I keep various toys and such around my office to help me ZONE OUT FOR WRITING. Some toys have a relaxing effect in themselves: like a slow-moving mobile, or one of those glass things that you turn over and watch bright-colored goop inside slowly run down to the bottom. It's THE LAVA LAMP PRINCIPLE: you stare and forget other stuff and slow down to the motion of the object. Relaxing.
Other things work to induce a relaxed and focused frame of mind (called TRANCE) not because they're innately hypnotic, but because I associate them with the way I felt the last time I messed with them, and I then start feeling that way again.
For example, a particular piece of music, or the smell of just-watered house plants, used again and again, becomes a cue to go into a particular frame of mind.
The blue image is something I put together just now while playing with some of my office objects. I like to look at it. It's a pale blue marble in a cobalt blue plastic box, shot close-up with flash and with the window light behind it.
I think it would make an interesting cover image for my most-recently completed project, my novel "COBALT BLUE." In the book, cobalt blue refers to the color, a tube of artist's oil paint, and to A MYSTICAL VISION.
If that picture doesn't put me quickly into a productive writing state, I don't know what would. BTW, the way I learned a lot of this stuff is from my psychologist-husband Bob Dick, who uses clinical hypnosis a lot in his practice.
