Our new Illinois address:

Practically Shameless Press
PO Box 498
Morton Grove IL 60053-0498

Web and email addresses remain the same.

Practically Shameless Press is moving to Illinois in a few weeks. We'll be temporarily located in Evanston, just north of Chicago, for the summer, then moving into permanent digs in late August.

The reasons for the move are primarily personal: to be near my daughter, who lives on Chicago's north side, and to be near my mother, who lives in assisted living in Glenview.

Mom needs more care these days, and I'll be playing a central role in her care, taking over for two siblings who have gone above and beyond for years.

I posted this to the Boulder Media Women email list this morning, in response to a question about the maximum number of blogs a person ought to have. Links to all three of my blogs are at my home page.

I started out with one blog about all topics, then added a second when it came free with the new website for my small press [this Press, this blog], then added a third when it came free with my book's page on Amazon.com.

I decided I would offer a different focus on each: (1) personal stuff, movies, politics, books, miscellaneous, (2) publishing, writing, and topics related to my book, and (3) the human shadow as it appears in world affairs and current events. I knew I'd find it challenging to blog frequently enough to warrant having 3 separate blogs, and the jury is still out on that one, largely because I don't have as much time or energy for blogging as I would like. I seem to go in spurts, frankly, blogging a lot when I've got the energy with occasional lengthy silences.

After a brief experiment at posting an entry to the personal blog every day, I abandoned the idea because in general I don't believe in forcing myself to do things I don't like. I do my best to post to the Amazon blog at least once a month and have been able to maintain that. I find it hardest to keep up with the blog at the Press because I haven't been working on a book until recently because I've had very limited time to do so.

I've since acquired the philosophy that one result of people blogging every day whether or not they have something real to say is that lots of junk gets published, and as a result the meaningful writing on the web is harder to find.

I've recently gone a step further than that in my thinking, to the suspicion that it's very similar thinking that got the book publishing industry into trouble. Let me wax rhapsodic for a moment and see if anyone agrees with this line of thought (and if I agree with it once I've written it out).

Once upon a time, publishers accepted only manuscripts they considered worthwhile or, failing that, salable enough to fund the worthwhile books. (I guess I'm generalizing a lot here, I'm thinking of the publishing houses that wanted to produce good books, because I used to work for publishers like that. The people who worked at such places did so because they loved books, and they wanted to publish only books they'd be proud to have on their shelves. And every one of them had shelves and shelves of books at home.)

Gradually, the publishing industry succumbed to greed, as it seems every industry does eventually. It began publishing books that weren't very worthwhile but that would make a quick buck. Walk into any B&N or Borders, and you'll see a table of what I call "junk books" for sale for a few bucks each. Books to be given as gifts, for Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas, etc.

Not surprisingly, readers caught on to the fact that bookstores were full of "junk books" and that you couldn't count on a book being worth the purchase price. You couldn't count on it being well edited or published because it was worthwhile. That certainly wasn't the only factor in the decline of reading (I blame television primarily), but I think it contributed.

I reviewed a book in 1997, written by a stellar writer, Maya Angelou. I had read her earlier work. It looked to me as if her publisher had decided to "repackage" some of her shorter blurbs into a book, released in time for Christmas, attractively designed and priced at an astounding $17.95, I believe (it was a pretty short book). I was disappointed to find nothing new in the book and said so in my review. I also said I was particularly disappointed considering Maya Angelou's female audience couldn't afford to spend that kind of money on a book that offered nothing new from Angelou's soul.

I went hiking today at Hall Ranch, an open space park a few miles west of Lyons. It was my third hike this week, and I like to think that I'm rebuilding some of the hiking muscles I had last summer and let atrophy to some degree over the winter.

Hall Ranch offers several different trails, and I chose the Nighthawk Trail because it excludes bicycles, and I could see from the number of cars with bike racks in the parking lot that there were a lot of bicyclists there today. Not surprising considering the lovely sunny spring weather with a high around 60 degrees. The Nighthawk Trail is a long one, and I had limited time, so I got only 54 minutes along the path, nearly all of it uphill, and was a little saddened to see how out of breath I was.

I normally prefer hiking at the end of a day of writing because it gives me time to digest. So I'd planned to think out some issues that I've been thinking about during the week, but I needn't have bothered. I let my mind wander for most of the time, and it was delightful. My schedule right now requires a lot of control, both mental and physical, and the unbounded freedom of hiking with nothing particular to think about was really enjoyable.

That said, my minds eventually wound back to the book I'm working on, Every Morning a New Arrival, what I've described as the "companion workbook" to Practically Shameless, containing much more detail about the archetypes and shadows and offering a variety of exercises.

I've been asking myself over the past week what thread I could use to weave through the topics I want to write about. Practically Shameless has a single thread -- my personal story of a shadow and its transformation -- and I worked very hard to follow that thread throughout the book, to (in the words of my editor, David Hicks) take the reader's hand and never let it drop, and in the process to explain the very challenging concepts at the foundation of Jungian psychology in a way that almost anyone could understand.

