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Hello, Good People of the Internet!
About two weeks ago I wrote a post titled “I don't know what I am doing any more.” In which I talked about how what I am doing isn’t working anymore. The gist of it was that I noticed that I was often doing things just to try to please the social media algorithm. This led me to realise I was pleasing neither the algorithm nor myself and something had to change with my approach.
The response to the post was overwhelming. Lots of comments of love, support, advice, and lots of very kind and generous words from many people. I thank you all.
One great thing that came out of it was a new community on Discord for magic-minded creators to share tips, tricks, experiences and general advice on “getting the word out”. The community is called Creative Conjure and is open to everyone. Find it HERE!
Yet, things still have to change with what I am doing, but I feel like I am in a much better position now to know what those changes are since I made that post. I no longer feel like I don’t know what I am doing.
I now have a plan. Or at least a very good outline of one.
Firstly, I am going to rely less and less on the big social media platforms to “get the word out” and instead cultivate and invest in my own infrastructure instead such as this newsletter, Patreon, the AIWW Discord and the AIWW website. This also means a return to doing vlogs, which while still are being hosted on someone else’s platform which isn’t ideal. I will be including more Patron-only videos too, though.
Secondly, I feel I suffered from a lack of focus on what exactly it is that I do. There is this vague sort of notion of writer, artist, musician, and chaos magician in which I try to do all the things all the time. This means that I have no real idea half the time why people read my stuff or join the Patreon. Is it the comics? The music? The videos? The podcasts? A mixture? And it feels that when I concentrate on one area it’s to the detriment of the others and the podcast people switch off when I’m in music mode, or whatever I am currently working on.
So, I asked the community why they hung out with me and the resounding answer was: the magick!*
Looking at it all now, I can see that in many ways I have been avoiding the magick over the last while, and I think this is largely due to a lack of self-confidence in my authority or validity to talk about magick. I’ll not go into this much here, it’s a subject for another time.
Also, I always had an aversion to being called a “teacher” or that what I do with AIWW is “teach”. My answer to the why of this is usually something along the lines of: “There are so many unqualified teachers in the occult spouting nonsense and I don’t want to add to the bullshit” and while I still stand behind that, I can also see that it’s a bit of an excuse to not step up and “declare yourself in” as Stuart Wilde would say. It's an excuse not to fully commit.
Looking back now, I feel I have never really stood up and claimed magic or even fully claimed myself as a magician. Instead, I made little self-deprecating jokes about it and only ever really dipped my toes in the shallow waters. I never jumped in head first. I’ve talked about this before in a post from a couple of years ago called “The Deer, The Witch, The Shed, and The Baptist’s Head!”, but even after that revelation then never truly stepped up to the magician mantle.
So, now I’m going to fully declare myself in. And I know that may sound quite odd to a lot of you, but I suspect it will resonate with a good deal of you, too.
Thirdly, coming from the refocusing, and in more practical moves, I will be tightening up all my various online places to have a more definite focus on the magic elements of AIWW. I’ll probably unlist all the old non-magick related vlogs on the YT channel and Podcast feed, remove the music videos from the feed, take the art vlogs down etc. All this just to re-enchant AIWW into a more focused magical working rather than this sort of undefined patchwork quilt that it currently is.
I’ll be working on the AIWW website to have a more definite magic personality so that there is no doubt what the focus is for new visitors, including new logo artwork and possibly a new layout. All the other stuff I do will still be available but will be accessed from my new LINKS page rather than the AIWW website proper. The menu over on AIWW has become quite cluttered. I need to simplify.
Fourthly, making this newsletter a more permanent and regular part of the AIWW ongoing Working. The aim would be for it to have more than just a list of links to things I have posted elsewhere but also to have new content available only in the newsletter—like this post and the reviews below. It would be great to have it come out weekly, but I need to see what the new schedule allows.
Fifthly, I have medium-term plans for a revised and updated The Forty Servants Video Course which will probably be on Patreon and will include a deeper look at the Servants than the previous one including the symbolism in the art, reversals, magick rituals, and all the other stuff that has emerged since the first course. So, if you have anything you’d like to see covered in that, please let me know.
Sixthly, The current iteration of the AIWW podcast will be most likely 9 episodes in total. It is me piecing together my cosmology and practical approach to magick. This will then be converted into a book, which is currently called SIGNALS. I might even rebrand the episodes to this title, though I will not be rushing into it.
The long and short of it is this. I am going to be focusing on the magic going forward. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be doing the music, or the art, the comics, or the writing, but they will all be in service to the bigger AIWW Magick Working.
So, I hope that sounds good to you, Good People of the Internet, and that you stick around to see the next stage of AIWW unfold. Trust me, it’ll be magical.
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*I have of late been using Magic over Magick, but I think I’m going to go back to the Special K version because, from an SEO angle, it just works better. I prefer Magic to Magick, but I get that it makes things much easier to find. |
