Stoneslayer: A Journey Through Loss and Reinvention

Hey, one more thing before you go. There are moments in life when the story we're living refuses to fit inside the lines we've been trained to draw.Moments when facts feel too small, when language feels too literal, when the truth of an experience is so enormous, so human, that the tools we've always relied on suddenly fail us. My guest today spent decades chasing facts until life handed her a story that couldn't be reported. It had to be mythologized.And that's where her healing began. We're going to learn about that journey and how mythology and storytelling might help you heal. I'm your host, Michael Hirsch.Welcome to one more thing before you go.Candice Lynn Talbodge spent decades as a journalist, a world of deadlines, accuracy, and verifiable truth, while privately studying the emotional and spiritual layers of human experience.After losing her wife to cancer, the tools of journalism can no longer hold the depth of her grief, leading her to develop Story healing, a structured narrative method for for transforming emotional trauma.That work unlocked the fiction she'd been trying to write for years, resulting in Stone Slayer, a dark high fantasy series rooted in psychological depth and spiritual awakening.With over 1400 good read ratings and 4.4 star average, Candice Lynn brings a rare blend of newsroom discipline, mythic imagination and soul level insight to every conversation. Welcome to the show, Candice Lynn.

Thank you, Michael. I'm delighted to be with you to talk about one more thing before you go.

Yeah. Well, your life has had an amazing journey actually getting to this point. So thank you for being here. I appreciate you joining me.

Thank you.

Like any good story you have as an author should appreciate, I like to start at the beginning. Where'd you grow up? What was your family like?

Well, I was born in Southern California and I was the youngest of four siblings. And I had a very, I guess on the outside I had a very sort of normal middle class upbringing. All right.But for me it was kind of an emotional desolation because I didn't feel loved or wanted by my family. And that's kind of the emotional reality I have found in a lot of people, you know, because love is a two way exchange.What feels like love to you may not be the love that your parents or your siblings or your extended family or friends can give to you. So there is often a disconnect.So I grew up feeling very isolated, but I also grew up with lots of advantages because When I was 14, my family moved to England for what was supposed to be a two year assignment, but turned out to be four because my parents wanted me to finish high school in England because I was getting a fabulous education as a result. I spent all my high school years in England. And I have a.US culture is a complete mystery to me because apparently it all stems from high school, which I didn't attend. So popular culture just in America is just not. I don't get it. So.But that's, that's, you know, that's kind of helped me just do my own thing and develop the story that I needed and wanted to tell over decades and decades.

Well, I'm happy that you have that story to tell and I'm grateful that you're here. That education in England, I'm sure has launched you in many different directions.And I know that you spent decades in newsrooms from that perspective. What drew you to journalism?

Basically, you consider me a one trick pony. Writing was the only quasi marketable skill that I had. When I graduated college, I could write pretty well.And of course, writing in the business world is the Rodney danger field because it don't get no respect and it still doesn't. You know, numbers are king in business, but writing, not so much. So journalism just seemed like a place where I could at least get paid a little bit.And that I do mean a little bit to practice writing. And I am glad, I mean I, I was consistently underpaid, consistently over performed, blah, blah, blah.But I am glad that I got that journalistic background because I ended up in 1981 at the late lamented Dallas Times Herald at the height of the infamous newspaper wars between the Herald and the Dallas Morning News. And it was a, it was the place to be and I learned to write quickly, fast, on deadline, just get it out and get it written.And that was invaluable training for when I finally was able to start writing Stone Slayer more than a decade later. I was freelancing. I had a lot of work.I was, I was doing business to business PR on one hand and writing for Reuters on a freelance basis on the other. And yes, Reuters knew all about my pr and I never pitched any of my clients or did anything like that.I just wrote the stories that I needed to write for Reuters about advertising and marketing. But anyway, in between all that, I was starting to write my story.So being able to write quickly and fast and get it out was a real skill that was useful.

It absolutely is. I mean, I can relate to journalism. I appreciate journalism because my father, my father was a journalist.I grew up in a newsroom actually, and I say grew Up.I mean, literally spent much of my childhood in a newsroom, then worked for the newspaper myself once I got about the right age, worked for the same place that he did.I lost him at an early age, but I went back to the Gazelle Telegraph in Colorado Springs and went in there, and some of the same people he worked with were still there. And I started working with the Gazette Telegraph.So I used to go on calls with my father when he got called out to go cover a train crash or a car crash or a crime or something along that line. And so, yeah, I appreciate journalism from a very personal perspective. So I'm happy that you did that.

