When I was very young, because of the death of my father, my mother, brother and myself were very poor. My grandfather had made a deal with the bank (they did that back then) so we could stay in our house until my mother was able to get her life together and earn money. Still, although we had a nice, small house, we lived in poverty for a long time. I remember driving in our old, smelly (the upholstery was molding) Plymouth to the Fairfax district where my uncle worked in a butcher shop. I believe he probably gave us food for free or at a deep discount. I always hoped to get a piece of spicy, smoked meat known as a "schtickle for a nickle." For me that was a great treat. My "new" clothes

The other day I was at a friend's house and we began talking about books. I have several thousand books on various occult topics. Some are very old. Others are quite new. My friend and I both knew of people who had well over ten thousand books, although most were fiction, especially fantasy or science fiction. I started wondering about why people keep large quantities of books. For me, it is so I can do research. Why people keep vast quantities of fiction, since I don't do that, I can't say. But when you go into someone's home and there are shelves that make the place look like a bookstore or library it's, I don't know, impressive? weird? It certainly tells you a great deal about the

As a fairly visible and accessible writer, primarily of non-fiction, I get questions about what I've written. In fact, I get lots of questions. I used to get stacks of snail-mail letters. Now I receive lots of email. While many of the questions are not connected, it seems like I'll go through periods where I'll get questions from different people that have similar themes. Here are a few of the ones I've been receiving recently and my responses to them: 1) Author X wrote something that disagrees with what you've written. What did that author mean? Who is right and who is wrong? I have been giving Tarot readings for decades so I can get a grasp on potentials for the future. As an NLP

Today I got five emails from authors all alerting me to a website that had 32 of our books and an equal number of other publishers’ books on it, scanned in and uploaded as PDFs for anyone to freely download. If it sounds like harmless sharing to you, please read this post and educate yourself on pirating. First, the background: people loves to steal our books. Libraries and bookstores have claimed for years that some of their most frequently stolen stock are the religious books – anything from the Bible to those on witchcraft and magic. Whether this comes from a belief that all sacred knowledge should be free, a desire to hold onto a book containing so much wisdom (or so many