I had an idea for a 365-page journal. Maybe 366. On each page, it would have the date, a quote relating to abuse or healing, and perhaps also a line drawing of a flower or leaf or something else simple and from nature. I would call it “Book of Days.”
It sounded so easy! And then I started working on it and it wasn’t so easy after all.
Poking around finding quotes is fun. But when I find a fantastic one, it makes all the others look sort of dull. Now I am thinking I ought to get about 1000 and choose the best ones. My work has just tripled!
And then how do I get it published? It would be useless as an e-book, because nobody could write in it. I doubt if anybody would want to download and print a 366-page PDF. Even if they did, the pages would float around and get lost because the book wouldn’t be bound.
These days there is such a thing as “print on demand.” You send a company a digital file of your book and they keep it on file and print the number of books you order from them. I priced a few and they turned out to be about what I wished the retail price to be. In this day and age, 366 pages is one beeeeeg book.
Some of these companies leave the marketing to you, others do the marketing (except for book signings, of course.) That brings the price way up. But I do not think it would be a good use of my time to do the marketing, which would be a half-time job, at the very least, in the beginning. Especially since I have never done it before and would probably make a large number of beginners’ mistakes.
So I’m asking for help on three fronts.
One is with the quotes. Got any inspiring lines that you are willing to share? Here are a few of my favorites so far —
It is never the child’s fault. – Anon
In all the years still to come, may your body walk as fast as the love and passion that moves you. – Catalina
I learned that it is the weak who are cruel and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. – Leo Calvin Rosten
Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break. – Shakespeare, Macbeth
The tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds. – Mexican proverb
Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible. – Saint Francis of Assisi
Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent; but nothing is infinite, not even loss. You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again. – Finn Butler
When in worry
When in doubt
Run in circles
Scream and shout.
“EEK! EEK! EEK!”
– contemporary Wiccan spell
Two is with the illustrations. Can you draw maple leaves? Daisies? Weeds?
Three is with printing advice. Have you published a book? What good choices did you make? Did you make mistakes I could learn from?
I’m open to all feedback. Even if you think this is a really dumb idea — I need to hear it.
Ritual Abuse 