Fate is more than just a magazine; it’s meeting Rosemary Ellen Guiley while trying to purchase an armful of the magazines. As I wandered about the first annual Scarefest in the plush Lexington Convention Center, I had no idea I’d bump into the First Lady of the Paranormal, Ms. Guiley. As editor-in-chief Phyllis Galde was not available at the Fate table, Rosemary stepped across from her booth to make the transaction and to have a wonderful and lengthy chat with me.

Rosemary Ellen Guiley, coincidentally a consulting editor for Fate magazine, is the author of 41 books and countless articles on the topic of hauntings, ghosts, and all things paranormal. Rosemary’s books include works on the topics of magic, alchemy, vampires, werewolves, witchcraft, ghosts, hauntings, dreams, angels, fairies, reincarnation, the tarot, saints, miracles, and prayer.

Rosemary is a frequent guest on the evening radio program Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. She also maintains three monthly radio reports on the Richard Syrett Show of Toronto, Scott Colburn's Exploring Unexplained Phenomena of Nebraska, and Tim Yancey’s Encounters Paranormal Radio of Florida.

Not one to stay sedentary, Rosemary holds a host of positions. Among them, a member of the board of directors for the Paranormal Source, Inc., a non-profit organization researching the paranormal, a columnist for TAPS Paramagazine, associate-editor of JAR, the Journal of Abduction-Encounter Research, paranormal expert for Spooked TV Productions’ documentaries, and Honorary Fellow of the College of Human Sciences to name only a scant few.

Rosemary, at what point did you realize you were in touch with spirits; with the spiritual world? What experience did you really say “Wow, this is it”?

My first connection with something otherworldly that was dramatic for me was when I was a teenager although I had experiences in childhood like I think most young children do with invisible playmates. I felt angels around me. I could hear the angels singing to me, they kept me company a lot when I was alone. I didn’t really think anything of these experiences when I was little in terms of being psychic or extraordinary. I think most children don’t unless they have dramatic encounters with adults that teach them otherwise, and some children do. But when I was in my teens, I began experimenting with my dreams because my mother had a lot of precognitive dreams.

And she told me about them. They fascinated me; the idea that you could see the future in dreams or be visited by angels for example in dreams so I wanted to experience this for myself. I went out and got some books on how to program your dreams, and also how to develop your extra-sensory or psychic powers. I began experimenting. Could I see the future in dreams? Could I travel to a distant location and see it accurately and validate that later? Could I send messages in dreams? Could I receive messages in dreams? I discovered that I had a fair amount of success with this. That’s probably my first significant taste of paranormal. Then as I got older, because I had these experiences and what I came to realize as psychic experiences when I was younger, paranormal encounters, I really wanted to go into it more deeply. My mom had a lot of visitations and those intrigued me. My own experiences, plus that, drove me into a study of the paranormal.

I was also very interested in astronomy from a very young age. It had a very profound impact on me because star-gazing and reading books about astronomy, creation, galaxies, distant stars, the question of “Is there life on other worlds?”… it expanded my young mind very dramatically. It put my mind out there rather than here in this physical realm. That was a very powerful influence which has really lasted my entire life. I really wanted to be a professional astronomer. By the time I was eight years-old, I was quite passionate about this and devoured everything I could find on astronomy. I had a telescope and my dad took me out star-gazing every night that I possibly could that it was clear. When I got little older, I realized that math was not really my forte (laughing) and there would be no Ph.D. in physics for me so I best find another career.

And that became then…

I went into journalism because I could always write. I’ve been writing ever since I could pick up a crayon. It wasn’t until I was in high school that it was demonstrated to me that I had an unusual gift for writing. When you’re a kid, everybody has to write. We have to write papers in school and reports and things like that, so here again, I didn’t consider things that I was doing to be extraordinary. A high school English teacher awakened me to the fact that I had a gift, a very good gift, for writing and that has borne out the rest of my life. I love writing; I’m passionate about it. That’s what I was meant to do. Along the way, after I got into college and in my career, I was able to marry my various interests. My skill in writing, my passion for the paranormal, the spiritual, the mystical, and even continuing my interest in astronomy (I was an amateur astronomer with my father for quite a few years), all those things have come together in my present career.

