Magick of Thought

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I’m no expert at writing books. I’ve been working on one for about 6 months, and focusing on it for the past month or so. But I’ve learned a few things, and I want to share them.

Learning to Write

It’s almost trite, but writing is re-writing. I mostly learned to write by writing a post, reading it, then fixing bad sentences. (I also get feedback from friends — thanks, guys!)

The point isn’t to fix that one post. The point is to slowly write good sentences, to practice your art. Over time, you’ll start writing more good sentences in your first draft, which lets you raise your bar for what constitutes “good.” (The same applies to paragraphs — sometimes, the problem is the overall organization, not the wording.)

I’ve known this for a while, and I always revise my blog posts, but I don’t really wrestle with them anymore. But I’m wrestling with this book, writing to a level that requires focused effort, major rewrites, and the kind of mental reaching that I used to make for blog posts, back when blog posts were hard to write. And I expect that, over the next few months, it’ll make me a better writer.

Bonus tip to spot bad sentences: I’ll wait a day, then read the chapter out loud. I notice places where my words lose rhythm, where I’m not sure what a sentence really means as I read it, where I have to read the entire sentence then go back and decode it. Those sentences need a cleanup.

(For example, the sentence, “Over time, you’ll start writing more good sentences in your first draft,” is not a good sentence. It’s imprecise and contains unnecessary words like “start.” It’s in the post because I don’t see an easy rewrite, but wrestling to bring it up to book quality would definitely make it easier to spot the rewrite next time, which is the very definition of being a better writer.)

Outline = Progress

Until recently, I had a rough outline of topics, but not the chapter-by-chapter outline I have now. I thought knowing the topics would be enough. It wasn’t.

Two problems with not having a chapter-by-chapter outline:

When I started writing about a topic, I had to figure out how to approach it. But to do that, you really want to know how you’re presenting the topics around it. Which you don’t, because you don’t have a detailed outline.

There’s no progress bar. But now that I have my outline posted, I can see links go up, and I want to fill that page with links, which makes me write more.

This outline, by the way, was the main new skill I learned in writing the book. I hadn’t done anything of this scale before, and it was hard to think through — there’s a reason I put it off. But now that it’s done, each chapter is basically one blog post, which I know how to do. So I’ve reduced the problem to one that’s already been solved.

(Incidentally, I would not recommend attempting a book until you find it easy to write a substantive blog post.)

Comments are Awesome

Whether it’s feedback from Ananael on a sentence that readers might take the wrong way or requests from Yvonne to clarify some topics, having reader feedback as I write will help me produce a better book.

I’ve heard that, to become a good writer, you have to care more about your book than you do about perceiving yourself as a good writer. So true. It can be unfun to hear about your writing’s shortcomings, but I’m glad for all the feedback.

Also, I love how the comments section lets us explore ideas that wouldn’t fit into the book, like Yvonne’s question about perception vs external reality. I’m going to put something in my book to encourage readers to join the discussion in the comments, and include a link to each chapter’s comments in the electronic versions.

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

I’ve been writing my book, An Initiation into Direct Magick, for a few months, but I’ve been working from a high-level outline, figuring out the chapters as I wrote. That made it slow for me, and probably made it hard for you to put the information in context.

So, I’m pleased to announce a full outline of the book, also linked from the top navigation bar.

As I write chapters, I’ll link to them from the outline, so it’ll be easy to see what’s missing. (I’ll add the already-written excerpts as I revise each chapter.) When the book is done, that outline will stay up as the free online version, in addition to the free ebook downloads.

Got feedback on topics, titles, or anything else? Comments are open.

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

As I return to writing my book, I’m having trouble with the overall arc of it. Sure, writing one chapter is easy — that’s roughly like writing a blog post, then editing it a bit more. But it’s just not coming together. And so, I’m writing this post to figure it out.

So far, I know that I want the book to be more of a guided tour through direct magick, rather than a straight path to learning as quickly as possible. Also, readers should expect to do something useful fairly quickly, which means we need to start with ethereal software, rather than fully-direct magick.

In my old outline version, Part 1 of the book was a quick explanation of my model. I think that’s important: It’s a much better tour if you have some idea of what you’re seeing, and of how that fits into the overall picture. I’ll probably update the current Part 1 to make it more tour-ish, but most of the content will stay the same.

I see several paths for the rest of the book, and I keep writing a bit for one, then deciding another path is better, swapping, and making zero progress.

I could do a self-initiation: Connect to some ethereal software, use it to awaken your mental muscles, and learn a mental posture. Really, that has to come next no matter what I do with the book. I guess that problem is that “self-initiation” somehow doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s because I don’t generally like initiations — I’m not much of a joiner, and I dislike rituals. Or maybe it feels like unnecessary packaging around some fairly rudimentary magick. And yet… It feels like a nice presentation, a way to let you know what’s going on, and a way to add some ritual around a style of magick sorely lacking in even the tribe-building, bonding sort of ritual.

Let me ask you, dear readers: Is anyone else turned off by initiations?

So, Part 2 will cover connecting to ethereal software, issuing basic commands, awakening mental muscles, and basic mental posture. Maybe I call it an initiation, maybe not. But let’s consider Part 3 for a moment. I see two options:

• Basic commands for this ethereal software, like “Heal this person.”
• Or we can continue the tour, teaching about sensory connections, energy signatures and the like.

And, as I wrote those options, I realized what I should do: Pick a command, then give you a tour of the bits and techniques you’ll need to use that command properly. “Heal this person” is a simple command. Asking for psychic intuitions, visions of angels, and other things will take more knowledge and more skills. And so, I’ll just organize those commands from simple to complex, explain as many of them as make sense for Book 1, and then put the rest in Book 2. (Book 3 is about fully-direct magick, driven primarily from your mental muscles, rather than driven by ethereal software.)

Like or dislike initiations? Other thoughts? Leave ’em below.