Bit by Bit

I still have some writing to do!  Yep, there's a little paragraph that needs to be put together for the back cover and I'm going to get that to my formatting Fae, Diotima, sometime tomorrow.  Several sister-writers have given me very kind blurbs about the book and they will also be on the back cover.

The cover!  We still have a few of the incidentals (Glossary, Bibliography) to do, but it's all very close.

How blessed I am with good friends and allies.Together we're spinning quite a tale with the little book.

This spinning wheel is part of the Old Bethpage Village Restoration project.

Goodness! Before you know it, we'll be booking launch parties and book signings.

Revisiting the Essays

This little book has alternating chapters. There are chapters on folk magic and in between there are essays--most of which have been previously published.  I included the essays to give readers who may not be from around here a sense of what our culture is really like.  Not what they think it is from Deliverance or the Beverly Hillbillies.

In editing tonight, I got the chance to read those essays with a fresh set of eyes. It was nice to enjoy the stories in them and to remember what prompted me to write them in the first place.

In the midst of this editing, I'm remembering how much of my self and experiences have gone into the making of it.

That must be why I'm so excited to think of it being published.  I hope you all are, too.

Recycling Mailers and Digging Red Clay Mud

Hi, all!  We're having some good soaking rain here in the southern highlands and it means the garden has to wait a bit.  I got broccoli planted on Friday but still have cabbage and romaine to set once the ground is not a mud hole.

When you get to read this little book, you'll find that I do my best to stick with traditional Appalachian materials but occasionally I make a little "borry" from another hoodoo tradition.

Brick dust (or redding) is one example.  Redding has a lot of practical uses for protection magic and for healing.  But here in the mountains we didn't and don't use a lot of bricks, except for important buildings in the community--courthouses, churches and the like.

But what we do have in abundance is dense red clay soil--the bane of laundry-doing mothers everywhere.  So instead of grinding up bricks to make redding, I'm digging wet red clay--red clay mud--drying it naturally and then putting it through the mortar and pestle to grind it fine.

With all this rain, it's a perfect time to harvest red clay--and there's a nice patch of it just across the road on the empty lot.

A rainy day is also a good day to peel old labels off these nice recycled mailers.  Those of you who have pre-ordered the little book--and thank you!--will see it arrive in a pre-used, padded manilla mailing envelope--courtesy of Accent on Books.

It's something you'll read more about in the little book--using what's at hand, what's readily available and what's inexpensive.

There's my mason jar of redding, with its funnel cap, courtesy of my friend Ebiaz.

Mailers...Next, Labels

The little hoodoo book is being published by a local publisher--Silver Rings Press which is an imprint of Renegade Planet Publishing. It's owned by a friend of mine and I'm helping out by handling the pre-orders for the book.

I actually love it. I get to interact with the very first people who are interested in owning my book.  I get to blog about the process and set up a Facebook page and start to think about a limited book tour.

Today found me at Accent on Books--the lovely indie bookstore where I worked for 15 years--to ask about used mailers.  Yep, I picked up a big pile of padded mailers to ship my book and its special bookmark to the folks who have ordered it. I'll need to pull the old shipping labels off and put on my nice green Village Witch labels.

Then I wait for the book to finish its formatting journey and head off to the printer.  I think I have enough to keep me busy, don't you?

some of the practical parts of Sunday's Willful Bane workshop

Talismans for Luck...and some special bookmarks

This is one of the Travelling Talismans I make for clients and friends.

One of the things I love to do is make red clay talismans--red clay/redding is a "borry" from other hoodoo traditions. You may have heard it as brick dust but I decided to try my hand at making red clay dust. Red clay is a near-ubiquitous part of our mountain land...in fact, there's a nice shiny patch of it in the empty lot across from my house.  I'm planning to raid it sometime tomorrow.

I'm going to create a special bookmark that has a red clay talisman attached to it, for all the people who pre-order the useful little book.  An extra incentive to get an order in before the official publication date.

Moving Forward & Backward in Time

The idea for this little book came from a series of workshops I did last year on traditional Appalachian folk magic.  I've taken practices I remembered from my childhood in the mountains--practices I still practice, as a matter of fact--and put them into a fun and useful form.  Then I invited folks here in Asheville, North Carolina to learn a little about these old ways.  They aren't fancy but they are effective and people seemed to have a good time learning about them.

That's the backwards in time part.

The forwards in time part is that so many friends and colleagues have like the Facebook page for the book and I am terribly grateful. I've started the process of the pre-orders and tomorrow I will spend some loving time sending a note to each person who wants a book.  I'll promise them a unique bookmark--it has a red clay talsiman on the end.  I'll get their mailing address.  And I'll give them the PayPal info so they can do that part, too.

I figure we don't really understand time and so I may move back and forth for a while here as I catch you up with where I am now and we walk together into the future life of "Staubs & Ditchwater."  Thanks for starting out with me on the journey.

 This is me, being silly at the HillFolks Hoodoo: Divination workshop.

a new blog about a new book

I do regular blogging on another site as Asheville's Village Witch. Now, I'm making a blog about the process of creating my new--and first--book.  It's called "Staubs and Ditchwater: a Friendly and Useful Introduction to HillFolks Hoodoo". The book is being formatted now and will be available soon and I thought it would be fun to chronicle what happens after the writing is done.

Here's the cover: