One of the challenges I face while working steadily at the Divorcing a Real Witch book is the one of inclusive language. While ostensibly for Wiccans – since I am Wiccan – other neopagans/Pagan religious practitioners may find the book useful.1 This leads to the dangerous bugaboo of using Pagan/Wiccan interchangeably when in fact the terms are not and should not be interchangeable. Since we have monotheist Wiccans out there and Pagan implies polytheism2 it’s less than perfect to simply just say “Wiccan” or just say “neopagan.” Besides, participants in my survey so far are not universally Wiccan.
Tag Archives: divorcing a real witch
Writing WritingWriting lockdown and scheduling
October 5, 2010 – 11:41 am
So the writing “lockdown” started yesterday. It’s more of a fulfilling an agreed-to schedule with my husband, and then going elsewhere to write for the evening. Since virtually no coffee shops stay open late enough to fit our schedules, I find myself wandering to bars that offer wireless for my work – or, really, exploiting my Android Tether.
I also strongly suspect that USI Wireless has some programming that blocks/hijacks nearby signals. My Droid is getting stuck with the USI login even in areas that I know offer free public WiFi. What a crappy, nasty, illegal business practice.
My goal is to get my book proposal into what I hope is salable order. I want to send a query to a prospective agent this week, and if she says yes, I’ll at least have that prepared immediately. Whether she says yes or no, this gives me the month of November – nanowrimo! - to work revisions, research and updates on my book.
I have some minimal Etsy stuff to do in the meantime, but hopefully somewhere between today and tomorrow I’ll make some real progress on assembling and revising those first fifty pages. At least, I hope it turns out at fifty pages. Hard to say right now.
General Update & Divorcing a Real Witch update
September 30, 2010 – 1:01 pm
The fall arts season begins, just as I’m going to be prepping like a madwoman for the Portland/New York trip. In the meantime, experiencing much discomfort at how little I’ve worked out lately – the calf cramping, it’s a problem, and I’m not sure how much daily yoga it’s going to take to straighten out. I tried to swim earlier this week, and I made it ten minutes before the telltale twinge in my calves drove me out of the pool. I really don’t want to have that happen during times there’s no lifeguard, and I have to wonder if the pool temperature plays into my issues. I may cave and rent a small locker – I can see life being easier if I just hop on a bus and go, with my clothing waiting patiently for me at the Y. Less stuff to carry on the bus, less excuses for incidents. Book stuff after cut.
The Four Books (on Wicca) I plan to write
September 2, 2010 – 11:51 am
2. Urban Wicca
3. A book on elemental magic – I know they’re already out there, but I’m working on some stuff in my own practice and I will have stuff to add to the body of current works
4. A spellbook written completely in rhyming poetry, a la The Crone’s Book of Words
.
I’m sure there’s other stuff I will write along the way, but those are the four books on Wicca I want to write.
Survey extended
August 5, 2010 – 11:47 am
I’ve extended the survey for those who have experienced divorce and who identify as neopagan to October 31, 2010. I may extend it again. This is for my book, currently with a working title of Divorcing a Real Witch.
What does knowing all this unpleasant stuff about divorce mechanics do, and how does it help you?
1. If you are neopagan/Wiccan or any other type of non-traditional spiritual type who has experienced divorce, you get a safe place to talk about your experience. I’m not sharing the information that makes you identifiable, and using the explicit identifying material such as your name only if you give me explicit permission to do so. Incidents shared will be given pseudonyms. Also, I’m surprised at the popularity of throwing angry cats.
2. If you are neopagan/Wiccan who has NOT experienced divorce, you get two benefits long-term from helping this book come about:
1)If you go through a divorce, it will help to know what other people have done. It reminds you you are NOT alone. It also gives you a place to work from if the stress shuts off the creative part of your brain that designs ritual. 2)If you are a clergyperson, it’s a specific guidebook on the topic. It won’t make you accredited as a counselor or anything, but it gives you a platform to work from, especially if you do get that counseling accreditation from someplace like Cherry Hill Seminary.
So, how can you help? In a way that takes very little effort, where you need not leave the computer. You just need to direct people to http://survey.dianarajchel.com. If you have the ShareThis plug-in you can send it to multiple spaces at once. Or you can click thumbs up on StumbleUpon. Otherwise, you can just cut and paste that link – drop it in your Facebook and Twitter, send out a message to your pals still on Myspace, comment on the Reddit Link to it, add it to your delicious.com bookmarks, digg it – just the clickity you’d do without really moving anyway.
