Stalled, but Good News

Having been All Excited about finishing the third month of the Nine Moons program, I’ve officially stalled the fourth month for one cycle. My mom passed just at Imbolc, which also happened to be just before new moon this month – that was enough to make the more challenging work of month 4 difficult. We had arrived at the end of month three barely prepared, physically, for the Full Moon work of that month, and were behind on prep for month four, so I declared a suspension, and we’ll take up the work again at the coming new moon.
This tells me several things. First, the program begins a serious jump in intensity and preparation for the second three months. There’s a multi-day meditation and trance exercise, and the rituals require more actual thought and personal prep than had been the case in the first third. I’ll need to put advance warnings in the final version of the book, to help students be ready for the increasing pace, or we’ll see more students stall at this point. On the other hand, if a student needs to stall, the message should be that the program hasn’t ended, and can be picked back up. I wouldn’t want more than a one month stall, just to keep momentum.
The good news is that I have been able to keep up and catch up on writing. I should be finishing month six before we get back to it, and I’ve finished the spirit arte piece. I mean to test that material soonish, but since I promised to make it available to readers here, which I’ll post as soon as I can get lulu to work, where it will be downloadable for a very short time (maybe a week, maybe a little longer). It will then end up in a new publication, available for festival season this coming spring and summer.
The new publication marks a change in my self-publishing strategy. I’ve been fiddling around with presenting some druidic info in a concise, grimoire-style format, with plenty of evocative art, etc, essentially various sorts of spellbook. While a few folks have bought them, (bless ‘em) it hasn’t been many. The spirit arte material makes a nice body of mostly-new work, and I have some backlog of items, especially small spells and charms. I’ve been throwing those in, here, and in these b-tier pubs for a year or so.
So all those older-format items will disappear from the Lulu store in favor of this new publication; a nice 200 page spellbook, with mostly new material. I just have to present some Druidic basics for those who buy the book because the cover’s cool. But most of the material is published only in these experimental pubs that have sat still.
So, if you’ve bought stuff with my High Day invocations, or the Virtues Prayers in it, or the Nine Invocations to the Tuatha De, that’s some pages you’d be re-buying… sorry. But the spirit-arte material is fresh, and so are most of the practical spells, a couple even brandy-new (though tested) from the Nine Moons. I’m putting it together in a popular format, but with a romantic or evocative typescript, indulging my enjoyment of fantasy books. There are folks out there doing what they call ‘talismanic publishing’ of occult books. While I won’t be able to offer craft bindings, I do see this as an effort in that direction. Maybe I’ll do a limited-run ‘signed and sigilized’ talismanic hardback. Too silly? Feels a little silly… cool though…