Well, I am, too, because it gave me great training and it also taught me something that I hope. I wish more people would also adopt. Question everything. Too many people these days just see a video or a post on the Internet and think it's true.Well, maybe it is and maybe it's not.So I always question everything, and that includes the prevailing orthodoxy, whether it's from religion or science, which has devolved into an orthodoxy.You know, don't tell me to trust the science, because many times the science has been bought and paid for by the very organizations and companies whose products the science is supposed to be examining and certifying. All right, there are always at least two sides to every question. Usually there are more.And when I was a journalist researching a story, it's amazing how slippery facts can be if you make one more call, one more interview, and suddenly the dynamic and perspective changes. So don't take anything at face value. Do some questioning.

And I think that's a valuable. A valuable lesson that they taught you, that journalism taught you about the truth and the limits, I guess, in.In regard to that and how it's presented and how it could be skewed so easily. Unfortunately, yes. So, yeah, yeah, that's a good message for everybody.I know that when I'm doing a little bit of research on you, you said that you live two parallel lives. When did you first kind of feel that split that you understood you were doing those two parallel lives?Was it kind of touching on what you had just said about. About trying to write. Write for Reuters, for example, from a freelance perspective, but then trying to write your own personal stuff?

Well, the split really goes back to my. Maybe when I was around in my early teens, 12, 13, and I had a. An instantly prophetic dream.My mom and I had been visiting a woman, my mom's dream, in the hospital every so often because she was dying of leukemia. And One Friday night I had a dream. We went to the hospital and the nurse said, oh, I'm sorry, you can't visit Mrs. Smith. She died at 3 this morning.And then I woke up and it was Saturday morning and it was my job to set the table for breakfast and everything. And the phone rang and not long after my mom came into the kitchen red, red eyed and crying and saying Mrs. Smith died at three in the morning.And I, I just couldn't say anything. I. I couldn't say. I know I couldn't say anything. But that hit me like a ton of bricks.And I've only recently started to talk about it, but it was a big fat clue. If you want to say that maybe reality isn't quite like we are conditioned to program to regard it.Maybe it's not all logical and sequential and analytical and rational something. And that led me, well, that and reading the Lord of the Rings and really loving it and that having an effect on me too.But that sent me in the direction and I daydreamed a lot.You know, I went to school and I would, you know, daydream because I was kind of a solitary kid, I didn't really have many friends and I, this, this character popped into my mind. And she was tall and she was mouthy and she was strong willed and I thought about her a lot and I thought about who is she? What's her world like?And I followed this over decades.And then in 1978 the Silmarillion came out and reading it, I realized that in the Lord of the Rings the tale that most moved me was the story of the Numenoreans and how they destroyed their island nation. And sure enough, that is Tolkien's Christianized version of Atlantis.So that sent me off in another direction of researching what there is about Atlantis. Most of the, the material as well. Did Atlantis exist or if it did, where was it? That kind of stuff I didn't care about that.I wanted to know what the society was like, what the people were like. And believe me, when you go down that rabbit hole, you read all manner of really weird stuff.You know, you run across Edgar Casey, you run across the Theosophists with Madame Blavatsky. I mean you do, you know, you get into some really strange areas.But all along, you know, I was this journalist or a college student or whatever I was at the time in the so called real world pursuing, knowing more about this character and who she was and where she came from and what happened to her.

That is an amazing, especially Going down the rabbit holes that you were going down, I'm sure that you were able to kind of get. I would love to see your notes, actually, in regard to all of what you felt about the people were from Atlantis.And my wife and I have a fascination with Atlantis and where it is and a fascination with the people.And were they really that much more elevated than we are as they were written about, and much more intelligent and much more advanced kind of a thing? Did you, in all your research and your findings, did you find that?

Well, the research I ended up doing was within me. All right.In 1986, I met my late wife and we started doing something that I now call Sunan story healing, which is basically going into the emotional body, not the mental body of hypnosis. You go in in a very loving state. You treat yourself like your own best friend. And whatever you are emotionally prepared to bring up comes up.And what you do, what you're going for, are the self judgments and the vows that are rattling around in your subconscious slash emotional body that you don't know about consciously, but they are really making your life miserable. Cycles of repeating garbage that you just want to break out of, but you can't do it mentally because it's not in your mental body.You can't analyze it or. Or, you know, figure it out, you feel it out, you let it out, you let go.You make a new decision about whatever it was that you were judging yourself. And that's what I did.And as I did that, more and more, and as I teamed with Jenna to start the SATVA Institute, which was her school, she was teaching and healing, and she was doing that while I was working as a journalist, then PR person, and as I got more and more information and still daydreamed about my story and Helen, I literally woke up one Saturday in July of 1980, 1998, and said, I can write the story now. And that's when I started writing what became the Stone Slayer series. But again, that's an evolution over a decade and a half.And it didn't start out that way. I had to go through a heck of a lot more emotional growing and tragedies like losing Jenna to cancer.And just generally, you know, it's sort of the kick in the pants I needed to finally, finally embrace the whole story and write it and name it, what it truly was.

From that perspective, you know, I. If you don't mind, I could touch on this. I. I can relate to this in a couple of different ways. I lost my father to Cancer. So.And he was, he was only 39 years old. I was only like, you know, 17 years old. And I lost my stepfather to cancer and I lost my grandparents to cancer. It's a devastating disease.I'm sorry that you lost your mother and your wife to this, this devastating disease. Disease. How did that change everything for you? Do you think, do you think that's what kind of lit your window open?And, you know, you said that you were finally able to kind of, to kind of start writing the story kind of, oh, go from there. Was. Was that the catalyst?

That was one of the catalysts. All right. It certainly was the catalyst of, well, now you're on your own, all right? And you, you, you can either sink or swim here, all right?And there were a lot of times when I was sinking, because grief has that way of doing that to you, but I, I guess I'm just too ornery, too stubborn. I decided I was going to live, but I had to. I mean, there were complications. I had been trying to write and publish the story for.With a small publisher that went belly up. So I took it over and tried to public publish, publish it independently back in the early 00s, like 05 and 06 and whatever. It didn't work.Well, that's because as I found out 15 years later, 15. More than 15 years. The story was incomplete, all right? And I. My healing was incomplete.So writing this tale precipitated major events in my life, but it also precipitated major healing and self growth and even some buds of wisdom in there somewhere. All right? But it's.It was a very fraught process, and it still is, because in 2012, I had my myelitis, which is an inflammation of the covering of the spinal cord. Most people who get myelitis never walk again. I could still walk, but my legs were stiff and tight. That's not a hallmark of myelitis.That was something else that is emotional and spiritual. Well, five years later and a move from Texas to California to be with my aging parents again.And, you know, Jan and I both moved out here in 2017 after, you know, my dad died in 2016. My mom followed in 2017. And a month after my mom died, I had a second round of myelitis, and it made the whole situation a lot worse.So again, I'm struggling with this, I don't know, this, this dysfunction of my nervous system that leaves me not able to walk without a walker. And I believe that all physical disease is a result of emotional and spiritual dis. Ease.The physical body reflects what's going on in our hearts and souls and minds. So I have been continuing my journey with the help of a marvelous chiropractor who doesn't. His chiropractic is nothing like traditional chiropractic.But then, hey, I'm nothing. You know, I don't. I don't do traditional anything. So it was right up my alley. It really helped. And it was funny.He came into my life not just over a year before Jenna left. So he was there, and I needed someone and something to help me. And we've been working together ever since, and it has helped free me.I'm not quite walking yet, but I see big signs that my legs are improving. So mine is a story of. I don't know which came first, the healing or the story. Or the story or the healing.It's just kind of this iterative process where one builds on the other, and the result is I am far better off, far more at peace with myself because, well. Okay, here's where it gets really weird. I chased off two inner demons. And I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean it literally.I chased off two inner demons and settled, shall I say, a relationship I had with the original Lucifer. I know this sounds bizarre, and it was bizarre to me. I was like, oh, no, this can't possibly be what's going on in my psyche. And there it was.What can I tell you? I mean, like I said before we started talking here, the definition is harmless. Crackpot. Okay, I'll take it. But the proof's in the pudding.And the proof is that I am more at peace, more in tune with myself, and much healthier. Healthier than I've been in decades. So I just have to go where my path takes me.

Well, I don't call it. I don't think that you're a crackpot.I think that, you know, there are things within this world that some of us have seen and experienced that others can't explain, and that includes demons. I believe in demons wholeheartedly.So, you know, you being able to confront that in such a way that it allowed you to move forward and embrace the positive and the white light area within that is a good thing. And I think that.Correct me, but I think that maybe your grief and your struggles with this revealed stuff that journalism couldn't really capture because of that perspective.

Well, that talks about the limitations on our perceptions. All right, in. In a book called the Doors of Perception, Aldous Huckley Huxley called the conscious mind a reducing Valve.It's very effective at limiting what we perceive to the physical and the mental because we can't kind of get rid of it. You know, we have these thoughts rattling around in our heads that we're aware of. So we've got a.A physical body and a mental body, but that's only half of who we really are. We also have an emotional body or a subconscious mind, if you prefer that label, and a spiritual body or an unconscious mind, if you like that label.All right? I'm not really into labels. I just use certain terms because I understand what they mean.So we are trying to live in a manner that is similar to lifting your. Lifting one foot off the ground and hopping around and trying to get places on one foot.You can do it, but it's not very efficient, and it's really taxing and wearing. Because we were meant to walk with two feet and we were meant to live with all of our being. All right?And the answers that we seek to questions that we can't, you know, can't answer with our conscious mind.

Right.

Are in the emotional and spiritual parts of our being and in our subjective experiences. All right? But again, everybody says, no, no, it's not subjective because, you know, that's individual, and you can't apply it to everybody. You.You're not supposed to apply your experiences to everybody. They are for you, all right? They are your lived experience and. And you have far more than, you know, consciously, but they're for you.And I have absolutely no opinion on how other people live their lives or what they believe or whatever. I mean, my healing is for me. My only wish for them is that they get the kind of healing that will make them live in greater peace.

Is that everything that you just spoke about? Is that part of story healing?

Yes, that is part of. Part of story healing. And I'm grateful beyond words, not only for that journalistic experience, but for being trained as a story healer.Because all of this came about through the working meditations that you do in story healing, where you go into your emotional body with the help of your spiritual body, and you find those places within you where you have issues and judgments and maybe joker demons lurking. You know, I mean, it was just. Well, let me give you an example. I have always been living in fight or flight, all right? I didn't know.It took me a long decades to. To realize. And I've always been prone to panicking when I was flying in a plane or driving in a car and between my home and the rest of my family.There is a low range of mountains where you have to drive up this big windy road. It's two lanes either way, it rides over the mountain and it's a very nerve wracking road.And I was always panicked and it was, it was misery getting over and getting back on that road. Well, after I cast out my two demons and did some more healing work, I took a trip over that hill and I have no panic.And I've done it several times since. No panic. It's like the most amazing freedom. And of course the irony is now I'm free to go places but my feet and legs still haven't got the message.So hey, I'm a work in progress, but I'm making progress.

I can relate to that. And I'm going to give you words of hope. And I was told by five doctors I wouldn't walk again, I'd be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.And as I mentioned before we started, I walked my oldest daughter down the aisle and I will walk my youngest down the aisle and I walk two to five miles every day now, in spite of what five doctors told me. So you know, there is hope.I believe if you, you, your mind, your body, your soul is connected like you are doing, I, I have faith that you will achieve that goal.

Thank you, Michael. Those words mean a great deal to me. And I am delighted that you ignored the so called experts and followed your heart. All right.

I am as well.

And here's the thing about experts and expertise. All right, What Sunan story healing helps you do is become an expert in you. And there is no one else who can be the expert in you.What the people with the Alphabet soup after their name have theories and methods and protocols and ethics, maybe, whatever. But what they don't know is you. And the only person who can really know you and know what you've been through and feel it and live it is you.All right, so I, you know, once I got that diagnosis from neurologist back In I guess 2018, the last thing I wanted to do was spend more time in more doctor's office because they couldn't tell me. They could tell me why I had problems walking, but they couldn't explain the stiffness and the tightness, all right?And I just decided I am not going to waste my time and money going from specialist to specialist to specialist and getting this kind of answer. So about a half a year later I met my chiropractor and we started working together. And that's when I started noticing Real healing.Because again, he's not limited to the mental and physical. He also knows their emotional and spiritual realities and they affect the body very greatly. And that's what he's helping me work in.And then I take it and I do all do some stone soon on story healing, work on my own. And I come back and he takes that.It's again, it's this wonderful upcycle instead of a spiral downwards, it's a, it's a cycle going up to health and greater freedom. So that's my path.

