I have been gone from here a long time. Over a year now. Back then, I promised I'd get back to blogging and tweeting more. While it's great to have a web and social networking presence, I have decided that I'd rather spend my time on the work that's most important: my Plath work. I just can't put full focus and concentration on a subject while tweeting and liking other things to increase my friends list every ten minutes. Because I haven't been talking about my work much publicly, I'm sure a lot of people thought I dropped off the map, or God forbid, even gave up this commitment to Plath and her largely unrealized genius. To showing everyone she was more than a suicide.
There is not a chance I'd give this up.
I have been busier than ever. The first thing I'll catch you up on is that this year I got my rights back to Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one. It's no secret that my publisher was absolutely incompetent, and I thought many times about giving you a lengthy blog of my journey through hell and back with SFAU Press. But who wants to read that? Suffice it to say that a friend summed it up well, when she said, "I have heard of every single one of these publishing problems happening to other authors I know, but never all to one person for the same book."
From the spiritual point of view, my energy was wrong. I see that now. I wrote this book, my first published book, with the wrong goals in mind. I wanted to firstly please the Plath world, and secondly, please my publisher. I was so very excited about my findings, and thought, you know, how could they not read a poem like "The Other" and get that it was Plath's tribute to Dostoevsky's The Double? How could they not also see Alcatraz in it, when the prisoners had just made their famous escape with their dummies in their beds, made of "Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic," slipping "between my walls" from that "womb of marble"? How could they not see Plath's beloved Wuthering Heights in "The Couriers"? It goes on and on.
They don't want to see. Truth is, people are lazy and don't want to read. Even academics. These classics have almost been forgotten, and besides, my findings are threatening, as they up-end all traditional beliefs about Plath They might accept some of it, but they're not going to take it seriously because I'm a tarot card reader who found it through the Qabalah system. And in atheistic academia, we can't have that.
We know Plath and Hughes were very active in occult activities, be it astrology, Ouija board, tarot, crystal balls, etc. But like that rather important Literary Hub article that recently came out about how Plath's physical abuse from Ted Hughes was too uncomfortable to really be seen or discussed by scholars, the same goes for their mysticism. All the psychology tells us that we're a pretty blind society, seeing only what we want to see.
Back when I was writing FSGL, I had some well-meaning friends and advisers tell me to steer away from the spiritual and keep this thoroughly academic. They wanted to protect me from attack, I understand that, but I do think it killed a lot of the energy. That said, FSGL is a little bit monotonous to read, and not the book I wanted to write. I have stacks of academic Plath books, and they keep on coming, and they are by and large rather boring to read except for the occasional new bit of information. My book became another one of those, with a weirder cover. Likewise, I was so concerned about meeting page limits, etc. that I cut and cut and took out most of my personality in order to accommodate the boundaries imposed upon me, and sometimes by me.
That's all done now. I have been having a lot of fun, both in revising and expanding FSGL volume one, which I am going to self-publish and sell for a lot cheaper, because I can. It will be searchable for students as an eBook, and I'll have a print-on-demand version for those who like to hold a paper copy. It's not a full re-write, because I have other things to get to. But it will be better.
To those great readers who have contacted me, and to some of my former students who have asked, FSGL volume two is going to come out differently. If you've read volume one, you pretty much get the system and how I got the answers. The way the poems work together is less important, and all mapped out in the first book. Instead, I am publishing individual poems in their own smaller books. This will be the Decoding Sylvia Plath series. The order in which they will be released will be determined by popularity, and so the first poem is unquestionably "Daddy." It will be cheap, because I want the word to get out to the average schoolkid as well as the scholar. No one should have to pay forty bucks to learn the truth. The cover art for Decoding Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is in design now, the book is already formatted, and soon it will be ready to go.
In addition to reissuing FSGL vol. one and releasing the Decoding series, I'll soon be publishing a teaching manual for FSGL for teachers and students. This is exciting as it's been compiled from two years of actual classroom experience, student activities, and more. If professors want to consider it for their classroom, I will be happy to send a complimentary copy. Next up for publication will be my biography of Plath and Hughes' mysticism, The Magician's Girl. If all goes well, this will all happen before the beginning of next year. I have been sitting on this work for ages, and it is time to set it free.
Why not seek a traditional publisher, some of you have asked. Well, I don't want to go through any of these publishing nightmares again, I don't want to wait years in cue for the seasonal releases, and Amazon makes publishing and distribution incredibly easy these days. Many of you know that I come from the music world, and I have seen the publishing industry slowly mirror what happened to the music industry. Today an artist, whether a musician or a writer, can get that production and distribution done effectively on their own. I am not writing these books for my reputation. I could care less what anyone thinks of me at this point. Eventually, word will get out, and enough people are going to understand that I'm onto something, no matter how questionable my methods. It's a matter of getting it done. It's a matter of doing justice for Sylvia Plath.
