You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
Practicing magick is isolating. Especially if you’re developing a new type of magick, without an order to bounce ideas off of. It’s a passion you devote hours and afternoons to, but one you can’t tell friends about, at least, not without having an awkward, unpleasant conversation.
But there’s a secret to making magick less isolating. Want to know what it is?
Start a blog.
When you do, you’ll get emails like this one I got recently from a reader:
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! I was starting to think that there’s something wrong with me because I didn’t use rituals, and because I noticed that candles, ritual robes and similar things actually make my focus weaker instead of strengthening it. And the usual “don’t think of how the magick will work, just be sure that it will” was constantly confusing me. I got amazing results through visualizing magick at work, so I never understood why I shouldn’t think about it.
Not listening to what others say when things were going well was easy, but when things got hard I realized that I just couldn’t find the answers I needed, no matter where I looked. I discovered your site today and I already know that’s what I needed! Even though I practiced magick before, I did exercises for beginners, because my magick was always kinda chaotic (not Chaos magick, just a mess) and I recently decided that to rebuild myself as a mage. I feel that your website can help me with that.
Emails like this just make my day. (Hint, hint.) It lets me know I’m making a difference, and that other people out there are struggling with the same things I am: Figuring out how magick works when the standard advice just doesn’t resonate, while we’re surrounded by people we can’t share it with.
Your blog doesn’t need to have answers. It just needs to have you. Your journey, your struggles and accomplishments, your experience of magick. So that everyone who reads your blog will feel a bit less alone, and so that you’ll feel a bit less alone for each reader who writes back.
Not sure where to start? Take exercises posted by other writers, try them, and write about what happened. I’d read that. And if you use my exercises, I’ll link to you, and other bloggers probably will, too. Easy traffic.
Worried you’re not a good enough writer? Don’t be. I was terrible when I started blogging. 500+ posts later, I’m decent. The answer is simple: Set a schedule, so you have a deadline. Write something, revise it, post it, and repeat. If you’re honest when you revise it — if you read every word out loud, spot places where the writing is weak, and fix them — you’ll become decent in 6-12 months.
Around that time, something amazing will happen. People who read your work will start asking questions, and as you answer them, you’ll figure out how to talk about your magick. When I started blogging, I talked about using “mental areas” to connect to “systems,” and said direct magick was “magick without rituals.” Now I talk about “engaging your mental muscles” to contact “ethereal software,” and say direct magick is when you “consciously engage your mental muscles, similar to biofeedback.” When friends ask me about magick, I recite a post I wrote, not word for word, but idea for idea, example for example. Drawing from your own writing is a tiny superpower, like pausing time in the middle of a conversation to figure out the perfect answer. Writing makes you comfortable sharing magick in an intelligent, approachable way, whether you’re in person or not.
So take the first step. Right now. Go to wordpress, blogger or namecheap, register a name, and start writing. Then leave a link below in the comments.
I started blogging in February 2010. Every February, I encourage readers to start their own blogs.
A Small Favor
I just did a minor update to my layout. Could you help me with a few decisions?
- The layout: Can you view all 3 columns easily? Does the page look good at full screen?
- How is the current text size? Who wants bigger or smaller? Would you like the “Text Size” widget back?
- Do you use “Latest Comments” in the sidebar? I have a hard time telling how useful it is — I wish it included dates, but I can’t find a plugin that does. Should I keep it?
And if you have any tips on wordpress widgets, websites to help making pretty color schemes, or anything else, send them my way. Thanks!
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Writing
yes
text size is fine, can re-size within the browser anyway
I find latest comments useful for checking any new comments on a previously read post- without having to go through
One thought – the beige background. Beige is the colour of my parents’ living room and houses that are being rented out. Beige does not really represent the color of a cutting edge magic blog to me. But that could be me. At least a simple white might be better.
And your blog has done a great job of thoroughly confusing and confounding me – but that’s a good thing!
Thanks, Simon. Yeah, I’m thinking about colors — knew zero about it Friday morning, by the afternoon I’d figured out enough to replicate what a friend did when I started blogging in 2010, so maybe another day of it and I’ll know what I’m doing. We’ll see.
And I’m glad my blog is making you think. Hopefully some bits will become clearer as I write and you read more.
(And thanks to those of you that emailed me feedback too — you know who you are.)
Hi Mike,
text size is fine in Chrome and as said above it can be resized in browser.
On my setup I have a beige “page” on a grey background. I wonder how it would look like if the grey background would be removed making the text areas wider. Sometimes simpler is better.
If you change colors I would recommend to choose something easy on the eyes. I sometimes like moderately bright letters on dark or black background.
Of course it would be nice to make the site look more mystical by adding graphics and stuffs but I think it would be better if graphics or intense colors remains away from the main text most of the time. There is a lot of occult sites out there that features extensive swirls of colors that may look nice at first but make the whole thing a pain to read.
May I suggest a front page with extensive and beautiful mystical graphics, some graphics and art on top of each page where the bar is, and peace and quiet for the reading area.
Thanks! On the borders, the page displays differently in different browsers. My chrome is like you describe, with large borders, but my firefox can’t even fit everything on my screen. Safari is somewhere in between. I’ve heard about this from web developers, and it really is frustrating — all the solutions involve hand-editing CSS and PHP code. So, sadly, this will have to wait until I get around to hiring a web developer (which will probably be around the time I do a cover for my book.)
Thanks for the ideas about graphics, too, that might be interesting.
Aha! I apparently had a “minimum font size” setting in Firefox, which is why the page looked different there than in Chrome. Unchecked it, changed some settings, and things should be much less cramped for you now. Thanks for the feedback, everyone.