I think it's a wonderful path. And in the fact that you're sharing it with other people is even a better path on top of that.So that's just kind of an icing on the cake or the cherry on top of the sundae. Let's talk about your book. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that journey. And to get into that, why, why myth, mythology, why fantasy?

Well, I.When I was 12, my best friend's mother and her parents were like my second parents put a Taylor Caldwell novel into my hand and said, you can write like this. And nobody ever encouraged me. Nobody had ever said, hey, I believe in you.So that put the idea of writing a book in my hand, my head and my, you know, and then all my thinking about Helen and who she was kind of converged together. So I, I didn't want to write another Dungeons and Dragons fantasy quest. Fantasy. A lot of people came after Tolkien. They did, you know, I'm not.They did great jobs, but it was that kind of fantasy. And I'm like, no, there's something different here.I didn't know it was my own story, but there was something different here and I, and I wanted to do my own version of it.So that's, that's the story I followed and that's the story that eventually became Stone Slayer when I finally realized, dread it, there's a demon in it. Dang it. You know, I want to get away from demons. Well, I keep coming right back. Okay, so there's a demon. Nasty. Okay?Not like a lot of the paranormal fiction we have where a sexy demon wants to mate with me. No, this demon is not sexy. It's not cute. It's horrendous.

Which is what most demons I believe are.

Yeah, well, they're spirits. In my understanding, they are spirits who did not trust God enough to believe in free will and said, no, no, free will is messy. Free will is this.Free will's that you can't have it, you know, it's bad. God. God. God was wrong. No free will. And chief among those was Lucifer. But anyway, so there are a lot of demons and spirits who tagged on with him.And the problem with that is once you do that, there is God's light and love that permeate everything. It is an energy that flows to everything that is living, organic or non organic. And without energy, none of us would exist and nothing would exist.And if you step outside that energy through denial, you then have to steal other souls energy in order to continue to exist. And that's what demons try to do. They try to steal your energy by any means possible.And the whole concept of demon possession as it's been portrayed in movies is not always what's going on. All right? But they're just trying to steal your energy. And the good news is you let them in, you can kick them out.You just have to know how to do it. All right?

Exactly. And a choice. That's a choice.

It is a choice.

Did this Stone Slayer kind of emerge from your healing in that knowledge? Did you kind of. Is there an overlap?

Well, there was an earlier version of it with a different name and an incomplete story again that I mentioned. I tried to publish, you know, 20 years ago. All right. But after I was.I was working with a wonderful editor of a small publishing company who really liked my writing. But she said to me, you're going to have to change the name. This is not the right name. I'm like, grumble, grumble, grumble.But I acknowledge she was right. The name was not appropriate to the dark fantasy, whatever genre you wanted to say that my series is in.So it grew out of a horrendous experience I had waiting for a very minor eye procedure. And I realized that, wow, there's something going on within me.Well, fast forward about eight months and sure enough, I cast out the demons, or actually the emotional body part of me hunted them down and threw them out. And I kind of watched this process go on. And that's when I no longer panicked going over, over the hill, so to speak.And I realized, oh, that's the name of my series. There's a demon in it and Stone Slayer is the name.I have been told by people that there is a whole bunch of a gaming Stone Slayer in the gaming world, which I am not part of. I don't, I have no interest in it and that it's very metal, whatever that means. All right. I just chose it because the name came to me.And you know, my inner writer said, this is It. This is the name for your series. So I said, okay.And then I had to go back and rewrite, you know, six or seven novels to, you know, books in the series to accommodate the new. The new character.

From that perspective, do you think what. What truths did fiction allow you to speak through. Through your, through that book, for example?I mean, you think, do you think it allowed you the evolution?We all know that I watched my father because back in the old days, when you and I know you started there, where we didn't have the electric typewriters, he didn't have the computer, he had a black typewriter in front of him that, you know, had little round keys, and you could just. That's what you would hear and see. Then you. Sometimes you'd hear him rip the paper out and crunch it all up and start all over again.So from that perspective, in the fact that you had to rewrite and re. Change, do you think your voice changed a little bit in regard to storytelling and novel. Novel writing?