And wonderfully so! Your parents were very nurturing in both of your career decisions, in your passion for the paranormal when you were younger, and as you wound up in journalism, they were very supportive of that as well?

Both my parents are passed on. My mom was very leery of psychic experiences because for her they were either overwhelming or negative. For example, most of her precognitive dreams had to do with death and disaster which is often the case for some people. For many people, that’s not a welcome gift when you have those kinds of dreams. You know something is going to happen and you feel helpless to do anything about it. She never really studied paranormal things so I think that some of her experiences were unsettling to her. On the other hand, I had an intense curiosity about these sorts of things and embarked on a very intense study. I’m quite a reader and I try to get my hands on whatever I can to read and learn about things. Plus I’m an experiencer; I also want to know first-hand. I read about it to learn about it, but I have to experience things as much as I can for myself.

I undertook the practice of meditation; I learned energy healing; I took psychic and intuitive development courses; I started paranormal investigations; I learned how to give psychic readings; I learned how to do mediumship and channeling and spirit releasement… all of these things have come into play in my career and have made valuable contributions to my paranormal research and investigation. I get out as much as I can and do first-hand investigation. I can’t investigate every place I’d like to, but I do it as much as I can. And I’m constantly talking to people. I’m doing whatever I can to help people sort things out with their experiences in the paranormal. That’s really the focus of my work… shedding light on who we are, what we’re doing in our life journey, what our interactions are with other dimensional realms. All these things really lead us to the big spiritual questions that are found in every mystical and religious tradition about who we are as an individual, a soul, and what our connection is to the big picture, to the divine, to the Godhead, to whatever our spiritual or religious beliefs are. We wind up facing the same big questions if we go into the paranormal long enough and deep enough.

When you encounter people that are not open to the paranormal, how do they react to you and what’s your reaction to them?

I do meet skeptics all the time and I think skepticism is very good. Especially in terms of the paranormal, one should always look for natural explanations of experiences first before considering supernatural ones. But there are a lot of people who are skeptical for a variety of reasons. Some of them may be religious. Some of them may be scientific. Science doesn’t look too kindly upon the paranormal realm and that’s fine with me. My work is not oriented to trying to prove the paranormal. My work is oriented to understanding the paranormal in terms of our personal and subjective experiences and how and why we have those experiences and the meaning we make out of them; how do we integrate them into our worldview, our religious philosophical personal beliefs. In turn, that’s how we change collectively. When we change collectively, it impacts our interactions with these other realms.

It’s all part of a very complicated picture, so if people want to be skeptical, that’s okay because that’s where they are. My feeling is that at some point in life, everybody has one or more experiences that cause a major reexamination of worldview. If you’ve been very doubtful of the existence of certain things or paranormal phenomena, you may have an experience that seems to provide irrefutable evidence to you that such is the case that perhaps you’ve been too limited in your view. At that point then someone like me is ideal to consult because people go looking for information and validation. What happened to me? Was it real? What do I do with it? And where do I go from here?

How does your work and your spiritual side coincide? Are they two separate items?

They do affect each other in very profound ways. To me it’s impossible to be involved in the paranormal without having an impact on your spiritual and religious beliefs. It’s understandable that some people start out by saying, “Well, I’m going to go out and investigate. I’m just going to be scientific about it. I’m going to take lots of gear and collect lots of data. That’s all I want is hard scientific data.” The problem with the paranormal is… it doesn’t function like that. This is one reason why it’s so hard to deal with from a scientific perspective; you’re dealing with very blurry areas that are highly subjective. Our experiences can be very intense in emotional and spiritual ways. They are not replicable. You really can’t even go to a haunted place and hope to have the same experience twice. You might have similar experiences, but trying to have exactly the same experiences is extremely difficult. For me it’s definitely had an impact on my spirituality.

