Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just before midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.1 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. 

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my sixth published book, Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings. These days books on investigating reports of monstrous entities are all over the place, but that wasn't the case in 2001, when this first saw print.  I happened to be doing a lot of investigation of certain entities in the Puget Sound area in the years just before then; I thought it would be interesting to get some of my experiences and ideas in print; the book was a pleasant project to write, and it sold like hotcakes -- and, er, I may have some very small share of responsibility for those books on sparkly vampires, because unless you happened to spend time in the stacks of old university libraries full of mostly forgotten anthropology publications, this was for some years the one place in print you could find out that there's a very lively werewolf tradition among the native peoples of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington -- you know, near Forks.   If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and here if you live elsewhere.

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I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Well Forked

[(Anonymous)]

For those who haven't heard about this, the Twilight series started with a vivid dream that the author had, and she kept writing because she kept thinking about imagining what happened next, and because the characters stuck in her head.

https://stepheniemeyer.com/the-story-of-twilight-getting-published/

"I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 (“Confessions”) of the book.

[...]

All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn’t shut up. I’d stay up as late as I could stand trying to get all the stuff in my mind typed out, and then crawl, exhausted, into bed (my baby still wasn’t sleeping through the night, yet) only to have another conversation start in my head. I hated to lose anything by forgetting, so I’d get up and head back down to the computer. Eventually, I got a pen and notebook for beside my bed to jot notes down so I could get some freakin’ sleep. It was always an exciting challenge in the morning to try to decipher the stuff I’d scrawled across the page in the dark.

During the day, I couldn’t stay away from the computer, either. When I was stuck at swim lessons, out in 115 degrees of Phoenix sunshine, I would plot and scheme and come home with so much new stuff that I couldn’t type fast enough. It was your typical Arizona summer, hot, sunny, hot, and hot, but when I think back to those three months, I remember rain and cool green things, like I really spent the summer in the Olympic Rainforest."

https://motleyvision.org/2005/10/26/interview-twilight-author-stephenie-meyer/

"I woke up that morning with a dream fresh in my head. The dream was vivid, strong, colorful[there is some kind of character encoding conversion glitch in the text here, probably originally an ellipsis] It was a conversation between a boy and a girl which took place in a beautiful, sunny meadow in the middle of a dark forest. The boy and the girl were in love with each other, and they were discussing the problems involved with that love, seeing that she was human and he was a vampire. The boy was more beautiful than the meadow, and his skin sparkled like diamonds in the sun. He was so gentle and polite, and yet the potential for violence was very strong, inherent to the scene. I delayed getting out of bed for a while, just thinking through the dream and imagining what might happen next. Finally, I had to get up, but the dream stayed in my head all through my morning obligations."

Re: Well Forked

[(Anonymous)]

Fascinating. Some of my favorite writers have all used dreams as inspiration. Though I don't know if Lovecraft is a favorite of mine per se, I do like his work quite a bit, and so many of those stories were similar to this: transcribed dreams. I've tried to use the tactic as often as I can in my own writing.

Anyway, it's handy to keep a notebook and pen on the nightstand. & sometimes I'd say its better to lose a little sleep to be a dreamscribe than to go back to sleep and forget something you may have wished you would have written down.

JPM

Re: Well Forked

[(Anonymous)]

I've also not read or watched anything of Twilight. Without seeking, I do come across "worst of pop culture" takedowns of it. I wonder how different Stephanie Myers's life would have been, as well as countless people whose entertainment glamorized abuse, had she turned to discursive meditation to understand her dream, rather than publish an expanded version. "Why have I dreamt of a bland, boring girl whose only characteristic is willing acceptance of an abusive, toxic relationship with a much older and literally deadly man who can barely refrain from murdering her? What would be wise for me to understand about this dream?"

Mocha Amphibious Moose

Re: Well Forked

[(Anonymous)]

Ain't that the truth?

Sometimes the cure for a distracting and persistent daydream is to face it squarely, ask it (directly, like I would ask a person) what it is saying about my life, desires, unfulfilled needs, and how I could address those things in real life. The answers are often quite embarrassing, amazingly useful, and allow a glimpse at root causes. At which point the sparkly veneers evaporate, and the gross little segmented critters underneath go scurrying away. They dislike having bright light shone on them.

Since I started doing that, it is much harder to read basic dumb wish-fulfillment fiction (which I used to like!), and I have rather more productive time. YMMV.