I set my tea down and ran inside to get my camera. After photographing the thumbs up cloud image and settling back at my desk, I felt confident that I was on the right path. It was a clear sign. The universe was supporting me all the way.

Your personal oracle may not resonate through a cloud image, but it will speak directly to you and what is going on at the time. You might hear a song on the radio with lyrics that sing out your answer loud and clear. Or a cledon – specific words floating out from a nearby conversation – that seem to be speaking directly to you. Printed words can jumps off the page at you, like the Nike ad that encourages you to break out of the procrastination mode and “Just Do It!”

This synchronicity excerpted from my book is a writer’s dream come true.

Jackie was writing a scene for her novel when she hit a missing fact. She needed to know the name of a particular famous Brazilian soccer player. She thought it was Ronaldo, but for some reason she thought there was more than one Ronaldo. She opted to keep writing and Google later. After an hour, she headed to the kitchen to refill her coffee cup. The Wall Street Journal lay on the counter near the coffeemaker. Not quite ready to sit down again, she started paging through it. Her eye landed on the headline “Know Your Ronaldos.” She couldn’t believe it. The short article consisted of photographs and brief bios of three soccer players: Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese native who played soccer in England; Ronaldo, the Brazilian striker considered “the best Goal-scorer on the planet”; and Ronaldinho, the Brazilian midfielder. It was precisely the information she needed.

Some people might call this chance happening a coincidence, one of those remarkable sequences of events that seem to have no relation to each other. Yet when we look through the paradigm of personal oracles, we notice interconnected threads of energy in action. It results in serendipity. Author and mythologist Joseph Campbell defined serendipity as “a thousand unseen helping hands,” bringing to fruition what is meant to be but is totally unexpected.

Writing begins with inspiration. Unless that spark of inspiration is coupled with the sticktuitiveness that carries our work to the finish line, our best intentions lay dormant in a mass of incomplete files in our computer or scattered around the room. So don’t get stuck. Let the spirit of the universe lend a helping hand.