Just a little bit of help from all of you goes a long, long way.
Great, so how’s the book coming?
Along.
After evaluating where I’m at with the rough draft of the entire book (sitting at around 65K right now) and with the book proposal (in the third draft on the opening chapters right now) I’ve decided it’s OK to slow down, as long as I keep working at it daily.1
I’m finding I’m excising all the stuff about my personal history. I’ll work it back in later, or maybe use that stuff to write a memoir down the road. With Mercury Retrograde starting August 20, and with planetary conjunctions making waves right now, I’m thinking this is a good time to lean back and really analyze my work, get feedback, do yet more revision. (Remember: Mercury Retrograde is a RE opportunity. Revise, reconsider, remember, relax.)
I’m also trying to work up a little something for Witch’s Voice that will hopefully bring the survey to the attention of people who want to participate, and I did exchange emails with the Minnesota Pagan Newswire Collective. At some point we plan to do a special interest story – and at some point, I plan on bringing all those journalism skills I developed in college to them.
That’s where I’m at – still working on that book!
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- Well, more or less daily. I’m also engaging in a gym exercise schedule because I have to face the fact that I need to look a bit more conventionally attractive if I want any of my creative work to get the chance it deserves. For me this in itself is a long, long road and is not actually about weight, though it is about health. But not because I believe overweight is unhealthy, counter to “common knowledge” thought that is. Read Fat Chic, you’ll get it. [↩]
Writing update: stuckness
July 19, 2010 – 3:54 pm
Right now on the Divorcing a Real Witch book I’m feeling sort of…stuck. I’ve got the survey up and going, but I’m not getting a lot of response from the bloggers I’ve asked to help me out so far – and really, that’s up to them. I disappeared from the community just as I was achieving trajectory, so the “who the hell are you” reaction is understandable. Also, there needs to be research into neopagans the technological divide. Our keep-to-the-fringe tendencies makes us a community of very early or determinedly late adopters. I’d be utterly unsurprised if some Wiccans were sitting in a cave arguing about using cigarette lighters for fire right now.
This isn’t writer’s block. This is the old-fashioned inertia that creeps up on me when I’m doing something important, something that might change things, something that scares the living hell out of me. It’s also why I feel depressed, disengaged and ever so slightly self destructive. Like it or not, I am an artist, and I am intense. Right now the like it is on “not” because I want to just crank up the back of my brain like it’s an old fashioned car and set it to working and writing, but I can’t quite find the handle.
There’s this section of my consciousness that’s just puckered. Anxiety is sealing it closed. I’m thinking of the people who don’t want me to write, who are convinced that they have the authority to say I don’t have the authority, who will threaten all sorts of bullshit because of some imagined story that has nothing to do with what’s genuinely going on with me. People who resent me for making money. People who just want control over me still. Worse is that I might get harassed by people who pay way too much attention to me, while the people I want to reach might ignore me altogether. How much would that suck?
So today is a day of One Small Thing.
I’m doing this blog post. I revised my Llewellyn article. I also did some revision on the overview for my book proposal. That’s something. I’m also a little hungry – and in Write Yourself Right Cameron does say something about HALT (don’t get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired – which are my four primary emotions.)I pre-made salads this week to make sure I ate healthy at lunch; I can grab one of those. After that, I can write a thank you not to the sponsors of our Doctor Who meetup.
I need to come up with an article appropriate for the Witch’s Voice – it’s a lot harder to do now that they have no regular guidelines. I’m drawing a massive blank, too. I’m also not blogged ahead on Fat Chic, which I find distressing and unusual – but typical in July.
The survey is up – please, PLEASE spread the word to divorced neopagans you know
July 8, 2010 – 1:19 pm
OK, the survey is up and ready to go. If you or someone you know is neopagan and has been divorced for 1 year or more, please ask that person to participate in this survey. It is intended to grasp the range of experiences happening within the community for a book and a possible online documentary.
I am looking for
- Neopagans who have experienced divorce
- Those who have been divorced for one year or more (it takes about that long for all the consequences to come to bear)
- You need not identify yourself fully – pseudonyms are allowed
- You can skip questions that are not relevant to you or are too upsetting for you to answer, or complete a survey page and simply leave it
You can go to the survey at survey.dianarajchel.com.
