. Their lives—meaning anything and everything they feel, think, do, experience, observe, or dream about—can and probably will show up in their poems, plays, films, essays, and books. As admirable as they may be, writers can also be dangerous.

As a writer myself, I feel I’m always trying to capture fireflies in a jar. But how does one capture a dynamic, moving force like life or an emotion in images without it losing its vitality? How can one put a frame around a picture that has no beginning and no end? I always do my best to approximate my perceptions in words. But some days I’m a better writer than on other days. Some days my writing sucks. On the best days, there’s nothing like the feeling of writing.

No one can stop you from writing if you want to write. That’s one of the beautiful things about it. You might think that someone else has to give you permission. That’s a false belief. Writers really get better at writing when they stop looking for approval—both their own and others’. For encouragement, I used to keep a note stuck up above my desk that read: “Be bold.” Then there was the time in a Chinese restaurant that I got a fortune cookie informing me, “One day you will write a book.” I taped that above my computer screen. Whatever message you need to hear to grant yourself the freedom to write whatever you want to write, tell it to yourself.

It’s only human nature to compare ourselves to other people and study their habits. It’s human to want to belong to a tribe, to fit in. For these reasons, it is fun to observe how other writers write and live. How do they do it? What does it mean to them? Am I the same way? I hope you’ll be excited to flip around in this book and see what random pages you land on.

When I began compiling quotations for The Writer’s Book of Inspiration, I was impressed with the extraordinary highs and lows creative writers experience while pursuing the craft. Some describe virtually tearing their hair out in desperation, others are pragmatic, even mercenary, and compulsive, and many express delight and spiritual wonder. The ones I love best are those that provoked me to laugh and to think. They all made me proud to call myself a writer and lifted my self-esteem. In these remarks from men and women of different ages, races, and eras, I felt a mirror being held up to my daily life as a craftsperson, an artist, and a living human being. There is tremendous humanity to be found in how they go about and often struggle at doing their best work. Nothing else matters more, when you get right down to it than being human—with all that it means.

The literary life is a path of self-discovery and revelation. If you have chosen to walk this well-worn path, remember to step a little bit outside of the bounds of cultural expectations from time to time. Trample the grass—or better, take off your shoes and feel the grass between your toes. Never rush and always daydream. Nap at strange hours. Design your own rituals. Ignore the ringing telephone, and other forms of buzzing, chiming, beeping technology. Let yourself forget what day of the week it is. Travel. Read. Cultivate relationships with odd and curious people. Whatever it is you feel, whatever you think or believe, make the blank page your friend and no matter where you go, you’ll be at home and have something to do. Be surprised by life.

Excerpt from The Writer’s Book of Inspiration: Quotes on Writing and the Literary Life, compiled and edited by Stephanie Gunning, reprinted by permission of Creative Blast Press. Copyright (c) 2013 by Stephanie Gunning. All rights reserved.

If you’re a writer looking for an editor or support in your self-publishing endeavors, you are invited to schedule a FREE 15-minute discovery conversation with Stephanie. Access her calendar below.

Sandra Rogers is a licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice , specializing in object relations and transpersonal psychotherapy. Schooled in the depth psychology of Carl Jung and the archetypal psychology of James Hillman at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, she believes that self-knowledge, including an awareness of the personal unconscious, opens the door to living an effective, authentic life.

The idea for the Queen archetype sprang from her long-held interest in the Crone archetype (the third in the classic Triple Goddess paradigm), which she found most women strongly rejected. The Queen is a new developmental stage sandwiched between the Mother and the Crone that is now available to women at midlife because women have so many more healthy, generative years in which to express their power and experience to benefit not only their own children but their communities, corporations, and the wider world.

By aligning with this archetypal energy, women can access their now highly developed power and skills to enhance and deepen their lives.

In her practice, Sandra often uses dreamwork, clinical hypnosis, guided imagery, and art therapy to help deepen the work. She believes that by helping her clients find their strengths and unique qualities they can become more self-aware and access their inner wisdom, heal were they need to, and reach their goals.

Inviting the Queen holds exercises that lead the reader through levels of consciousness associated with the seven chakras in their bodies as a means of beginning to embody the Queen, ultimately operating from her higher perspective in their daily lives.

Visit Sandra’s website https://www.SandraRogersLMFT.com

Buy the Book on Amazon https://amzn.to/2tfYxOA

If you’re a writer looking for an editor or support in your self-publishing endeavors, you are invited to schedule a FREE 15-minute discovery conversation with Stephanie. Access her calendar below.