Author uncertainties
Some books I get all the way through writing with no trouble at all. Some stall – I have a novel just sitting around while I try to make peace with it right now. Druidry and the Ancestors went awry, and I had to go off between the first and second drafts and do a lot of reading. When a Pagan Prays (coming soon) took over a year longer than I’d expected because of the experiential stuff happening alongside it.
There’s a period (I’m in it) when I know a book is on the way through the physical process of making it, and I can’t change anything. Always, always and without fail at this point I want to change things. Often I feel that what I’ve written is silly, or insufficient, or obvious, or that everyone will hate it. In terms of getting out there and doing pre-book-release marketing this is, I promise you, a big handicap.
I’m never wholly sure about anything I write, because my thinking is evolving all the time. I’m still running into things I wish I’d read before trying to write Druidry and the Ancestors. Often half the problem is that in not knowing what I don’t know, I have no way of knowing how to find it and fill in the gaps… I am alarmingly dependent on sheer blind luck.
I really wish I’d read David Dilard-Wright’s At Ganapati’s Feet before I finished working on the prayer book, because there were a number of ideas about Hinduism in there that now have me pondering differently and wondering about other approaches. However, as the book was on pre-order still when I got my review pdf, I couldn’t have got to it sooner.
No book is ever truly finished and perfect, because there is always more to know. Often it’s a case of trying to pick the right moment to abandon them and make whatever I’ve got, public. No work of fiction is ever perfect either, and I often have similar processes. Next year I will know something different. My own path will have carried me somewhere else. I’ll have read something that shifted my perspective.
This also has the effect of making me very wary of other authors attempted authority. If someone says ‘this is how it really is’ I become cautious. The more certain they are about the ephemeral uncertainties of spirituality, the less I trust them. Anyone who has walked a little way and paid attention has some sense that they do not know much, in the grand scheme of things. Dogma, for me, suggests a lack of thought and insight which in turn makes me question how much the author can help me. “This is how it is for me” is a fair assertion. “This is how it is for all of us” is often really suspect.
A book is simply the best its writer could do at the time. For writer and reader alike, it can be nothing more than a stepping stone on a journey.
