#bruxas

After some consultation among our readers and in honor of the late feral sorcerer David Blank, whose birthday would have been today and to whom Wyrdwood is dedicated, we are pleased to announce a very limited second print run of my work Wyrdwood: Essays Toward an Understanding of the FolkwitchviaAlkahest Press.

This second printing is identical to the first and limited to just 50 copies, for those who had missed out the first time around some years ago.

Get your copy from Alkahest Press.

As the rain pounds the clay tiles of my roof I sit and ponder the incredibly confusing year that has been. While in the middle of a plague the long planned moved from London to a quiet village in Portugal was successfully orchestrated, though not without its troubles.

The primary frustration in our adopted home seems to lie in the incredible affect the plague has had on international shipping and customs. While much of the problem can be said to be directly related to the plague, a certain amount of guilt must be levied at the Portuguese postal and customs system CTT.

The CTT appear to be a form of mob racket, holding property hostage without a note, waiting until you dig through a graveyard of paperwork, forms you need to fill out that they never mention, and phone calls that tell you the opposite from emails you received just a day before.

It has made publishing a nightmare, with an Iberian take on the Kafkaesque driven by the fact that I have had little luck locating a printer within Portugal that is both of the quality our readers have come to expect and of a price even close to those we have become accustom to.

Beyond that any personal purchases from the US or Canada that are insured are immediately stopped by customs, taking as much time if not more than our publishing printed matter does to locate in the Byzantine system, and paying as much as an 80% import tax on the stated value of a book. It has become so drastic I have started having all North American mail sent to London and shipped from there to here. But come the end of the year the UK will be out of the EU and I will require another path of entry into the EU for my books.

Besides these annoyances I have been incredibly grateful to now live in such an idyllic place. The people here are astoundingly friendly and open, inviting us to events and constantly offering us food from their gardens and pantries. I must have eaten a liter of my neighbor’s pumpkin jam in the past month alone.

Yet between unpacking and settling into our new home, and the constant issues with shipping and publishing I have had little time for Skeptical Occultist posts, folklore research, field work or anything else really.

I have however adopted a local cat who lingers at the edge of my garden. He comes much closer now than he did when I first met him in the summer night, but while we feed him he has still not come close enough to touch.

I hope to find more time before the end of the year to write on a variety of topics I have jotted notes for, review a couple of incredible books of occult scholarship that have come across my desk, and get the rest of these books printed and out in the post before the end of the year.

In the meantime my book of spells Gramarye is closing in on selling out in preorders, and we have only a handful of copies of FOLKWITCH 4 left in preorders as well. I guess I should get back to work, but the cat needs to be fed under the awning where he prefers his grub on a rainy day and I need to refill my coffee first.

Be safe in these times of plague my friends, stock yourself with rare books and strong coffees as the winter ahead looks to be dire.