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My cartoon for this weekend’s Guardian books.

p.s. my latest book cartoons collection is Revenge of the Librarians: tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2

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Prayer for Writing

Come to me Deities of Words, Come to me Masters of Letters, Come to me as I sit in front of my tools, as I sit in front of blank scripts, and grant me your writing wisdom.

Brighid, may you kindle my thoughts and stoke my wonderment. May you inspire my worlds, and my imagination So I may be as radiant as you.

Ogma, may you glitter my nouns and glisten my verbs and adverbs. May you transcend my poetry and my prose So I may be as honey-tongued as you.

Lugh, may you build upon my worlds, and grant wit to my sentences. May you bring out what is unique in me and in my words So I may be as talented as you.

I welcome all the Powers of the Pen, and all Champions of Speech. Come to me as I seek your guidance, and to you I give my thanks: Blessings upon Blessings be to you.

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Photo Prompt #26 Source: the cinema by m0thart

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Photo Prompt #25 Source: Christmas by kiiw

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Photo Prompt #24 Source: Happy Little Skulls by MADmoiselleMeli

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Photo Prompt #23 Source: the moment before the autumn rain begins to fall by m0thart

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Photo Prompt #22 Source: Untitled by michellis 13

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West Side Booksellers

New York City, New York

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Photo Prompt #21 Source: Skull Candy by LisaStockk

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Got this beauty today.

“Goldstone is a man made gemstone that has been around since the European Rennaissance.

Early monks working at a glass factory near Venice, Italy were practicing alchemy when molten copper accidentally tipped into a molten glass container.

This crystallized into thousands of tiny crystals and formed a melt with golden light sparkles. This is how the first goldstone came about. Though it is not technically a gemstone, it is often referred to as one.”

Like space in the palm of my hand.

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People always joke about the Marauders thinking a stray dog is really Sirius but imagine that the Marauders are exploring the Forbidden Forest and they split up and all of a sudden, a deer comes over and nudges Sirius. And he’s just like, “Oh, hey, mate.” And the deer just nudges him again. And they finally decide to head back to the castle but the deer is having none of it so they literally have to drag him out of the forest. Only they’re panicking because he’s not changing back and come on James, this isn’t funny, you know we can’t get caught. And so they start to worry that something is wrong and he can’t change back. And so they smuggle him back into the castle. And by smuggle I mean, they throw the Invisibility Cloak over him but since he’s a deer, it doesn’t really cover much. And that’s the story of how Professor McGonagall looks up and sees three boys shoving a headless deer past her doorway and she promptly decides that it’s not her problem.

So they get the deer to the common room and it’s only then that they begin to speculate that maybe this deer isn’t James after all. But the deer just keeps doing really vague things that could be James. And they spend the rest of the afternoon having to decide if this really is James and if it is, if he’s messing with them or if something’s wrong, and if he’s not, did they just kidnap a deer?

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Are you overcomplicating astral travel?

Here’s the thing: By far the most common question I get from people is “how do I astral?” Which is, well, a big question. It begs other questions, like:

>Why do you want to travel

>WHERE do you want to travel

>Do you have jobs you need to do over there or are you gonna hang out

etc etc

But here’s the thing: Often people decide to travel, and then they get stuck. They try a method they maybe heard about once, and it doesn’t work, so maybe they research another method. Maybe they pick up a book on the topic, maybe the book tells them “you’ll know you’re astral traveling when you can rise out of your body and see it on your bed.”

BOOM. Imma stop you for a minute.

There it is. This is the moment the Gold Standard™ for the new person gets set in stone. The mind now says “If I’m not hovering above my body with full range of vision, I’m not Traveling, with a capital T.”

So now we have this goal. The person may feel a little more confident because there is a road map in front of them, and that map may have steps, often detailed by a book author, or maybe even a blogger here on tumblr. Maybe the person tries the steps, and fails. Maybe it takes months. Maybe it takes years, but eventually, maybe the person gets frustrated, and they give up.

“I just can’t travel”, they say, truly discouraged, or “I’m just not meant for this, if I was, I would have been hovering outside my body by now.” They maybe pack up the books and leave it be.

Perhaps you see people on tumblr or blogs that talk about full blown OBE or extreme situations, and then you internalize THEIR gold standard, and then you fail to achieve the standard. Same situation applies.

Imma stop you right here. What happened?

Person decided they wanted to travel

Person researched or was told what “authentic” travel looks like

Person attempted to reach the “authentic” standard

Person failed, and then

Assumed they were not meant to travel, due to their failure to reach “Authentic Travel”.

