Still working... working... working

The book is coming along.  At some point I have to stop editing, I know.  But I'm not quite comfortable with it yet.  Still.

On the other hand, it'll be soon.  Honest.  To that end I've been coming up with things I want to say to catch me an agent.  Nowadays authors can't submit to most publishers directly.  Some agents don't even take new authors.  It's complicated.

Writing a whole novel is easier than finding an agent or publisher.  Or at least it's more enjoyable for me.

Anyway, if you'd like to read the description as it exists today, CLICK HERE. 

If you like my writing, you might consider tipping me by becoming a Patreon supporter (a buck a month is all!).  Just a thought, not a requirement.
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Still coming to a bookstore near you

Last May I posted about a book I've been wrestling with since 2009, Evolution Device.  I had hoped to get at least a digital version online before now, but that hasn't happened.  What happened instead was a professional editor.

I thought the book was ready to go.  But no.  I didn't realize what I was getting into with a pro editor, because, silly me, I thought that the book was nearly ready for publication.  I thought maybe I'd just pay this editor to nitpick the manuscript and I'd be giving readings and autographing books in bookstores in short order.

Bwahahaha!

The editor was kind.  She softened the critique by letting me know the book had potential  But then she identified a few plot points she didn't understand and other areas that she had questions about. 

Three pages of areas that she had questions about.

At first I was overwhelmed.  I waited a few days, then started with some of the issues that looked easiest to fix.  Was that  movie star I referred to really a star in that year?  Why did that character just disappear?  Why was I spelling Magick the way I was spelling it, and would readers understand what I meant?

Other issues were not so easy.  If they weren't fixed they could end up becoming fatal flaws.  Some of the problems had come about because I was tired of reading my own writing over and over again.  Some of it was because reading my own writing over and over again caused a kind of editing blindness.  That's when I just don't see what's actually on the page, I instead see what I intended to be on the page.

Which is why I hired a professional editor in the first place.

And the result is...

Now the manuscript is shorter because I ended the tale in a different place.  It's tighter because I corrected a point of view continuity problem that, in doing so, fixed other problems.  I took out some backstory that just wasn't necessary.  I added a couple plot twists in passing, and I fleshed out a few characters that could use the extra weight of words.

I had no idea I could do all that.  I impressed myself mightily. 

But it's not over yet

You'd think by now I'd be sick of this whole thing, but au contraire!  Just this afternoon I finished editing a print-out of the manuscript, all 345 pages of it.  It took three days.  When I was done with the last page, amazingly, I still loved my book. 

So hey, I've got a fan-base of one already!

The manuscript goes back to the editor after I've made the corrections to the digital file, probably in just a day or two.  She had told me that if I resolved the issues she had pointed out, it'd be ready for an agent.  Those words alone kept me going at the revision.  But she's a pro, she knows when to use the whip and when to use the carrot.

Once she's done with it the manuscript will be copy-edited, because I want a candidate agent and/or publisher to have a polished novel to enjoy without the distracting goofs, typos, and dumbnesses that can ruin the reading experience.

And oh, the blurb

A blurb is a description of a book in a few short paragraphs that gives potential readers an idea of what the book's about.  It might appear on a back cover or on Amazon or be sent to a book reviewer -- it's a worm on a hook to get people to buy a book (you didn't know I was a poet, did you?).  Almost a year ago in my blog post about this book, I provided a draft of a blurb, but I think this one is better.  It is, of course, subject to change.

Evolution Device

♪

They call it a gift, but sometimes gifts are really curses.  

Eddie Edmunds was born to be a shaman to his people in remote New Mexico.  Instead he finds himself on the slippery path of fame and fortune as a rock guitarist in music-crazed London in the early 1970s.   

Eddie's gift is not what it seems.  His extraordinary skills with music are actually manifestation of a power that some would consider magic.  When Eddie inadvertently calls his Muse into physical being, Lilith must learn how to act in a human world where she has no place, and where being in a physical body is not always what it was expected to be. 

Lilith must not only be the Muse who provides inspiration for Eddie's music, but she must provide a way for him face his fears.  He must control his gift before he -- and she -- are destroyed by the wild power.  

-----------------

I've also been playing with book covers, not that a publisher normally lets an author have a say in that.  Here's one I did early on that I still very much like.

Coming soonish to a bookstore near you

Well, okay, not soonish. Maybe digitally in a few months, but in print... next year at the earliest.

Oh, perhaps you are interested in what the heck I'm talking about?

Evolution Device. A book I wrote. Not my first book published but my first novel. The title is subject to change, as these things are until it's too late to change them. The reason I'm posting about it here is because it this book was a long time coming. It was conceived oh, just about when I first started listening to The Yardbirds, in a way. Just about when the music of Jimmy Page first entered into my consciousness. 

It just fermented in the deep dark of the back of my brain, receiving jolts every so often as I listened to that music. It called to me, the magic I felt in that guitar, magic I've written about at length here. Eventually I had to respond.

I started Evolution Device in 2009. It's only now getting ready to be born. Maybe it'll be a Frankenstein's monster, but maybe it'll have absorbed enough of its Master to bring its own magic to the world.