Well, I think getting the whole story didn't really change my voice, but it did change my perspective and it did make me very, very aware of the choices we make because the characters, some of them get ensnared in the demons, machinations, through unwise, imprudent choices. All right? And. And it's not that the demon, per se, does all this evil.It has a lot of willing human helpers because they think they're going to get greater money, more power, whatever. Okay. You know, and they, they sell their souls to the devil or the demon. And it sounds so cliched, but that's actually what happens.And the story is very dark. And when I realized it, and I, you know, I'm at the end of book nine right now.I'm in the second generation, and I realized where it's going and what's going to happen and all the things that are going to come about. And I'm like, I don't really like where this thing is going, but this is the story and that's what I have to write.I mean, this is part of my own healing struggle. All right, because it's so interesting. I.Not long after Jana died, a friend, actually one of her former clients and students turned a friend, suggested that I get in touch with a. An astrologist because I'd always wanted to do an astrology reading for whatever.So anyway, I sit down with the guy Leo, and, you know, we do a zoom meeting. And he looks, he takes one look at my chart, and one of the first things he says to me is, you don't do superficial, do you? And I just cracked up.No, I'm not a superficial vergence. Well, it turns out, you know, you have 12 signs, 12 houses in astrology.Your sun sign is the one that all people always talk about, but you have a moon sign and you have all these other signs. And seven of my 12 are in a water sign, a water. So I'm like, okay, water is depth.And I am very much someone who doesn't do just the surface, all right? I like to go beneath, far beneath myself and any issue. So then what Leo also told me, and that is what I achieved.He said, you came here in part to resolve your issue with authority. And I was like. Because we talked around it, I would meet with him once a month. And it was in the. He was gifted counselor.I say was because he died in April of 24, but he was a gifted counselor. And basically, I think he's really a counselor just using the chart as a jumping off point for what's really going on within a person.And was great because it really helped. And I did exactly that. And I didn't realize that the authority I had to resolve was Lucifer. My relationship with Lucifer that needed resolution.That was the false authority. Because my message to everyone is that you ultimately are your own authority. All right? You're your own healer, you're your own teacher.And anybody's expertise can be very helpful to you as you go along your path. But ultimately you are in charge. And people don't feel that. They feel powerless, they feel helpless. And I know, I felt that.But once you start reclaiming all of you and letting go of those self judgments and bringing your energy back to you, going through this very deep, soulful healing, you feel, you begin to feel your power. You begin to feel how much worth you truly are to you and to your creator, God, Yahweh, whatever, whatever label you on source. Great.I like Great Spirit, but I use God because it's short and sweet.

All right, there you go. Well, Native Americans call it the Great Spirit. And I have a lot of friends who are Native American.And you know, when they talk about Great Spirit, they're talking about God. I mean, obviously we can. We have the option of naming that entity however we feel comfortable with. But yeah, it's all good. It's all good.I know I've got three covers of your book, I believe of the three of the books, had you always wanted to write a series or did you realize it was going to go into a Series.

Well, after I got to about 200,000 words in book one, I said, this is gonna go. This is going long. I think I should probably chop it up into a series. Okay.Because my book is not the typical, you know, like, you have a detective character, and the detective has mysteries to solve in each book. This story starts with Stone Slayer, book one, Scandal. And it continues from book to book, and new characters come in and some characters leave.You know, it's the. But the story continues and develops based on the events of the past books. So it's best to start with Scandal because then you know what's going on.And yes, there is a map and a glossary of characters, so it throws a lot at you in the beginning. That's okay because just keep reading, and then the storyline and the key people will become very clear, and then you'll meet the demon. Oh, Joy.

Well, I have to smile it. I think that it's interesting when we find our purpose and sometimes it's not what we thought it was going to be.And it sounds like you contributed to journalism for a very large portion of your life. But, you know, you smile and you can see joy coming from you when it comes to this portion of your life and your career, this chapter.Becoming a novelist like that, and getting these kind of. These characters on paper, getting the story on paper and sharing that with the world. So I'm happy for you.