From a very young age I never felt comfortable being contained by any one religion. I was raised a Methodist, I was sent to Sunday School, confirmed in the Methodist church, and by the time I was in my early teens, I was studying eastern religions, spiritualism, and comparing, weighing and assessing things. I have looked at a lot of different religious and spiritual paths. I got involved in Zen Buddhism which is very useful for me and very mind-expanding. I’ve never really found one single religious home that I felt a complete one hundred percent fit in. I consider myself a Christian because that’s how I grew up. I call myself an expanded Christian because I incorporate a lot of beliefs into my spiritual view which are really outside of mainstream Christianity. For example, I believe in reincarnation and I do not consider spirit communications demonic like Fundamentalists or conservative Catholics do. I have a very fluid concept of what the afterlife is like. I have no definition of Heaven and Hell that I think is it. I think the afterlife may be a series of experiences that are influenced by our own personal beliefs and experiences.

I don’t believe in a hard and fast Heaven or a hard and fast Hell where you are sent forever because of certain things you did or thought. My view of the afterlife is we probably don’t know until we get there. I’ve read stacks of literature involving after-death communications through mediumship, channeling, visitations of the dead, dreams, the esoteric literature, and things like that. A lot of them say similar things, but there are a lot of contradictions. Ultimately, I don’t think we know until we get there, but I do believe in an afterlife. I do believe that there is some sort of assessment in terms of one’s good things and one’s not-so-good things. I think that a soul is offered continual opportunity for refinement and advancement. We do have opportunities for reincarnation. I’m not sure exactly how much of a personality reincarnates. Whatever makes up me, I’ve had a number of lifetimes on earth and elsewhere in other places as well. In fact, I think we have incarnations in places that, from a human point of view, are literally beyond our comprehension… we can’t even see until we get into some sort of afterlife state. I think that a lot of other people face these things too. For example, many people are skeptics about the paranormal because of religious beliefs and when they have experiences that are outside of what those religious beliefs teach, they have major confrontations with their religion. That’s very upsetting to a lot of people; some people retreat back into religion and some people expand beyond it. They have to place their experiences in some sort of meaningful context that enables them to continue to feel a spiritual connection to something.

You mentioned there not being a hard and fast Heaven or Hell, but still being good or bad nature. Can spirits be either good or bad or indifferent?

The universe teams with spirits of all sorts. Some of them are very benevolent, some of them are neutral. That is, they’re indifferent to human beings and what we do. Some of them are malevolent and they like to interfere with human beings. Everything that’s called demonic has a different slant depending upon your cultural and religious points of view. For example, in Christianity, demons are agents of Satan or the Devil, who want to tempt you into making your free-will choices for evil so that your soul is sent to Hell. Outside of Christianity, demonic or malevolent entities can do a lot of damage. They are tricksters; they’ll make lots of trouble for you, cause illness, disrupt relationships, lead you into immoral ways. But it’s not necessarily a knock-down drag-out fight for the forever fate of your soul; they’re just part of the nasty things that exist in the universe and you learn ways to deal with them and you consult people who can help you deal with them in that way. I don’t think that one slice of the multiverse is right or wrong, I think they both have their place in the grand scheme of things.

What do spirits get out of that? Why would spirits be one nature or the other?

There are people who are good-natured and want to do good things in the world, and there are people who have criminal mindsets who want to steal, manipulate, hurt, and even kill other people. There are people in-between who are out for their own interests and are willing to take the low road in order to get it at someone else’s expense. There are spirits like that too. Some of them may actually have an interest in occupying our world.

We find this in the mythology of the jinn, a type of demonic entity in Middle Eastern lore. The jinn had this world before we did. They got cast out of it to make room for human beings. They want it back so they’re going to mess around with us to try to get us out of our own world. I think that our stories from mythology and folklore have a basis in genuine human experience so these things may be genuine forces at play.

Can they physically affect living humans?

Spirits can indeed affect human beings. They have limited abilities to act in this world because it takes a lot of energy for something invisible or incorporeal to move a physical object. It has to exert a tremendous amount of force so I don’t think it’s possible to do Hollywood style things. But I do I do think they can impact in the physical world. They can certainly influence our health and even cause accidents to happen. I think they also work through people.

