A hare’s breath escape

• I just finished indexing Her Hidden Children, much helped by the fact that I could find search terms by letting Adobe Acrobat search PDF files of all chapters. But before you index a book, you need to strategize about the book’s purpose as well as the reader’s needs, something discussed at this site.

• “Hare’s breath escape” is just one of many “dreadful phrases” collected by Teresa Nielsen Hayden. As she says, most are more common in print than in speech, so why do poor writers mis-see them? See also Egg corns.

• M.J. Rose at Buzz, Balls, and Hype wonders if writers should also be bloggers.

When it comes to writing, the most important job we all have is to write our books. If we don’t put our best effort there we aren’t doing our jobs. No author should sacrifice writing time for blogging time or promotion time if it’s going to weaken the book.

Of course, she’s a novelist–and she blogs.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with having a blog geared to your peers. I read other authors’ blogs – and enjoy them – but of the dozen or so I frequent – not one has ever convinced me to try that authors’ fiction.

Those blogs aren’t talking to me the reader.

Read it all.

Tags: ,

Pagan Studies Barbie

After Pagan Barbie, why not Grad School Barbie?

Put them together, and you have Pagan Studies Barbie?

Christian mutilation of Pagan inscriptions

Towards an Archaeology of Iconoclasm is an ongoing academic project about early Christian attacks on Pagan art, architecture, and writing. In this example, an athlete’s inscription was attacked.

Now, as mentioned, it’s a different “religion of peace” doing the same things. Sigh.

Tags: , ,

The Unsettling Wisdom of Dreams

As some of my readers know, my oldest sister died in February. She was living in Lithuania, and I had not seen her for two years, although we were in touch by letters and email until just a few days before the end.

In fact, one thing keeping me from working more both on this blog and other writing has been my new part-time job as her executor and trustee of her family trust.

Some time in March (I forgot to write it down), I did dream of her. I pay attention to dreams about the recently deceased. There is a special quality to them. At times they seem to carry a definite message from the Other Side.

I tossed a couple such dreams into “Ghosts,” an essay about my parents that I wrote partly to show my creative-nonfiction students that such work could be sold for money.

The dream about my sister, however, was not as clear-cut as those I summarized in “Ghosts.” In it I was following her across down a sidewalk at a small shopping center, carying my cat Victor in my arms. For some reason, I wanted to show him to her.

Today, as the Brits like to say, I’m gobsmacked. I had it all wrong. I thought the dream was about her, but it was not.

It took a message from a friend in Arizona to enlighten me. Her dog may have terminal cancer, and she was talking about how animals will sometimes tell you when it’s time to go.

Victor had been sick in late December, including a Christmas Day visit to the 24-hour emergency vet. Because we could not leave him at home alone, with the cat-sitter dropping by every other day, we canceled our planned trip to Arizona.

In April, his medical problems returned. With him sprawled on the metal table in the examining room, clearly in pain, M. and I made the tough choice between more treatment and euthanasia.

But not until my Arizona friend wrote to me about her dog did I understand the dream from weeks before. It was not just about my late sister.

A month before the vet gave him the injection, I had already carried him in my arms to the Land of the Dead.

Celts, Wine, and the Northern League

Northern Italy’s wine industry may owe its origin to the Celts.

Let’s remember, though, that “Celtic” most accurately describes a group of languages, not an ethnic group.

But this bit caught my eye:

Interest in all things Celtic — from music to mystical rites — took off in northern Italy in the mid 1990s, fanned by the Northern League party which rose to prominence with demands for independence for the north.

It’s eerily parallel to the way that the neo-Confederate League of the South in this country, jumped on the (Anglo-) “Celtic” bandwagon a few years ago. In Italy, however, the Northern League has some degree of political clout.

(Via Mirabilis.) Tags: , ,

Llewellyn Takes on a School Board

Llewellyn, the largest New Age/Pagan/astrological publisher in the US, has pushed a North Carolina school board into a corner. When the board said that “religious groups” could distribute “scripture” in the school’s, Llewellyn’s publicist decided that the works of Silver Ravenwolf would qualify as well.

Jason Pitzl-Waters has the details.

The whole issue reminds me of the plot line of Heathens Idolize School Prayer, one of the Chick-style pamphlets distributed by the Aquarian Tabernacle Church.

It’s been almost a decade since I was working with Llewellyn, and everyone whom I knew there has since moved on, except the Weschckes, who own the company. Carl Weschcke has always taken a slightly messianic view of his business, which is not a bad thing for a publisher to do. But he does so while looking at the bottom line.

“The move was definitely more of an educational motive than a political motive,” says the publicist. Yes, and, if successful, it’s reaching the teen and young-adult customer base that Llewellyn targets.

This calls for a Glenn Reynolds-ish “heh.”

Tag:

A Fatwa against Egyptian Sculpture

A high Islamic cleric has issued a fatwa against the classical sculpture of Egypt.

In his fatwa – or religious ruling – issued earlier this month, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa quoted a saying of the prophet Muhammad that sculptors will be among those receiving the harshest punishment on Judgment Day.

Artists and intellectuals here say the edict, whose ban on producing and displaying sculptures overturns a century-old fatwa, runs counter to Islam. They also worry that extremists may use the ruling as a pretense for destroying Egypt’s ancient relics, which form a pillar of the country’s multibillion-dollar tourist industry.

Islam and the Pagan religions have one thing in common: there is no central authority. But the Grand Mufti’s pronouncement might encourage the wackos to blow up a statue of Rameses II or otherwise interfere with the economically important tourist industry.

And money is money, as one of the many sellers of ancient-Egyptian replicas attests:

But in downtown Cairo, tourist shop owner Fathi Ibrahim says, “It’s not my role to disagree with the mufti. Anything he says, we must obey.”

However, Mr. Ibrahim contends that the mufti’s fatwa may have been misunderstood, finding it hard to believe that his merchandise is “un-Islamic.” After all, he says, “We’re not selling statues for people to worship. They’re just souvenirs.”

Don’t anyone tell Mr. Ibrahim about Egyptian reconstructionist Pagans.

Tags: ,

A Unitarian Easter sermon

“Praire Mary” Scriver, one of my favorite bloggers, re-creates the thread (or whole tangled mess of threads) of one of her Easter sermons from her days as a UU minister.

And she concludes,

When I explored this stuff, members of my congregations often said afterward, “I didn’t understand one damn thing you said!” Well, that’s why they call them Mysteries. Unsolvable but eminently ponderable.

Tags: ,

The Joy of Indexing

Blogging may slow down this week while I work on indexing the book.

Looking for more than the brief instructions given by the publisher, I came upon this site, which was useful in thinking about constructing the index as a mental map of the book.

It’s not as simple and straight-forward as it looks. And you have to think about the mental search terms that different groups of readers might bring to the book, which leads to entries like “‘Drawing down.’ See Trance possession.”

The designer put in the little crescent at the beginning of each chapter and each section in the front matter. I like it.

Pagans and the Dalai Lama

Some California Pagan friends attended this event with the Dalai Lama. Yes, the headline says that it was about the image of Islam, but apparently the 500 “scholars and religious leaders” included some Pagans, including the Pagan chaplain of the state prison system.

One of them, M. Macha NightMare, writes about getting ready for the event.

I confess that I would normally rather clean my closets than attend large interfaith events, but that’s just me. Huston Smith would have been interesting to hear.