The book on handparting I’m working on passed 50K this weekend. It’s still a rough draft, but this means that the word-clay I need to work is really coming along. Next will come the web page, with the survey, and I will begin collecting interviews on the subject. This will happen around rewrites, and I may shop this around to different writer’s groups to get a variety of feedback.

I’ve gone into this knowing that publishing is a completely different game than a)the pagan market perceives it to be in the first place and b)what it actually was in the first place. I am an internationally published author. When I introduce myself, I generally get a response of, “What was your name again?” I think that sums up international publication for most of us, and I don’t expect that to change because I actually write a book as opposed to my smattering of short articles.¹ Fortunately, I’ve gotten bits of help and nudges along the way – Lisa of Cybercoven.org² has definitely sent some good information my way, as have local members of my writer’s group who also know the metaphysical publishing field.³ Yesterday, after finding the post through a comment over on Lupa of Therioshamanism’s livejournal, I discovered RuneSoup. The post was the Five Laws of Occult Economics: Why We Suck at Money. There’s more digging to do, on this, of course, and I am a true Scorpio in that I’d like to pluck at the underlying attitudes while people get mad at me for making their internal buildings collapse, but for the on-the-table reasons that you can’t ignore, this pretty well covers it.

I read through the blog post, found it valuable, commented as such and marked it in my “Read It Later” plugin. Apparently Howard likes to get to know his readers, because he contacted me today to tell me he wrote about my project on the Divorce and Wicca (or whatever title gets picked for it) here – I’m example 5.1. I think his plan is intriguing, and while I have every intention of hiring a publicist and actually have a specific publicist in mind, I can’t see how that person would object to me doing a chunk of the legwork myself.

While this book isn’t nearly as fun as the Urban Wicca book I have on backburner, I suspect it will be received more easily since it is unlikely to challenge any (Wiccan) assumptions. I suppose writing this is after all the literary equivalent of eating my vegetables first. At least it’s not brussel sprouts.

I am grateful for the help and tips I’m receiving along the way. Article writing, once you get into a groove, is relatively easy. But writing a book is daunting, because there actually aren’t many places that spell it out all at once: a marketing plan should look like this, a book length should look like this, a query letter for an agent should look like ___, for a publisher like ____ and you can do this and this with proposals, etc.

I’m not a babe in the woods in this, but I am a toddler. I appreciate all the points I get that encourage me to er, toddle along.

More From dianarajchel

• The Wicca and Divorce book | Diana Rajchel
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• More updates on the Wicca and Divorce Book | Diana Rajchel

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1. Also, finding some of my work floating around the Philippines made me really wish I had a proper agent. [↩]
2. read her book Magical Connections, it’s good! [↩]
3. Not sure how public second friend wants to be, thus not linking at this point. [↩]