SHAMANISM SAVES THE WORLD!

I've spent the last 18 months writing a fantasy trilogy. A wolf in Victorian dress turned up and suggested it. I'd just finished writing my 1st 2 books, one on the Medicine Wheel and one on astrology. In a sense, these were straightforward, as they involved setting out stuff I'd been thinking and writing about for years. But a novel? I hadn't done that sort of writing before, and surely I didn't have the ability? It has been stop-start, as I have shifted in and out of self-belief. 

One major theme has been a kind of how-to guide to embodied journeying - Shapeshifting - which isn't normally what gets taught, even though as far as I can see it is the most traditional way. Iconoclasm, which is my nature, my edge, always seems to bring me back to tradition in the best sense. Beyond that, I am addressing our great historical divide between Spirit and Reason, God and Lucifer. I want them to shake hands, and it is the Shapeshifters and those who love the Earth who will bring about that reconciliation - which Philip Pullman so noticeably failed to do. Shamanism saves the world!

 

I've just had a 2 and 1/2 month stoppage, at the start of the 3rd volume of the trilogy. I have to be inside one of the central characters to keep the bigger plot going, and I was failing to do that. And what happens then is that I don't have enough meaning in my life, and I start drinking a bottle of wine every other night. Alcohol gets a grip on me nowadays, in a way that it never used to, if I am not creating a story. It is not enough to write shamanic and astrology blogs, which is an important part of what I do. That creative story-telling side of me, which is new, has to be up and running or I drink instead. Alcohol is a powerful and addictive class A drug. I love it, I even have some of my best writing ideas under its influence.

I am still circling around this central character, who is about to go wandering on a Vision Quest in Iceland. This volume is called The Second Coming, and in it the young Messiah lectures people about the horrors of hell, but he gets a hard-on when he does so, and it is visible and embarassing for him, so he has some special underpants made that hide the problem. I am having fun. But it is still a kind of avoidance of the central character, who has much of myself and my own current conflicts and contradictions. Him going on a vision quest will be me going on a vision quest too. This sort of writing is transformative, sometimes it has me weeping.

I didn't do any writing today, because I haven't worked out the next step, and this evening the walls started to crash around me, though I remain off the wine. I have a lot going on inside me, I feel like a pressure cooker sometimes, and I just need someone around to speak it all out too. Which is difficult in my writerly solitude. I am very social as well as requiring solitude, and sometimes it all gets a bit much. I would love to have someone around me enough to talk it all out for at least an hour every day. Which is partly why I am writing this piece late at night. I just want to get it out there, I want to tell you all, I want you to know me, then I hope to have a good night's sleep. Though generally I am happily awake till 3am, and that's another thing 🤣