Thoughts and words: all the same

Halloween creepy Frankenstein head. Painted it myself.

Yes, 2018 is waning. The sun sinks into the horizon lower and lower each coming day, until the 21st of December, when the pagans celebrate the rebirth of their sun god Tammuz. Until then, the leaves of the trees will sprinkle themselves over the soil until only arboral skeletons are remaining. I like this time of year.

Exactly one month and one day ago, I began writing a book. There I was sitting at my desk reading and contemplating, and it struck me as ridiculous that, though I've wanted to be an author (off and on) since I was in 4th grade, I've still not written any published work. Nothing was really stopping me other than my own lack of discipline. After all, pretty much anybody can publish a book through Amazon and sell copies through Kindle or in a print on demand format. The only challenge anymore to any aspiring author is the task of writing the book - the most basic, yet most difficult part.

With the fodder cleared out of the path, I am free to write without fear of rejection from publishers. But don't get me wrong: I operate under the expectation that my book will fail, but really hope it doesn't. In other words, I don't have any delusions that my first attempt will be a best seller. It is actually liberating to write with an expectation of failure, but with the assurance that, in the end, I'll be able to get my work printed, sell a couple copies, and hold it in my hand as something that I created.

This is probably a healthy mindset for me personally. I tend to procrastinate tasks or goals because I don't think I can do it perfectly or I don't have any confidence in success. Recently there was an article floating around online that I came across. It said that successful authors (i.e. ones that sell books and make decent money) don't just write one book that sells really well. They often just write a bunch of stuff, lots of books, and the cumulative sales are what make them money. To me, this was a revelation. "I don't have to write a best seller right out of the gate. I just have to write something, otherwise I will surely fail."

My old forge

That night my first chapter was born, forged (see image) from the fires of thought. Currently, the book is up to almost 20,000 words, and I've reached somewhat of a mental blockage, which is why I'm writing here. Do you ever get the feeling that your brain is scrambled, that you can't concentrate, and that your memory is just plain terrible? That's pretty much my current status of mind. But what is the remedy?

The best potion for clarity of thought tends to be more reading and less television viewing. That's right: television kills creativity. It makes your brain lazy. Too much television is probably one of the conditioning elements that has degraded public consciousness. We drift further and further into thoughtlessness, adopting opinions that have been mass produced by media outlets and peddlers of merchandise. Whereas it used to be literature (not that every piece of literature promotes good opinions either) that was the common cultural experience, it is now the motion picture or, more accurately, superhero movies that provide the same. The superhero movie genre is a digression for another conversation, but I'll go out on a limb to say that, while I enjoy a good movie as much as everyone else, a movie probably doesn't generate the same level of thoughtfulness as would reading a book. And at the risk of sounding like one who sits in his pajamas on a laptop and laments the degradation of culture and societal institutions like some pathetic butt-hurt loser, I'll just reiterate: watching less tv is a good thing.

Makeshift Baphomet...

By now, you're either curious about the topic of my book, or you've stopped reading this post because
you think I'm a self-righteous pretend intellectual. Hopefully the latter is not the case, and assuming the former, my book is about UFOs/Alien Abductions. The goal is to get to the bottom of it, exposing the evil nature of the phenomena and their connection to the occult, New Age spiritual practices, and the roots of it all in ancient history and mythology (the same thing if interpreted correctly!).

There we have it. Now that my writing brain (you know, a separate brain like the "gut brain") is all primed for lingual expression and deep logical formulation of ideas, I have to get ready to attend church.

Thanks for reading!