If evil is directed at someone it’s usually going to come through another person and not directly from an invisible spirit. That’s one way that spirits can act out in the world. There do seem to be rather mean-tempered ghosts, but their haunting phenomena seem to be confined to minor things like tugging on you, maybe a little bit of a tap or push, movement of small objects, noises, breezes, things that are on a low level.

Is that sometimes just to be noticed?

There are probably limited things that intelligent ghosts can do to get somebody’s attention. Most hauntings are non-intelligent, that is they’re not caused by interactive intelligent agents who are aware of human beings and respond accordingly. They’re mostly residual imprints that are left in space. Sometimes imprints can be activated by the living to create psychokinetic phenomena. It’s a mix of a variety of factors, and we really don’t know what the formula is It seems to be a mix of human consciousness, energy of place, the psychic activity in a place, and whether the haunting presence is a shell, imprint, or something self-aware with intelligence. All of these things come together in unique ways for paranormal experiences to happen. That’s one reason why two people can be in the same environment and not have the same experience. It’s also why we can go back to the same environment and not have the same experience over again.

What has been the most touching experience you’ve had with the paranormal, something that’s affected you profoundly in a very positive way?

I would say spirit releasement. I don’t actively go looking to do spirit releasement, I don’t say to myself, “I’m going to go out to this location and help earthbound souls to the other side”. If I am in some place and I’m approached by someone who seems to be stuck and is looking for help, I’ll respond. If they’re lost, disoriented, they don’t want to go, then often there is very little that the living can do to help them across. They have to be ready even if they don’t know exactly where to go. There have been times when I have been approached by people-

-just to backtrack for a minute, when you work in this field, everyone has a spiritual light around them. No matter what you’re doing in the world, there is a spiritual light around you that attracts the attention of other entities who all have a variety of agendas to push…entities who don’t like your spiritual light and want to do something about it, entities who like it and want to come and help. An earthbound soul can be attracted to light that you have and feel that you can be of assistance.

Some of those experiences have been very poignant because I can very clearly see the people involved. Sometimes I learn quite a bit about them, sometimes I don’t, but it’s a rewarding experience to help someone who is in need like that and to help them get to where they need to be in the afterlife, so they no longer wander around in the limbo zones stuck between earth and the afterlife.

The afterlife, which you’ve said we don’t know too much about, is seen as a release?

I think that it’s part of an evolution. What we know about the afterlife comes from mediumship, our visionary experiences and our near-death experiences. When you look at the total body of works in those areas, there are more contradictions than there are agreements, so who’s right? I don’t know. They could all be right. There may be afterlives that are fluid and multi-layered, where people change places and levels, and other afterlives that are fixed.

Personally, I think that there are many different realms in the afterlife. I believe that they’re fluid; that we don’t stay in one place for all eternity. The afterlife is an evolving experience just like physical life is. If you look back on your life you’re not the same person you were when you were ten years old or twenty or on throughout your life. You’ve changed quite a bit and the quality of that life has changed. I think the same happens in the afterlife.

You mentioned getting to know these people, these entities, that may be lost or confused. Is that through a psychic connection?

It’s entirely a psychic connection. For example, just by way of background, I use my psychic abilities in my paranormal research and investigation. I do not work as a psychic. I’m not doing professional readings. I do not go in as a psychic, but I believe that anyone who spends any amount of time in the paranormal is going to have psychic experiences. I think it behooves you to learn about them and know what you’re experiencing and have a way of validating them. Otherwise you’re missing a lot of valuable subtle information. So my experiences vary.

Sometimes I get a lot of psychic data and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m really more consumed with running equipment like a Frank’s Box [CG: named after inventor, Frank Sumption, a device that scans low-band AM/FM wavelengths for messages from the deceased or other entities ] or collecting E.V. P. [CG: E.V.P. (Electronic Voice Phenomena) are recordings of spectral voices], or doing ultraviolet or infrared photography, so my mind is more focused in waking consciousness than it is in that borderline state where you get psychic impressions. When someone presents him or herself for spirit releasement, that is a psychic impression, a clairvoyant image. I can either see the person with my eyes or see the person mentally in a clairvoyant impression. I have telepathic communication with that person. The spirit releasement work is an altered state in which there’s a lot of visualization and calling in of the angelic realm. There’s no one system of spirit releasement, however. For me, it’s summoning help from the angelic realm and placing myself in this altered state where I can be present with this earthbound soul and find the light for them and show them where the light is and see that they get across. It’s all done in a psychic state.