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The next phase of Divorcing a Real Witch
July 2, 2010 – 6:33 pm
I’ve got a first draft on the proposal now, and holy crap… it’s weak. I still believe the book itself is pretty damned strong if still in a first draft, but right now the overview would fail my “short attention span” rule. For now I’m leaving it sit. I already had to trash more than half of the second chapter, intended for the book proposal – it was too personal and way too far from the topic of what happens to those who, by proximity must observe and are therefore affected by your divorce.
In the next month, I’m hoping to get the proposal into a condition where I’d let another human being look at it. I’m also just about ready to release the great big survey on Wicca and Divorce, and I am going to need that puppy Tweeted, Facebooked, Tumbled, and email-forwarded like mad. So for those of you who want to help, this is me letting you know… this is HOW you can help. By letting anyone and everyone everywhere in your neopagan sphere know that there’s a survey I’d like them to take. I’m getting the legalese worked out, along with the privacy notice. I do indicate on the front page that many questions may be triggering, so we’ve built in a way for participants to skip questions, or go to the bottom of a page and hit “send” and then walk away. There’s really no way to ask these questions without sending someone back to a therapist. Just writing this book, especially in the wake of recent life events, has depressed the hell out of me. And since writing a book is never just writing a book, I’ve still got a long journey ahead with a god-awful depressing subject. It’s like being locked in a room with one of those twits who likes to say “But my life sucks more!” until you are forced to shush and listen to a litany of indeed, suckage. That’s not the book’s fault; that’s just the nature of the subject.
Right now I’m stuck in an in-between. Divorce is a very serious subject, and I am a very funny woman. Alas, this is to the detriment of the book. So I’m struggling to negotiate the right headspace between the “fly free and wacky” approach that generates my best writing, and the “I must take this seriously to be taken seriously” approach that allows me to broach heavy topics but that is not really a palatable read. Curse you academia!1 YOU did this to me!
So there I am. Just a little bit stuck.
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- Not really. Nothing worse than slipping on a banana peel and landing on a trampoline, anyway. [↩]
Divorcing a Real Witch intensive survey: beta testers needed!
June 26, 2010 – 10:08 am
I’d still like to get a few more beta testers for the Divorce and Wicca survey I have up. It’s long, but allows you to skip non-relevant to-you questions and you can save and come back. Betas need not complete the total survey. Betas also need not fit the survey qualifications. Right now I just need to know that the survey works and will continue to work as it gathers more data.
Also, aside from Witchvox and the Wild Hunt, any recommendations of places I can promote it are very, very welcome. Also, when the time comes, tweeting it, reposting it to your Facebook, or posting it to your own groups will be much appreciated.
I do plan on posting on the Pagan News Service group on Google, and I am plotting in my head for an article series – one for Witch’s Voice (highest readership) and on the advice of Gordon at RuneSoup I’m also thinking of pitching some articles for an “Advice from a Witch on Divorce” article to various women’s magazines. I may be a little too late, hard to say – I would guess that most monthlies are doing their fall issues now.
I got some valuable advice yesterday about what else I will need to do to get this book off the ground, so I’m hanging in there.
So if you want to beta test leave me a comment and I’ll follow up with you by email.
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Divorcing a Real Witch: Update
June 24, 2010 – 2:56 pm
I thought I’d let a few of you all know how it’s going on the Divorcing a Real Witch project. In sum: slow and steady. The initial beta test of the poll on Wiccan divorce experience failed, so we (meaning my husband) moved it to a different server, and after an initial slow load time it appears to work in every browser. So now I’m looking for new beta testers. Contact me if you’d like to test the poll for me.
I’m also working on the second draft of the first two chapters, and trying to assemble something remotely usable as a proposal for prospective agents. In the process I’ve become frustrated with others in my craft and my Craft. I’m starting to suspect the reason I get so many patronizing and useless responses is because certain people just don’t want to admit it when they don’t know something. This reveals a lot about the reason for the abysmal state of publishing on pagan topics.1
More From dianarajchel
- Seriously, “try Writer’s Digest” or “Writer’s Market” is not a helpful response, since I already did it. Pointing me to AgentQuery after I MENTION AgentQuery is also NOT useful. And telling me to “do my homework” when I’ve just demonstrated that I have deserves no more and no less than a middle finger up your nose. Grr. [↩]
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