The purpose of Every Morning, however, is to be quite different: I want it to be a resource, of use in many life situations. My own bookshelf is populated with books that I refer to regularly -- on animal medicine, the Enneagram, Jung, the tarot, meaning in physical symptoms, symbols, etc. -- and I want to add to that shelf. 

A resource book may not be read from beginning to end; it may be read section by section and sometimes not in entirety.  The question is, then, does it need a thread to bind the sections together? Could the book be more like a collection of essays, each one ending in an exercise? My instincts say that some kind of thread is still needed, or at the very least, a compelling segue from one section to the next. 

Here's a portion of the Rumi poem from which the book's title is taken. What does it bring to your mind, dear reader?

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and attend them all . . .

(Translation by Coleman Barks. From The Illustrated Rumi, page 77.

Thank you, again, to all of you who took advantage of the Anniversary Sale to stock up on copies of Practically Shameless and Shadow Work CDs.

The sale was so successful that there were times this week when I had difficulty processing all the orders.

Thank you!!!

It was also very rewarding to hear feedback on the Home for the Holidays CD from several people who have had a chance to hear it since the holidays.

I've got 2 things to celebrate, so I've marked down books and CDs in the Practically Shameless Press online store by 20% to 52%!

One year ago -- on Monday, February 18, 2008 -- my book about Shadow Work, Practically Shameless, reached the #1 spot on Amazon.com's Bestseller list of books about Jungian psychology. (It also appeared on Bestseller lists in three other categories.)

Reaching the #1 spot was made possible by purchases by people like you, who have supported the Press from the very beginning. Thank you again!!

That appearance at #1 also laid the foundation for the book's appearance on that Bestseller list for 52 weeks since then.

Let me repeat that --

As of February 18, 2009, Practically Shameless has been on Amazon.com's Bestseller list of books about Jungian psychology for 52 weeks!

To see the sale items, please visit the Practically Shameless Press online store.

And let me say in addition --

The Tombstone Process CD can literally change your life in a matter of hours. It's a gentle, effective, and deeply touching emotional process you can do on your own at home, to let go of a painful dynamic that has been your unconscious way of loving somebody. I've used it myself multiple times, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

The Clean Talk CD can change the way you communicate. It teaches you to use Clean Talk, the way we communicate in Shadow Work when there is conflict or strong emotion present.

The Shadow Work Basics CD can teach you about yourself and about the four archetypal energies in you.

Practically Shameless, in paperback and on audio CD, is a personal story of transformation that explains Jung's psychology from the inside out and helps you get the shame off.

And by the way, the 2nd thing I'm celebrating is the 2nd printing, which arrived on Thursday. The Press offices are full of boxes of books. Yes!!!

 

I'm delighted to announce that copies of the second printing of Practically Shameless will arrive from the printers next week.

In this printing, I was able to fix several very minor typos that I discovered while reading through the book for the audio book edition, and that was very satisfying. I also changed the last page from an order form to a list of products for sale from Practically Shameless Press.

What's even more satisfying is realizing that what this second printing means is that more than 1300 copies of Practically Shameless have sold since the arrival of the first printing in late October 2007. And that doesn't include hundreds of used copies selling on Amazon.com.

Next Monday, February 16th, marks the one-year anniversary of Bestseller Day, the day when Practically Shameless first appeared on Amazon.com's Bestseller list of books about Jungian psychology thanks to purchases made on the same day by friends and supporters. The book has remained on that list every week since. It has also appeared dozens of times on the Bestseller list in the category of Emotions and Feelings and at times on the Bestseller list in the much larger category of Self Help.

To celebrate the anniversary, I'm going to offer a special promotion. I'm working on some ideas, and suggestions are welcome.

In yesterday's New York Times, Motoko Rich's article Self Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab explains some of the basics of self-publishing. It can't be said to be comprehensive, as it doesn't mention Dan Poynter, but it makes some interesting points.

It uses the term "self-publishing company" for Print-On-Demand houses like iUniverse (what used to be called "vanity presses"), where I think it ought to explain a bit more for the sake of the uninitiated.

I didn't see any reference to those who do what I did, start a small press.

In late 2007, the Smooch the Soul blog reviewed Practically Shameless, and now it has reviewed my two essays on shadows at the holidays, with an additional mention of my new Home for the Holidays CD.

If you page down, you'll see Smooch's reply to a Republican who was unhappy about the blog posting a link to Matt Damon's interview about Sarah Palin. I respected Damon's comments about Palin not because he's a celebrity but because he's an intelligent and articulate person who provided what I thought was a really clever comparison of Palin's nomination to a "really bad Disney movie." Spot on, IMO. 

A reader using a slice of bacon as a bookmark? I'd never heard of such a thing until I saw it in the Paper Cuts blog at the New York Times,

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/librarian-theres-some-bacon-in-my-book/

I commented that perhaps a slice of bacon is an unconscious statement on the part of the reader, to say that Francis Bacon really did author Shakespeare's plays, or that the writer really "brought home the bacon."

I know I've seen this blog before and have added it to my list of regular reads.