When you refer to communication, that’s both coming from you and they are communicating back in direct response?

It’s all telepathic, yes.

So there is a definite communication there?

Yes. Otherwise, it’s very hard to help someone across. I might talk out loud if I’m with a group of people so they know what’s going on. If I’m just by myself, I don’t need to talk out loud.

Do you see through material objects? Hollywood has given us the notion that touching an object or coming in contact with that spirit, might give you a blast of vision of their life or what they are seeing or what they’ve gone through. Is that accurate?

Touching an object and getting impressions is called psychometry. I can do psychometry. It’s a very basic psychic skill. When you touch an object and get psychic impressions off it, they may be images of people who have owned or handled or used an object, ways is in which it was used, time periods. It can be like flipping through a photo album or scrapbook or even getting little bits of movie clips. Information related to an object can sometimes be quite fragmentary and sometimes it can be a lot. You might get images and names of people who dealt with an object. As for the other ability, seeing through the eyes of a spirit, I have never felt that I was literally looking through the eyes of a spirit or someone who was deceased; however, I do work with a psychic who has that ability. His name is Karl Petry. He lives in Kearny, New Jersey. I do frequent investigations with him. Quite often, we’ve gone to a haunted place that has active intelligence in it… you’re not going to get it through an imprint, it has to be active intelligence… he starts communicating with a person, he sometimes will see their lives, their memories, as they see them. It’s like he is inside of them looking out. Now that experience has never happened to me.

That must be very powerful.

Yes it is. It’s quite profound. It can affect you emotionally quite a bit. One thing I would like to emphasize is that it’s important to approach this work with a great deal of respect for what you’re dealing with. I’m very dismayed when I see paranormal investigators, quite often beginners in this field, go in and treat the haunting phenomena like toys, or they don’t see the real human energy behind them. They use extreme provocations, insults, taunts, anger, because they want a show; they want to get something riled up and have some phenomena. When you’re going into a place that’s haunted with energies or ghosts of the dead, you’re really dealing with your own ancestors in a way. Would you walk into a house that has the ghost of your dead mother in it and act like that? No. So why would you go into any other place haunted by ghosts and carry on like a barbarian? I don’t like it. I think that’s very disrespectful and ultimately I don’t think that it enables a person to have the deepest, most valuable experience.

You alluded to the things that culminate to create an earthbound spirit. What can cause that at the moment of death? Is it always at the moment of death? How does a spirit become earthbound?

I think that there are a number of factors involved in earthbounds. One is unfinished business, people dying with an intense emotional longing to complete something. Another is a sudden death which also leaves unfinished business. Sometimes earthbounds don’t know they’re dead. They’ve died suddenly or unexpectedly, sometimes by violence or in an accident. Sometimes people just sort of lose their way to the afterlife. They might have died alone or very lonely like a long lingering death, and this might impact their ability to cross over. Sometimes I think children are vulnerable, that they lose their way especially if they die in unhappy circumstances.

All these things can be factors in whether or not somebody is earthbound. These reasons are borne out in the literature of mediums’ experiences, and in hauntings. Releasement involves helping the earthbound soul let go so that it can move on.

In Children of the Grave, you stated that when a person dies and they do become earthbound for whatever reason, they maintain that age. Why would that be?

I think we encounter the ghosts of people as they were at the time that they died. If they’re imprints, that’s the imprint that they leave on the psychic curtain that penetrates our physical space. They move on into the afterlife so there’s nothing left behind to grow and develop. It’s like looking at a photograph of yourself at age twenty. That photograph is not going to change; you change, but the photograph doesn’t. That’s exactly what an imprint is.

An earthbound is stuck at the time they died. They’re stuck in a limbo and they’re not aware of the passage of time. Time is suspended so they’re frozen in terms of their ability to continue to change in the afterlife state. If someone is earthbound for a very long time, they’re going to be in the state that they were in when they died.