It's not about Jimmy Page, but in a sense his music is my muse. 

Evolution Device 

♪
Rock guitarist Eddie Edmunds has inadvertently manifested his spiritual Muse, Lilith, into physical reality. Lilith must now get Eddie to learn to control his power before he -- and she -- are destroyed by the wild magic of his music. Or before the drugs he uses to dull the power take him out. But a Muse can only do so much and Eddie is headed down a path of no return even as his band, Evolution Device, is dragging him to greater fame and fortune.

If you're interested in following the adventures of Evolution Device's... um.. evolution, you can sign up for my email newsletter soon as I set up an account. It's all up in the air right now, so stay tuned!

UPDATE December 2017
Evolution Device is being whipped into shape with the help of a professional editor.  The revisions, rewrites, and copy editing is almost done.  Then the hunt for an agent and publisher begins.  Stay tuned!

What May Not Be Ever Again

“Everybody I know seems to know me well but they're never gonna know…”
~ What Is And What Should Never Be, Led Zeppelin II (1969)

Mage Music 71

The desire for another reunion of Led Zeppelin is a big topic of conversation for music lovers, and if it's not that, then the talk is about when Jimmy Page might come out with new music of his own. What follows is my personal opinion based on my own observations and conclusions and from the point of view of Magick. You may not agree, as is your right, and you are welcome to contribute your own opinions - but please keep them limited to the music and Magick aspects.  Also note that this is part one of a two-part post.  If you comment, I may steal your idea and use it to inspire thoughts for part two.  If I see farther it is by "standing on ye sholders of Giants"*.

The "just play with another band" theory

Jimmy Page has dropped in on many great bands over the past decades. He's worked with some pretty good musicians in his own groups, too, and people wonder why Mr. Page doesn't do an album with them. I say, how could he?

Sure, a musician of the caliber of Jimmy Page has got to have some highly talented people to work with. But as I see it, a major obstacle for Jimmy Page playing with other big-name musicians is that those guys are big-name musicians. They've got their own well established style, their own approach to music, their own feeling for what to say and how to say it musically. So does Jimmy Page.

So the real question would have to be who's going to yield the musical direction to the other?

Whose Magick is it anyway?

Jimmy Page basically started out his professional career as a session musician.  That means he was freelance, not with a regular band but hired to play individual studio recording sessions.  More importantly, this meant he had to match the needs of the music of the sessions and there was very little wiggle room to bring in his own musical vision.  Jimmy Page was very, very good at it, but playing other people's music wasn't where he wanted to do.  What he really wanted was to express what he had in him and that's why when the opportunity rose he set forth with that triumphant musical colossus, Led Zeppelin.

The beauty of Led Zeppelin was that Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham were basically at the same place at the same time in terms of music.  They were all very, very good - but the potential for greatness hadn't yet been expressed in any of them. Once they were together much of Led Zeppelin's music - not the lyrics, but the music - was driven by Jimmy Page, and the others in a sense yielded to Mr. Page's muse. Led Zeppelin wasn't all Jimmy Page, of course - the chemistry came from all of them, after all - but they were at the same place musically.  They created the Magick together, as indivisible components of one ritual.

Today that's not so.

Now things are very different. Robert Plant is following his own muse and has gone off to explore new musical territory for himself. I believe that for him to come back to a situation of being subsumed in a creative project over which he no longer had his own full musical expression, as he now does, would be very hard - and who could blame him?  This would be true for any other vocalists or guitarists who were of the equivalent level of experience and musical genius as Jimmy Page, and I think that this is a key point.

The best of the best musicians have all worked hard to get where they are, and why would they want their individuality, their unique musical vision and all they've achieved with it to be cast aside for something new, something in which they would not be the star?

And even if they would do it, could they do it?  Could they give up who they are to become something else?

Old dogs can learn new tricks

It is hard to do, but highly talented people can strike out in new directions. The problem with the music industry, though, is that audiences aren't always open to newness, and critics have not been bashful about expressing how they feel each time Jimmy Page has stepped off the beaten path.  From the very beginning with Led Zeppelin, to Lucifer Rising and carrying through to surprises such as Come With Me (with Puff Daddy), critics have been fast to complain although thank goodness, that hasn't stopped Mr. Page.

But finding musicians who could work with Jimmy Page to create new work today - that is a different story. This week's playlist was chosen partly because the title suited the subject here, but also because the versions provide examples of Jimmy Pages most exquisite techniques of fingering and timing. He squeezes some of the notes for so long that your heart wants to stop from the sweet torture of it.

This level of musicianship and creative artistry - this Magick that has been sustained for half a century - this is not something that anyone wants to see diluted by collaboration with lesser musicians, I think.  Only the best musicians.  But who are they that are that good yet willing to give themselves up for the Magick of the Master?

If there is to be any new music from Jimmy Page, I think he would have to find extraordinary new musicians who could joyfully bend to the Master's will while still being powerful in their own right. That's what Led Zeppelin was, after all. But is it even possible? We can dream, but I'm not holding my breath.


