Chapters 7, 8, and 9 have been written and the book is very nearly finished.  All I'm waiting on now is a few more case histories to include in chapter 8, and I'm still debating on including interviews as a separate chapter.

After coming back from the visit to my mom, I ended up getting side-tracked on a few other projects, which took me away from writing again.  I see how the other stuff will benefit me later on, which is why I allow it to take my attention, so it's not really a problem.

One of the amazing things about writing a book is that the process forces you to re-examine your beliefs and what you think you know about a subject.  Especially a book about beliefs.

As I got into writing about focus and how it relates to beliefs, I realized that what I thought I knew was just one of my own personal beliefs.

It took me a few days to get back into the rhythm of writing, but once I did, chapter 5 completed itself relatively quickly.  That was the big chapter anyways, which is the most important one of the whole book.  This is where we present a variety of methods of changing beliefs.

Back in July, I was hard at work on the new book when I realized that I needed to take some time to bring in a little extra cashflow.  By creating 2 very special events on the main PowerKeys Publishing site, we were able to bring in over $15,000, much of which was shared with participating affiliates.

Over this past week, we've moved all of our websites to a new server in order to handle the greater amount of traffic that's been coming in lately.

In the process, we took advantage of the opportunity to tweak a few things and get a bigger space so we can host other websites as well.  I had considered getting a dedicated server, but that was too big of a step right now, so we got a bigger VPS (Virtual Private Server).  This one is at least twice as powerful as the previous one, with 3 times the disk space.  Plenty of room to grow!

This last weekend, I decided it was time to upgrade the OS on my desktop computer here.  I run Fedora Core Linux, and have for over a year.  It started as an experiement to see if I could do without Windows and the several applications I had grown to love and depend on, such as Corel Draw, FTP Voyager, Notetab Pro, WeBuilder, and MS Office.  Another reason was to see if I could learn how to manage a web  server.

Over the past few weeks, I've been discussing the possibility of doing workshops in Australia and New Zealand with Al Diaz, Ken Graydon, Charles Burke, and a few others.  For a moment, it appeared that there may not be enough people on our own mailing lists that were interested in such a workshop, but we've gained the attention of the promoters for "The Secret" that are interested in making sure we get down there.

As much as I'd like to focus 100% on writing the new book, it seems I'm still not free of past beliefs about money and need to spend some time earning my keep.  Bills are due and the savings account is running low.

This isn't really a problem, but will put a kink in the plan to have physical books printed.  I'll need about $10,000 to have the book produced and the first 2000 copies printed.  I could go the POD route and have books printed one at a time as they are ordered, but the quality of those books aren't as good as regularly printed ones.

Today is the day that we Americans celebrate our independence as a nation.  Even though it seems that we have the greatest impact on the world at large, we are still a relatively young nation.  In fact, we've only been a nation for 231 years.

In comparison to England, France, Italy, or Spain, we are just a "wet behind the ears" kid.

So how did we become so influential in the world?