Is there ever any regression that you’ve noted or seen where someone might revert back to a younger age in spirit form?

Not an earthbound. I haven’t encountered that myself, and to my knowledge I haven’t encountered it in the literature that I’ve read either.

I'm curious about your career and how you got where you are today. The transition from journalist to paranormal investigator, would you say that was a smooth transition?

It was, fairly so. I think that’s because I’m doing really what I’m meant to do in this life. When we are on that path doing what we should be doing, the opportunities come in front of us to keep moving us in that direction. I’m by no means saying that it’s been a piece of cake. I’ve certainly had my ups and downs, triumphs and failures like everyone, but by and large I know that I’m doing what I should be doing because the right doors keep opening.

When I was a journalist and I was doing a lot of freelancing on the side, my ambition was to be a novelist. I wanted to do horror, fantasy, and paranormal novels. I did do some fiction, but I’m really meant to be in nonfiction so those opportunities opened up for me. 41 looks later (laughing) I haven’t gone back to fiction. My friends and family thought that it was foolish of me to give up the salaried job. People told me that artists starve, nobody makes any money writing, and I should stick with it only as a side pursuit. I left my fulltime employment in 1983 and I have never regretted it or ever looked back.

So when you made the transition, it was a leap more than it was a transition?

Any time you make a major change or go for a big goal or dream, there are always risks involved. There were a number of factors involved for me. At the time, I had a very nice paying job. It was comfortable. It was pretty boring because it was comfortable. I wasn’t really challenged in it, but I was thinking “When this happens… When that happens… I’ll wait a little longer and save up a little more money, another promotion” …that sort of thing. In other words, I kept sort of putting things off.

My father died then unexpectedly. He had an aneurysm and died on an operating table. I was very close to my father, and that was my confrontation with my own mortality. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought “Wow, you just never know when you’re going to go. You could go today, tomorrow. There’s no guarantee of any future.” If you’re not doing what you feel you must do or what you really want to do with yourself, you’re wasting time. Life is short and time is precious, so whatever it is that you feel compelled to do, find a way to do it because there’s no guarantee of having any tomorrow. So that’s really what propelled me out of my salaried employment more than anything else.

I went out and landed a book contract. It wasn’t for a huge amount of money and there was no guarantee of anything after that. And I said, “This is it for me. I’m doing what I want to do. My ambition is to be a writer, to be an author, and so I’m going to do it now”.

People wait for the ideal time to pursue their dream. When I was pursuing my psychic work and energy healing, I did do readings for a number of years to gain insight into that process and to what was going on with people underneath the surface in terms of their personal and spiritual struggles and challenges. I found that there are three things that people do to hang themselves up from pursuing their passion. One is “What if…”; what if I do it and I fail? “When then…”; when all the ideal things are in place, then I will do it. And “If only…”; if only I had more money, if only I was younger, if only I had studied something different in school, if only I didn’t have to take care of this responsibility, if only, if only. And people play those games throughout their entire lives. I certainly did. As a result, they wake-up one day and say “Wow. Why didn’t I go for it?”

Certainly we have responsibilities in the world. We have family members we have to take care of. We have children. I’m by no means saying you have to be totally self-absorbed or self-centered and hedonistic, but there are ways to balance your responsibilities in life -- putting a roof over your head and food on the table and pursuing what you’re meant to do, your passion. Most people are afraid to find ways to do that. They’re petrified of failure. I think at the end of the day when we have our life-review, we regret more what we didn’t try than what we tried that didn’t work.

And now you’re continuing to write books? You’ve kept absolutely busy with writing?

Yes. I spend most of my time writing. Sometimes I’m more in travel, speaking, and promotion mode, you know. This time of year, it’s heavy on presentations and radio shows and things like that, but I would say that over the course of the year, I spend most of my time doing investigations, research, and writing. After that, it’s a balance of the administrative stuff… I’m an artist, but I run myself as a business too. That’s how I make my way in the world.