Thanks to Denise Smith for inspiring this post in one of her comments in a Jimmy Page group on Facebook.  This post has been part one of a two part thought, which I probably will continue next week.  

* Quote is attributed to Sir Isaac Newton but he wasn't the one who originated the thought.  He understood that he, too, "stood on ye sholders of Giants."

---

What Is And What Should Never Be  (♫ YouTube playlist ♫)

1969 (studio) Led Zeppelin BBC Sessions
1970 (live) Led Zeppelin
1994 (studio) Unledded
1998 (live) Page & Plant, Colorado
1999 (live) Live At The Greek

Muse Music Magick - and a Happy Birthday

2013 - Year of the Muse

~jimmypage.com, January 1 2013

Before all the sweat equity that a Mage must put into Magick - or a musician into music - there must be inspiration to provide the goal, the end point of that journey. But where does inspiration come from?

The neat, clean hard-wired explanation

Scientists today are discovering some incredible information on how communication and creativity work in our brains. They are getting a picture of how truly hard-wired we humans are for what we are capable of. The actual physical pathways of electrical pulses and brain structures involved during acts of creativity are being mapped.  This is very exciting stuff - but what scientists are doing is confirming what many of us have already understood:  Music is something that not only we all can do or at least appreciate, but is a basic and necessary part of the human communicative experience that evolution shaped the brain to do.

But as nice and neat as that sounds, that still doesn't explain the source of inspiration.  Science is remarkably chary of addressing the hard questions:  Why does life exist at all?  What started it?  What's it all for?

The mushy, non-scientific explanation

Like with Magick, music is a process and an experience. Like with Magick, the musical process requires desire and will and ritual (performance). And like with Magick, in spite of what science would say, the source of music is not ultimately to be found in the hard-wired world but in something much vaster than electrical pulses in the human brain. 

Science has yet to venture into to the scary territory of the Mysteries and pretty much either pretends that part of the human experience doesn't even exist or that it's hogwash (although quantum physics is making that avoidance harder and harder to maintain). Even when attempting to categorize, quantify and otherwise pin down psychic phenomena science clings to the notion that there is no difference between the mind and the brain.  

The ancients tackle the hard stuff

Some thinkers have always known better.  To them - particularly the ancient sages of mythology and philosophy -  the mind/brain sameness claim would have been considered ignorant in the extreme.

Which is not to say that human attempts to explain the unexplained (and likely unexplainable) have been 100% accurate either, but at least they tried, and so those of us today with broader vision benefit.  There is much to learn from mythology, and thus we come to Muses, the goddesses who embody inspiration and the arts.

The Muses

In western mythology there were originally three muses: Practice, Memory and Song. However, traditional mythology gives us nine muses - either daughters of Gaia and Uranus, or of Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory, daughter of Gaia and Uranus). No matter what the genealogy, the Muse we are most interested in is Euterpe ("giver of delight"), originally the muse of music and later of lyric poetry. She is most often depicted holding a flute or sometimes a lyre.

Diodorus Siculus (Greek historian 1st century B.C.) said of Euterpe, "she gives to those who hear her sing delight in the blessings which education bestows."  The bringer of musical inspiration bestows the blessing of knowledge. But we knew that.

The point of the mythology is not that there is a goddess named Euterpe hovering in the background tapping the head of a musician with a magic wand and knocking inspiration into the otherwise vacant mind, but that the inspiration is a connection from the human mind to another realm, one that is vaster than humans. It is a blessing of enlightenment and delight that appears to spring from outside the musician, in mythology from a Muse.

Truly, inspiration comes from and through the musician, as does Magick. The source isn't the human being exactly - the Mage or the musician opens the way, is a conduit of the infinite and, necessarily, a filter that cannot help but distort (that pesky infinite/finite issue).

Background mosaic of  Euterpe
appears on the front
of a concert hall,
"la salle Rameau",
in Lyon, France.  Click here for full image. 

Who needs a Muse?
So what's with the Muse, then?  If a Mage or musician can do it without one, who needs an ancient goddesses of mythology?  Well, to put it simply, there's the audience issue, too.

The Muse not only provides an explanation for the seeming Magickal blossoming of an idea but is also an audience to bounce ideas off.  All artists, all creators, need an audience - someone impartial who will experience and validate the work. But while in the process of creation, an actual human and fallible audience can be a bad idea - an uneducated comment, or even a good comment at the wrong time, can squash the artist's creative flow flatter than a bug under the sole of a Dr. Martens boot.

While some artists and Mage have a living, breathing person as Muse who provides inspiration and feedback, those extraordinary individuals are rare.  For the solitary artist or Mage, the work in progress must be bounced off of the vision of the heart and soul. It can be done, and must be done that way for the highest-level Mages of Magick, music or any of the arts or advancements in knowledge - new work means going where no Mage has gone before.

The Muse, then, is a metaphor for the artist's or Mage's process of tapping into the infinite and letting the light shine through.  Jimmy Page has declared this is the year of the Muse: A year of inspiration, of creation, of new music and of Magick.

Listen for your own Muse, for you surely have one if you want one.  If not your own, then Jimmy Page's will do.

Happy Birthday Jimmy Page January 9