Sometimes frustration is the best motivator.

I picked up my first copy of Ted Andrews' Animal-Speak back in 1998. I was still pretty new to paganism and magic, and this was the first book on animal totemism and related topics I'd ever read. I soon found out why it was a classic, and it's still one of my favorites.

However, by the time 2004 rolled around I was getting pretty fed up with the animal magic book market. While I'd created a pretty solid system of practice on my own, I was still quite fond of books as one of many ways to see what other people are doing. Unfortunately, most of what I kept finding were the same basic totemism books, most of which seemed to want to be Andrews' book-only better. This got pretty frustrating as you can imagine. I kept wanting to find something different, and it just wasn't there no matter where I looked.

So I decided to write my own. Fang and Fur was the result. A year and a half after I made my first outline, my first book was in print. Now that's a feeling of accomplishment!

It's really not so difficult as you might think, especially if you have a few years of solid practice under your belt. I wrote FFBB after a decade of practice, but quality of time is more important than quantity.

Getting Started

The first thing you want to figure out is what you want your book to be about. If you've been having trouble finding new books on a topic, chances are you've probably been working with it for a good long while. A few questions to get you started are: What interests you the most? What are you passionate about? What would you really like to see more books on? What specifically would you do with this topic to make it interesting compared to what's already out there? (This last question is VERY important.)

Once you've got a topic, you need to research the market. Again, you're probably pretty familiar with this if you're motivated by "I need something new!!!" However, writing a new approach to Wicca 101 is going to be a LOT tougher than writing a new approach to, say, practical magic based on the indigenous peoples of Borneo. Also, determine whether or not the market is already glutted. There are a billion books of spells out there, and it's going to be incredibly hard to make yours stand out, even if you have done something unusual with it.

Try talking to other pagans and magicians who are familiar with the topic of choice about whether they'd be interested in the approach you'd take with your topic, and what they think about the present market. Also, ask them if they know of any obscure books that may be similar to what you're working with. It's entirely possible that somebody else had the same idea you did and already wrote about it. That doesn't mean you should scrap your idea entirely. Instead, obtain the book if you haven't read it yet and see where your ideas differ. Some overlap is fine, but your goal should be to offer something that, as far as you know, isn't already out there.

Getting Down to the Business of Writing

Now that you've gotten your idea in hand, it's time to put it to paper (or, as in the case of most writers today, to pixels). The best way I've found to start is with an outline. I make it very basic, and then go back a few times, fleshing it out with each lookover. I usually do this in MSWord, just so it's easier to move things around.

You may or may not want to include basic information that's already been covered in other books. I generally don't, simply because I write for an intermediate audience-unless it's on a topic that has very little printed literature available. For instance, my second book, A Field Guide to Otherkin, is the first book to cover Otherkin in detail (not just one particular type, such as vampires or therianthropes). I do go into a lot of basics there because I have a broad potential audience-not just those who are Otherkin themselves or who know Otherkin, but people who've never encountered the concept. FFBB, on the other hand, doesn't waste time with 101 material, other than places where I present unique ways of interpreting it. With that book, I assume that my reader is already familiar (no pun intended) with the basics of totemism, familiars, and magic in general. My general rule of thumb is-if I don't have to include basic 101 info, I don't.

As for the rest of the material, that may take some research and extra practice depending on how much experience you already have. If you're taking three decades of experience and distilling it into a book, this may not be too difficult. However, if you have something that you've wanted to see covered but haven't actually worked with it yourself, you may need to spend a few months doing magical experimentation. For instance, with FFBB, while I had some experience with creating magical entities, I had never specifically used animal forms for them, or created new species on the astral plane. So I spent a couple of months just experimenting with those ideas to see how the theory held up. You may also have to spend some time in the library doing research on historical and other aspects of the work at hand.

Next comes the toughest part for a lot of people-sitting down and actually writing the thing. It can take weeks or months just to get a good rough draft going, not to mention the various edits and changes that you'll do as you go through the manuscript numerous times. Don't despair, though-you'll find that as you get a good start into the book, that you'll often get what I call "bitten by the Muse" or "a writing frenzy"-all of a sudden the book will seem to write itself as all those thoughts you've bottled up come pouring out.

Once you have a draft you're pretty happy about, get other people to look at it, especially those who are familiar with the genre you're writing about. Listen to their suggestions, decide what you agree with, and edit accordingly.

Also, if you really want to be unique in the pagan/occult field, use in-text citations and include a full bibliography. (I only partly jest; it's very common, especially among pagan authors and publishers, to not include in-text citations for material not written by the author, and to include either a shortened bibliography or none at all.) This is especially important if you're running off in new directions with a specific topic; not only do you want to be able to show your work if someone questions your sources, but it's also nice for readers to have some suggestions for further reading. I actually annotated the bibliography for A Field Guide to Otherkin simply because it's such an unusual topic and I wanted to showcase the resources that were especially helpful to me or otherwise of note.

By the time you have your manuscript ready to submit to publishers you'll likely know more about the subject material than ever before. This is a good thing, especially as you'll be answering readers' questions as well as explaining why your book is unique in the market (authoring includes a LOT of self-promotion regardless of who you publish with). This is also very helpful when composing your letter to go along with the manuscript when you submit it for consideration by publishers.

But that, kiddies, is an essay for another night, and this wolf has got to get to bed soon!

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