A Malkuth of Me,  books,  business of writing,  craft,  grimoires,  the writing life,  thoughts

A Comparison

I made the observation recently that some occult authors really seem to have a hard time communicating in plain English. This seems to happen a great deal in the realm of “Limited Edition Hardcover” occult publishing. They take an author who writes really pretty sentences and have him write an entire book of them.  While this might be great for people who are really into flowery prose,  I prefer my occult texts to be direct. Don’t blow sunshine up my ass or use a lot of metaphor. You’ll only bore me. You’ll find I respect you and your writing more in the morning if you just quit trying to baffle me with bullshit. Yep – that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? I am pretty sure if you’re concentrating on writing a lot of pretty sentences that go nowhere and you talk in circles or you’re writing entire paragraphs of nonsensical metaphor –  you’re probably just making shit up as you go.  While that may or may not be true – this is what being purposefully archaic, subtle and indirect says to me.

“Cast thy circle thrice around widdershins as the thrice great Hermes stands before you holding the gilded staff of the serpent! Tenebrous night, blackened make the blade sacred in Her glory!”

Sure – it sounds pretty impressive — theatrical even!  But an entire book written like this, sentence after sentence after sentence gets really old, really fast. ::yawn::  I wonder if I wrote all my Demonolatry books like that if any of it would have been useful to people.  Probably not. See, so far what I’ve written for public consumption has been geared toward beginners (or as a refresher for more advanced practitioners). I see no reason to release my beginner books in special binding, limited numbered editions, etc. Yeah – we did that with Modern Demonolatry back in the day, but that’s because we had exactly enough $$ to publish 100 copies and POD technology wasn’t really around or accessible until around 2005. ::shrug:: Nowadays I would never put out a beginner book in anything but paperback and generic hardcovers. Why? Because those books need to be more accessible to people (cost wise). Not to mention they’re more useful if written in a direct and up-front manner.  Just sayin’…

If I do write a book worthy of a Limited Edition Hardcover (since DB Publishing would be paying out the nose to have them printed) I’ll make sure it’s actually something written in a clear, concise manner without any archaic text so that readers will get something useful. Any archaic text will be explained. It won’t be a beginner book. It will be something very specific and geared toward the advanced practitioner.  I’ll use modern American English and I might use a random expletive or two. I’m a big fan of “fuck”.  I may even throw in a few typos and grammatical errors JUST TO PISS OFF the grammar police. Some people just can’t see the forest for the trees. I find that absolutely amusing. Dance for me, my pretties! Dance!

Smelt Isle anyone? 😉  You never know what I’m gonna do just to see how other people react to my doing it.   On your toes folks! The show is about to begin. 🙂

Steph is an award winning and bestselling author of thrilling steamy and paranormal romances, dark urban fantasy, occult horror-thrillers, cozy mysteries, contemporary romance, sword and sorcery fantasy, and books about the esoteric and Daemonolatry. A Daemonolatress and forever a resident of Smelt Isle, she is happily married and cat-mom to three pampered house cats. Her muse is a demanding sadistic Dom who often keeps her up into the wee hours of the morning. You can contact her at swordarkeereon@gmail.com

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