Blog

Lockdown Blues

  I spent these last month’s in a forced isolation Learning another way to live I didn’t really miss you all to tell the truth It was a joy to walk in silence in nature To hear the sound of birds singing Or the bees humming I didn’t miss your litter Nor your drunken screams and shouts At two in the morning Leaving the pub or disco club I didn’t miss the traffic jams And impatient toots of horns I didn’t miss your hissy fits Nor your selfish behavior Spring happened and for once It felt like it must have done Once, aeons ago under a pagan Sun I tracked the Moon phases From New to Full width We walked full circle She and I Without humanity there We communed

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Astral Messages – New Look

The next book to get the treatment and a new look is one from 2013 called Astral Messages. This is a short blog post and accompanying poem collection and I still think its a nice little book that should have done better so… it got another edit over the weekend and a new cover.     In common with all my recent covers, I am using my own photos. The book is for sale here.

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Astral Messages

Deep and deeper into fiery depths Down and down ‘neath the cooling stillness Where obscured symbols serve for words And standing stones encircle scented voids Ancient primordial creatures stir And other strange images form down there Midst blue and emerald mind mists And the elemental mysteries of inner Earth Where fires’ flames lick and dance And the shimmering air swirls entranced Crystalline waters trapped as precious opals Sublime and regal royals enthroned Through all eternity as cold and darkened stones Images move and rise and fall Emerging, emerging and then not at all Half-formed figures born floating linger Whispers and soundless sounds as tinder To spark and fuel those inner flames Astral messages calling ancient names Billowing, enduring truths exclaimed   From the book Astral Messages: The Poems and Thoughts

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Humanity at its Finest…Not!

Now that at least here in Czechia, the lockdown is coming to an end, I’m feeling a little nostalgic for it to be honest. I am for personal freedom and I think the state has acted in a heavy handed manner – one I never want to see repeated. But that is a different topic. This weekend, my fellow human was out and about and frankly, some of us don’t deserve to be let out at all, ever. Yesterday – it was a Saturday, I was treated to a return of the idiot driver. Within minutes of getting on the road in my car, a motorcyclist overtook me and another car on a dual carriageway by blowing between us. He failed to see or simply ignored my right turn signal

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Two Newly Dressed Up Compilations

A couple of years ago, in a fit of madness, I created two new compilation books. For some reason, I gave them very similar names and then sat back and forgot about them. Then the other night when counting sales and so on, I realized that these books had bad titles and horrible covers. So I redid them.   Your Haunted Lives Extreme Edition (Compilation Volume) For some reason, I had the great idea to make a compilation of the best selling Your Haunted Lives with its follow up, Your Haunted Lives revisited but to call it Paranormal Eyewitness!?! I’m not sure what I was thinking as the My Haunted Life series’ compilation was always called My Haunted Life Extreme Edition. The cover was also truly awful. So, here we

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Chasing the Shaman – Reviewed by Sue Vincent

  By Sue Vincent It feels rather odd, being in a book. Not as one half of that semi-fictional pair, ‘Don and Wen’, but as yourself… especially when it is written by someone else. But it does show how much our human stories intertwine, and how, when paths cross, magic can happen. Not just in a symbolic sense, but in a very real way. When Stuart and I started writing out our adventures in The Initiate, we had two things in mind… to record the journey for ourselves and to share it with others, hoping they too would find a way to connect with the land in which they live. One of the first people to read The Initiate was my long-time friend, Gary Vasey. He was excited by our story and emailed me saying

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Book Stats

Last night, for some reason, I spent several hours updating my book sales spreadsheet. I had the last 12 months or so to fill in so it took quite a while. I have several years of sales data now in the spreadsheet. It was an interesting exercise….. here is what I learned. I have sold around 18,000 books excluding my business books. My all time best selling book is Your Haunted Lives which has now sold around 3500 copies. For three to four months, this book was selling over 120 copies a month! Released in January, 2016, it went to #1 on Amazon in multiple categories across the supernatural genre. It is available in ebook, paperback and audio nook formats. These days, it still sells double figure every month but

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Spammers’ Karma

Last week, in my business email account, I started getting a lot of messages coming back saying – undeliverable. Puzzled, I asked our internet guy to take a look. He soon figured out that someone was sending emails and making it look as if they came from my account. Yes – they can do that. They aren’t coming from your account but it looks to the receiver as if they are. What can I do? I asked. Nothing really, was the response. Great! However, I was wanting to know who was being emailed by Notme. Our web guy took some time but soon came back with the scary fact that somehow, the emails being spammed by Notme were the people who had sent us a message at our general email

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Chasing the Shaman – A New Book

Sometimes, things just come together. In the last week, I had an idea for a book. I wanted to write about magic like Sue Vincent and Stuart France or perhaps Alan Richardson does but in my own style. As some of you may know, I have been on the trail of a shaman here in Brno and it struck me that his activity – in my reality – was a piece of a chain of events that were truly magical and worth writing about. I assembled the book from various blog posts, correspondences with Sue Vincent, poems and of course a lot of new content and what emerged surprised even me. Back in late 2005, I got Inner Journeys: Explorations of the Soul published and it told the story of

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Burning Witches

Tonight in the Czech Republic is know as Burning Witches. Pretty brutal name right? So, it’s 30th April and the day before Beltane and right there is a clue perhaps to the origin of Burning Witches. What people do is make an effigy of a woman suing two sticks and whatever else they can find and then they burn the effigy on the bonfire while celebrating with beer, wine and food. Of course, it is a pagan tradition in which the old woman of winter gives way to the maiden of springtime, rebirth and fecundity. What I find interesting is that it is similar to the broader slavic tradition of burning and effigy of Marzanna – the Goddess of winter – usually around the Spring Equinox. In the latter case,

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