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More Author Mistakes #authorsbehavingbadly #marketingmistakes #cockygate
Ouch! Just when I think I’ve seen all the crazy, bad marketing mistakes out there – along comes another one. These are gold to me. I’m actually teaching a workshop at a writer’s conference in September about cultivating the online writer persona — and THIS will be one of those situations that serves as a bad example of what authors…
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When Networking Starts Impeding Progress
My key phrase for the last month has been: Writing the next book is a writer’s first priority. This weekend, while at lunch with a fellow writing friend, we talked about volunteering for writing associations at which time she let it slip that she was involved in three other writing groups aside from the one we were both in. At…
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Ending the Competition
I’ve never been a competitive person. In my younger years I used to ride in horse show competitions. Not because I wanted to compete with others, but because I wanted to push myself. Besides, it was all in good fun. By the time I was fourteen, I found myself soured by competition. Humans can be rather ruthless, and none more…
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Find the Right Community
Online writing communities can be vast oceans difficult to navigate if you’re new to the scene. The wrong community can cause aspiring writers to give up, while the right community can help nurture a writer’s creativity, or boost them toward publication. The first question you want to ask yourself is, “What are my long term goals?” If you love writing…
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Constructive vs. Everything Else
From Amazon reviews to author criticisms in forums – negative, destructive criticism happens. It sometimes even happens in critique groups. A few weeks back, I told a woman that her blog post about an author was exceedingly negative. Imagine my surprise when the blog author argued with me and told me her post was constructive criticism. The post berated the author…
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Impressions, Priesthood, & Understanding
I was recently approached by a young man in his twenties who, after telling me he was new to Daemonolatry and his family condemned him for his abilities as a medium, expressed an interest in the priesthood. I went through my classic explanation that unlike most pagan/occult groups (especially online) that we actually required our priests to do a bit…
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What We’ve Lost
Lately I’ve been looking at Demonolatry students and it dawned on me that things just aren’t the same way they were back in the 80’s when I started out. I realized just how much modern students lose now that the master – apprentice relationship between the magus and his/her students only exists for a rare few practicing the artes. See, not very long ago that’s how Demonolaters learned Daemonic…
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Initiation
Initiation is an interesting topic. In a lot of groups the process of initiation itself is somehow a way for the group to either pass on their magickal power to the initiate or for the group to help the initiate tap the raw magickal current running through everything by giving them some special key, power, or authority that comes from the group itself.…
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Dear Diary…
My post yesterday about bizarre criticisms turned into a conversation among my writing group. “What was the strangest criticism you ever received?” I figured it would be a fun blog post. For me the strangest criticism would have to be when a critic complained that one of my my esoteric books read like a personal diary. As opposed to what? A recipe book? A…
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Discrimination & Discernment
I actually got this post idea from the esoteric author Sorita d’Este after she asked the question on her FB “How important is discrimination on a magical and spiritual path? And … how often is discrimination ignored because of a feeling that one should be more “accepting” of others?” It’s a brilliant question actually. My answer to it will probably…