October Letter

Upcoming projects, including a serialized novel

The last ten days, I’ve not really been myself.

In fact, I’ve been rather haunted by something that I haven’t quite been able to name.

It started with a dull, numb feeling a few days after returning from London for my first public Here Be Monsters event. That event was of course quite lovely, and gave me a quite a bit of hope. Still, though, I didn’t quite feel my usual self upon returning, as if something was off, or something was missing.

No doubt, some of this is a necessary come-down after two years from the inception of the book to its final release. It required quite a lot from me, and though it was absolutely worth all that effort, I put off a few other things that had been important.

One of those things was a novel I’d just started reworking, a story I’ve been trying give life to for several years. In fact, just a month before being approached by Repeater to write Here Be Monsters, I’d compiled everything I’d written on the novel into Scrivener to finally sort it out and finish it. Then, I completely put all that aside.

This morning, I was finally able to figure out what that numb sense of emptiness I’ve felt these last almost two weeks was. It was that novel, languishing on this computer.

Want to read it? I want to finish writing it.

I’ll be doing just that with your help. Every Saturday until it’s finally complete, I’ll publish an edited chapter of it here. That’s a schedule which I think will help me complete it over the next few months, after which I’ll look for an agent to represent it.

I’ll also continue my readings for The Mysteria these next few months. I think I’ve finally been able to pinpoint where the major shift in political theology occurred, and I’ve an essay I’ll be publishing soon here that gets at this. By way of preview, the problem of “disenchantment” seems to be rooted in the recent Christian rejection of non-mechanical explanations for magic, illness, and human drives.

That might seem a bit backwards, perhaps. We’re accustomed to thinking of Christianity as one of the last European holdouts of a magical worldview. It absolutely was, at least until the 15th century. A lot changed during the following century, as Protestants challenged the authority of Rome over Christian doctrine, especially with constant criticism of Catholic magical prohibitions against certain activities. For instance, the Catholic prohibition against usury, which was one of the strongest obstacles to capitalist exchange, was itself a magical ban, since only God was able to create ex nihilo. Removing that prohibition was a prerequisite to the birth of land as a speculative commodity, as well as the birth of the Protestant/Capitalist doctrine of “improvement” (adding labor and capital into land in order to make it more productive).

Another shift occurred in the way “natural magic” was understood. What we call “science” now was once called “natural philosophy,” and natural philosophers wrote just as often about magical phenomena as they did anything else. The influence of the stars and the subtle magical properties of plants were matters of scientific inquiry, as were also the effects of demonic and other invisible agencies on human behavior. Over time, however, magical phenomena was increasingly divided between “natural” and “demonic,” with the former being considered acceptable to study and manipulate, and the latter ultimately dangerous to approach.

Removing external agency (God, demons, angels, spirits, etc) as a possible explanation eventually got us to the place where we are now, where only inert mechanical or chemical processes can be used to explain the world. It took several centuries, but this is how “the machine” became our dominant cosmology: we’re now all just bits of meat organized according to chemical codes, shambling about on an inert rock covered in meaningless organic matter while under the illusion we are “conscious.”

So, I’ll write more about that soon, and I’ll keep reading. I’ve another six books waiting to be read before I feel I’ll be ready to start work on the manuscript. Fortunately, that’s about the amount of time I’ll need to finish this novel.

Other updates

I’ll be returning to London the first week of November for an event at the London Radical Bookfair. I don’t have any other details about the appearance yet, but I know it will be on Saturday, 4 November. There’s also a possibility I’ll be speaking in Birmingham or another city during that trip, but again, I’ve no details yet. As soon as I know more, I’ll update you here. Same for potential US events this winter.

Next week, I’ll be interviewing Dan Evans on The Re/al/ign about his book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie. If there are other guests you’re eager to hear me interview, I’d love to add them to my list!

Also, if you’ve read Here Be Monsters and liked it, would you kindly consider writing a review of it? Here are two great reviews already written on Goodreads:

Reader reviews — whether on Amazon, Goodreads, social media, or on blogs — help book sales quite a bit, and they also help books get the attention of other reviewers and of journals. And of course, I absolutely love hearing what you thought of the book!

Much love,

— Rhyd