Yes. This is part of my purpose.I believe that as souls, we choose to come into a physical lifetime because there are advantages to being in a physical world and there are challenges, all right? Everything has a positive and a negative, all right? But when we do, the smart ones among us choose lessons that we want to learn.Like me finally reconciling with authority, all right? And becoming my own authority and feeling that. Not just mouthing the words, I feel my authority, but we also choose a purpose or purposes. Like my.My late wife wanted to be a counselor and a teacher. Those were her purposes, all right?And she said, I looked over my life and I realized I was always counseling and teaching before I was counseling and teaching, because in every job she ever had, she was always teaching subordinates. And when she was a supervisor for fast food, she would career counsel employee employees. So she never had to fire anyone. They always. They.They all realized that maybe they should move on to another job and they left. All right? But that was after career counseling. And she was very, very good at that.It was her nature to be good at that, whereas it was always a mystery to me until I learned to use my soul senses better and got some soon on story healing training. And then suddenly I was much better at it. I wouldn't put myself in her league. She was amazing.But so my purpose, writing this book, telling this story, what happens in Stone Slayer. And as the years grew by and I, you know, decades passed between the time I knew I wanted to write it and when I sat down to write it.Now, between when I sat down to start it and now, David, this country hasn't gotten more and more like Asgard, the country I'm writing about in the. All right? There are just absolute polarization between races. The rich are getting richer and the rest of us are getting a lot poorer. All right?We're at each other's throats all the time, or at least we're depicted that way in the media. All right? And you have to ask, who benefits when we all point fingers at each other? You know, hint, follow the money. Okay?So this country now resembles Asgard socially, all right? And legally and politically, it's moving in that direction too. So Stone Slayer is basically a timely warning of, hey, guess what this leads to?It's the road to perdition. You really want to go down that lane? Or maybe you want to change lanes and try something different? All right. I don't know. I can't answer that.I can only know what I will do and how I will behave and what I will fill my heart with and hope by reading this. A, it's entertaining for people and B, gets him to think a bit.

I would hope so, because right now we are living in a world of chaos, and that chaos is only getting larger and bigger and enthralling more and more people and countries, and it's not. It's not a good path. It definitely is not a good path.

Definitely. Yes. Well, let me, let me enlighten you a little bit on the demon. The demon is a chaos demon, and it used chaos to destroy. All right?So chaos is a good prerequisite and setting if you want to destroy something.

I would absolutely agree with. That's what's happening at the moment.So hopefully there'll be at some point that we'll be able to put a stop to that from a better white light perspective and, and maybe get back on the path where we should be and where we need to be instead of taking us back 40 or 50 years and just. That's a whole different. That's a whole nother show, Candice Lynn. That's a whole nother show. Yeah.Well, let's tell where can somebody find Stone Slayer and help with storytelling healing?

Well, you can go to my website, Candicelyn Talmage.com there's a whole bunch of background on the series and my non fiction books and they're available in ebook and paperback on all major online stores. So if you're a Kobo fan or a Barnes and Noble fan or an Amazon fan, you can find them all there.

As I was standing in your website,.

Please Candicelyn Talmadge.com.

And I'll make sure that that's in the show notes for everybody so that they can reach out and contact you with just a click of a button. That should help. This is one more thing before we go. Before you go. So before we go, words of wisdom.What's the one thing you want people to remember if they're standing at the edge of a story they don't know how to tell yet?

You have more power and strength than you realize. Give yourself some credit, cut yourself some slack and follow your heart. All right. Follow your heart.

Brilliant words of wisdom. In fact, you are a testament to that following your heart. It took you decades to get to this point and you have fully embraced it.So that's very cool. Thank you. Candice, thank you very much for sharing your journey, your wisdom, your healing with us. I greatly appreciate it.And you know, the next couple books when, when you get them published, we should have another conversation.

I would love that, Michael. Thank you.

Well, I'll make sure that everything will be in the show notes and how to find your book and how to get into your story healing because I think that it's the best, it's a benefit for anyone going through any kind of a journey or any kind of a, whether it be physical, emotional journeys. I think that you have an opportunity to kind of learn from that for those of that are listening.And there'll be a link that you can just click and follow it like I said earlier, it'll take you right to it. And once again, again, Candicelyn, thank you very much for being here.

Thank you.

Today we explored the space between fact and feeling, between truth and myth. In between the stories we report and the stories that we live. Candace Lynn reminded us that some truths can only be revealed through imagination.And sometimes the deepest healing comes from rewriting the story. I did it. She did it. And you can do it too. So that's a wrap for today's episode.I hope you found inspiration, motivation and a few new perspectives to take with you. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to like subscribe and follow us and stay connected.You can find us on Apple, Spotify or your favorite listening platform. And you can head over to YouTube, catch the full video version. Have a great day, have a great week, and thank you for being part of our community.So until next time, I'm Michael Hurst and this is One More Thing before youe Go.

Thanks for listening to this episode of One More Thing before youe Go.Check out our website@beforeyougopodcast.com youm can find us as well as subscribe to the program and rate us on your favorite podcast listening platform.