BUT

Here’s the secret, my bros:

1. There is no one form of “authentic” astral travel. You will find this is an epidemic with older books on the astral, when astral “travel” or astral living was equated on a wide scale with your classic OBE, or Out Of Body Experience. So in reality, what many people are trying to achieve, when they want to travel, is an OBE. Based on what books/people tell them. But that is FAR from the only way to astral–in my case, for example, I’ve never achieved full OBE–and not for lack of years of trying. (Because I thought that was How One Astral Traveled)

1-A. THERE ARE MANY FORMS OF ASTRALING BESIDES “TRAVEL”. I don’t travel because I lead an astral double-life–I “tune in”. An OBE is wrong for my circumstances, and if I would have learned that sooner, it would have helped me a lot. There are people that astral-trip only in dreams! People that astral-trip only while DAYDREAMING! People that mentally trip but never leave awareness of their body, people who can’t “see” anything there but hear everything perfectly, people who can only see the astral in black and white, people without a “form” or a body, people with only a bizarre pinprick field of vision! HONESTLY IT’S ENDLESS. Learn your style!

2. Because there is no one form of “authentic” astraling–there is no ONE WAY to achieve the travel! If you fail at going OBE, there may be a perfectly good reason you aren’t suited to that route! The failure here also lies on authors and books that imply there IS one way of authentic travel, and therefore, the user is set up for a failure situation a lot of the time. (And for example, OBE LEAVES your body open for attack or walk-ins in a lot of cases–did you ever think this was your natural energy defense system preventing you from leaving yourself a shell?)

3. Your way of travel is probably NOT going to match someone else’s, so you absolutely need to drop the gold standard now. I am NOT telling you to give up on discernment, because that will keep you alive when you reach the astral. I am telling you that if you have lofty expectations of what the astral is going to be like for you based on someone you’ve read (including me!) you need to drop it before you go, because it’s likely to fuck you up. I have listened to hundreds of different astral experiences, and I co-run the astral atlas–it’s all remarkably different for each individual based on your needs and jobs.

4. Your ideas of the astral are probably going to get blown out of the water when you get there anyway. Know this. Expect it. It will constantly surprise you and remind you that this isn’t In Your Head, and in doing so it will shatter your ideas of what it is, over and over again. 

5. Stop complicating things. If I had a nickel for every time person that came to me and asked why they can’t astral, and I gave them the idea of “Well, did you try opening a door?” and then the look of revelation descended, I’d be rich. This is not a blame on you, because I don’t blame you for this over-complication thing. We’re humans, we like to complicate everything, it makes us happy and whatnot. It makes me almost tremendously happy to shroud things in pomp and circumstance. But seriously–have you tried opening a door? Like. Visualize a door, and then open it, and then walk through. That’s how I first got to the astral.

After weeks of trying and doing all this complex shit, eventually I was told to visualize a door, and walk through. And then I was fucking there.

(Can you imagine how pissed I was, though. Like wtf I WAS TOLD MY ENTRANCE WAS TO BE GRANDIOSE AND MAGNIFICENT, not a fucking shitty wooden-ass door with nobody around to see me. Harumph, I said. I ended up in an empty field in fuck-all nowhere, if you wanted to know.)

I’m not saying it’s always easy to get to the astral. It has ways of keeping you out (or in) inside mental spaces or white rooms until you’re ready to be out on your own. This is where discernment and patience come in. But I AM saying if you find yourself failing over and over again at this thing, ask: Is it because you have an unconscious Gold Standard? Analyze why. And then, let it go. Because it’s not going to help you, it’s just going to make you anxious and perpetuate the failure cycle, trust me. And then ask: Am I overcomplicating my approach/expectations because of my gold standard? Analyze that, let it go.

Then, try an amazingly simple thing like opening a door, and stop cutting yourself off at the pass, and just let it happen.

You might be surprised at the results.

(This post is aimed at people who a) WANT to astral and b) have a hard time doing so for unknown reasons. It is not suggesting everyone should astral if they don’t want to or have no interest, if that wasn’t self-evident.)

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“We never would’ve upset you if we knew you had superpowers”. #dustin #strangerthings #Netflix #illustration #comicbook #graphicnovel #dessin #ink #sketch #art

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My daughter’s Girl Scout troop made a lending library as one of their service projects last year. One of the Dads was kind enough to help out with the project, and constructed this TARDIS-themed lending library with the girls. He even used a solar light at the top so that it lights up at night, too!