In The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart, Cameron again draws from her extensive artistic and teaching experience to lead readers toward ever-widening creative horizons. An extraordinary book of learning through doing, The Vein of Gold features inspiring teachings on the creative process and more than one hundred imaginative, involving, and energizing tasks. Each task involves the reader in "inner play," leading to authentic growth, renewal, and healing. Arranged as "a journey to the heart of creativity," the book guides readers through seven kingdoms: The Kingdom of Story, where the formative power of language empowers the creation of our guiding self-image; The Kingdom of Sight, where we learn to receive information holistically and honor our most personal impressions, intuitions, and feelings; The Kingdom of Sound, where we tune in to the melodic flow of creative life, literally making each day more "sound"; The Kingdom of Relationship, where we sharpen the skills and develop the will to choose the companions we can really trust; The Kingdom of Attitude, where the negative self-talk that weighs us down is cast off as we learn to pursue our creative efforts with lighter hearts; The Kingdom of Spirituality, which teaches us to examine and strengthen conscious contact with the higher realms for a working partnership with unsuspected inner resources; and The Kingdom of Possibility, where the reader comes to fully inhabit his or her creative life vision.

In her bestselling The Artist's Way (1992), Cameron offered a 12-week program aimed at recovering one's creativity. Each chapter ended with exercises designed to help a reader glimpse his or her inner artist, which, Cameron said, had been buried alive under a mountain of negative conditioning. Now Cameron urges readers to go deeper still. As before, she urges them to write three daily "morning pages" of stream-of-consciousness prose and to take themselves on a weekly "artist's date," a solo outing designed to help them get better acquainted with their inner selves. But here, Cameron gives new emphasis to her advice about the value of a daily 20-minute walk: "The job of your adult self, for the course of this book, will be to walk your creative child back to health." All the exercises herefrom the considerable task of writing one's narrative history to doll-making; from creating collages representing difficult relationships and mulling over the common themes of favorite moviesare intended to make readers feel deeply. "A pilgrimage is a physical process," writes Cameron. "What this means is that the tools of The Vein of Gold will be more deeply felt, and therefore more deeply resisted, than the tools of The Artist's Way." The book is divided into "kingdoms"of sight, story, sound, attitude, relationship and spirituality. Each leads readers closer to their own "vein of gold"to that territory of experience and possibility that, Cameron says, is indelibly theirs. For those seeking the wellsprings of creativity, this book, like its predecessor, is a solid gold divining rod. 125,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC and QPB featured alternates, One Spirit main selection; simultaneous Putnam Berkley audio; author tour. (Oct.)