There’s an outreach aspect to my work, because everywhere I go, every time I do a radio show or I’m at a conference, I’m approached by people who need help with something. They’re trying to sort something out, they’ve had an experience they don’t understand, they’re confused about something, they want to know where to go for resources. I’m constantly helping people and I consider that a big part of my work. I’m very grateful that the encyclopedias are valued by so many people as resource guides. Writers use them for entertainment for writing novels and scripts and things like that, and people also use them to help them sort out things that are going on in their lives.

You’re spending a great deal of your time running your business? It’s not all just sitting down with a cup of tea and writing? You’re doing a lot of busy work as well?

Absolutely! I have a lot of professional help and I still wind up doing a lot. I have a manager, Jana Vandyke of Mega Management, who is a godsend to me. I have a literary agent; I have a lecture agent; I have a web designer… I rely on a lot of professional help to help my business run smoothly, but it still takes up a lot of my time just to do the nuts and bolts of it. Sometimes people have kind of dreamy ideas about what it is to be an artist. I’ve had people think that I’m on some sort of easy ride here… I get up, I don’t have to go into an office, I just kind of lay around all day and maybe I write a little bit. They don’t have a clue as to what’s involved. You have to be extremely self-disciplined when you’re self-employed. I put in a lot of long hours, and a lot of my business has to be conducted on weekends, such as conferences, seminars and retreats. Many evenings are devoted to dong radio shows and interviews. I keep irregular hours and do not have a set schedule for any given day, but I go with the flow of the business at hand. I’m a bit of a night owl, and like to stay up until 1, 2 or 3 in the morning. I am usually up by 7 or 8.

Even though I have a lot of books out there and I have a variety of income streams, I’m still self-employed with no long-term guarantees.. My income fluctuates. Books can go out of print; speaking engagements can expand or dwindle; any number of factors can impact you, so you have to stay on top of things.

I’m also an artist and an artist is constantly challenged to keep expanding frontiers. I’m always looking for something new to develop, some cutting edge of research to explore. Every year, I change my presentations so that I have fresh material for my audiences. There are some programs that I have that I’m constantly asked to do like shadow people, vampires, and angels. I think that it’s important to always have something new. You have to keep up. You can’t just recycle the same old stuff. If you’re really going to make contributions to the field, you have to be out there constantly digging, exploring, and coming up with something new that’s of value to the audience.

For me, that is extremely important. When a person gives up their income or time to buy my book or sit in one of my lectures, I want to make sure that they go home with something that’s useful to them. It’s not just about doing things that I want to do. It’s also doing things that are of value to individuals. I think every artist really functions like that. I constantly have my audience in mind when I do things.

I do things also in response to my audience. When I start seeing trends in questions, it indicates to me that there’s something out there in the paranormal Sargasso Sea that people are encountering en masse. There are waves of things that happen, so what’s afoot? I have to stay on top of that and then that stimulates me to dig deeper. That’s how I got going on shadow people; I started getting a lot of inquiries about people’s experiences with these dark forms and they were all very similar. They were coming in from just different people, ages, places, but the experiences were all very similar. I thought “Hmmm. There’s a phenomenon here and people seem to be experiencing it with increasing frequency. What’s going on?” As a result, in 2004 I started going into shadow people research, and as of 2005, really in-depth. It’s one of the topics I do that people have the greatest interest in.

People can access your website to reach you through e-mail and send you questions?

Yes, my website is www.visionaryliving.com. I do my best to answer. Sometimes the answers are short and I refer people to the best resources I can, but I do my best. I have waves of e-mail. Sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it’s a little. I have deadlines to juggle and travel, so I do the best I can. I consider it very important to be responsive to people, at least provide some information or insight that points them in a good direction. I do not counsel people on how to get published; that’s not my line of business.

Where would be the next place Chateau Grrr guests can meet you or take in one of your lectures?

As of mid-November, I’m on winter hiatus, except for private investigations, media interviews and occasional events. In March, I get busy again with conferences, retreats, lectures, etc. Check my calendar page on www.visionaryliving.com for updates.

Even on hiatus, you’re busy! Rosemary, thank you so much for sharing your time and insights with all of us here at Chateau Grrr. We could not have hoped for a more wonderful and articulate person for our first Featured Guest.

Thank you!