Hi. And welcome to Agent Venus™ and elizabethmerrick.com. Thanks for coming by.

Q: WHAT IS AGENT VENUS?
A: THE STRATEGIC PATH TO HAPPINESS and CREATIVITY

Agent Venus is a place to get inspiration, motivation, and support for WRITING and other creative endeavors.

It is a place to learn (and remember) how to outwit, outrun, and otherwise conquer self-doubt and resistance to engaging in whatever creative genius you were put here to share with the other earthlings.

No matter what our true “thing” is, we resist it left right and center. That’s how we know it’s our thing.

AGENT VENUS=SHIFTING TO PRODUCTIVE EASE IN AN INSTANT

Agent Venus is here to help you find the quicker, easier, more strategic (like a secret agent, get it?) path to really shining with your thing. That is to say, the easier path to: creativity, success, beauty, harmony, and affluence (that’s Venus, baby.)

I (Elizabeth Merrick), am here with the nuts and bolts writing advice. I am sort of like the car mechanic of writing instructors: I keep it very practical and down-to-earth so you can just get on the road already and stop torturing yourself with stuckness and confusion.

AGENT VENUS BANISHES DOUBT

Until now, the fun and easy and effective writing tools I created and honed for my NYC classes were only available in person. (They are excellent tools—based in intuition and in neuroscience—I get really passionate about them and tend to go on and on. . . forgive me.) But now I’ve got this new website and a few more innovations in the works for 2010 and 2011. So I’m going global. (And boy was my resistance to do so a doozy. Yet here we go.)

AGENT VENUS IS AN ENTREPRENEUR

The other thing I help my students with is creating platforms as writers, because like it or not, we’re in an era when all writers must become entrepreneurs. Fifty percent of succeeding as a writer is figuring out your time and your money so you have enough creative energy to actually write. If you can align yourself with the core essence of what you’re creating, it’s a lot easier.

AGENT VENUS REMINDS YOU OF YOUR BRILLIANCE

The second part of the whole “platform” thing is: dealing with our new and very tricky enemy: entrepreneurial burnout and internet fatigue. After much success with my own “platform” (ugh, it’s kind of a weird word, but bear with me), overwork and computer fatigue took me down for about a year. I tried out some serious tricks and potions and strategies and wild lunatic guesses that turned out pretty well. I’m finally ready to share the amazing things I discovered. (Hint: there’s even more neuroscience and intuition involved in this next phase).

Q: WHO IS ELIZABETH MERRICK?

I am a writer, writing consultant, and creativity strategist. I wrote a big fat dark juicy intense girl-zone epic novel, called Girly and started a publishing company to get it out there myself back in 2005.

In 2006, my Random House anthology This Is Not Chick Lit, which featured eighteen amazing women writers such as Curtis Sittenfeld and Jennifer Egan, made quite a splash. It sold tons of copies, ruffled some feathers, but mostly delivered gorgeous, diverse fiction all over the place, even in airport bookstores and at Target. Feminist short fiction anthology at Target! Who knew!

My true love these days is teaching writing, along with how to banish the doubt and stuckness that blocks your contribution to the world. Back in 2003, in NYC, on a whim, I put an ad on craigslist for writing classes that were fun, productive, and not snobby or literary-criticism-based. The classes took off and basically became my day job within about six months. This gorgeous thing was born in my life: Elizabeth’s Workshops. Hundreds of amazing people who I just love SO MUCH passed through these classes between 2003 and 2008. You can read about some of their glorious successes on my testimonial page.

Also during that same era, I created and ran a really fun, star-studded reading series in NYC for women writers, called Grace, which was tons of fun and included dozens of amazing writers. In conjunction with the reading series, from 2003 to 2007 I blogged a lot about, among other subjects, the fact that at the New Yorker and other hoity-toity literary joints, there is still an eerily dependable 80% male to 20% female breakdown of the bylines. (Dude: yuck. Also: ladies, time to reconsider taking out a loan for that MFA degree.)

So then, by late 2008: tada! I burnt out. (Are you shocked?) I learned my way around the Creative Void and Utter Exhaustion. Then I got better, by resting and healing, but also by training in a few new modalities that took the creativity tools that had emerged from my workshops leaps and bounds forward. Now I am here with Agent Venus, rocking the mic.

(My education and credentials, if you are curious about that sort of thing, include: a BA from Yale in Film Studies, an MFA from Cornell in fiction writing, and an MA in Creativity and Arts Education from SFSU. I have been teaching writing since 1995, at Cornell and NYU, among other places.)

Q: HOW DO I WORK WITH YOU, ELIZABETH MERRICK?

I’m not offering classes again yet, but for the time being, if you want to work with me you can hire me for a 1-on-1 Goddess Intervention.

In the past, I had very limited time for 1-on-1 consultations so I only really offered them to clients I already knew as students in my classes. Right now, I’m really interested in working with individuals, but I probably won’t have time to do this forever. 2010 is the year to get affordable, individual attention from me. After that, probably not so doable.

If you want to get on the earlybird deal list for future classes or coaching discounts, please sign up here for my Secret Newsletter, which right now is an extremely rare thing just to give my people the heads up on deals and goodies. (I MAY start a weekly-ish newsletter creativity booster kind of thing at some point this year. But I am committed to not burning myself out again, so it all depends on how much I have on my plate.)

Anyway: I’m so glad you’re here! It means you’re upping the ante or even just getting ready to start doing your THING. What a contribution: even just starting to wonder about the possibilities for your writing, your creativity, your brilliance, is magically uplifting everyone around you. The further amazingness is that this simple curiosity also uplifts me, my students, and everyone who is reading this website. Yay, you! Can’t wait to see what you create for yourself in 2010.

xoxo
Love, Elizabeth

Photos: © 2010 Joan Beard