Yesterday I announced on Facebook that my ADF grove is dissolving. Specifically, as of January 31, 2017 the ADF Protogrove called Five Rivers is dissolving. I am also allowing my membership in ADF to lapse for reasons that are not earth shattering nor to be made public. Sometimes, relationships just don’t work.
Recently the Mother Grove (Board of Directors) of Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF) took an action
that some, including myself, felt was not appropriate and should have been handled differently. This has prompted not a few people on my social media lists to reconsider their involvement, and some have even decided to stop supporting the organization. Now some of you know that I do not feel that some of the leadership are worthy of their position, and that I already left ADF once due to poor treatment of a specific membership population…mistreatment that I am still seeing, and that the training programs are lacking due to the subjective nature of the reviewers.
As much as I love to talk, I don’t like writing so much. My writing is pretty much how I speak, long winded and full of information that may or may not be needed to get my point across. So after my editor went over the Fénidecht article with me for a 3rd time (we dropped 1000 words) and we jointly declared it ready for submission, I sent it in. Then as I fell asleep last night I was fretting everything that I removed to make it more concise and specific to the audience. ARG!!
That really is the beauty of the modern technological age though isn’t it? ADF will publish the article in the Spring edition after which I can publish another version on this blog putting that information I had to remove for length back in and making it more informative for the general audience. This flexibility should remove any anxiety I have about not providing enough information in the print edition, but it really doesn’t. Maybe I should focus on getting a larger following by the time it comes out??
My next published project was going to be on Finn as a god, but I think I will focus on gentlidecht and how I came to choose gentlidecht as the word to describe my faith. Both drafts are over 2500 words so I suspect my editor and I will be going over them a lot before they hit the blog. I hope to learn how to better write my drafts so that she doesn’t have to go over them as much in the future.
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For full disclosure the editor I work with happens to be my wife. I call her my editor because being an editor and writer is her career, from Simon and Schuster to her successful freelance business. From query letters to developmental editing to ghostwriting she does it all, and I have to plug her latest ghostwriting project is now available on Amazon called “Way of the SEAL” by Mark Divine with Allyson Edlehertz Machate and it is something those interested in the warrior path should read. I will be doing a review of it in the next couple weeks and posting it here.
The plan for all my articles is to publish them in print media followed by digital media. The space between the two publications will be based on the publication agreements with the print media. So far I have 4 articles in process with 2 more that I would like to write:
Fénidecht – The outlaw warrior in modern times.
Why Gentlidecht – An argument for calling myself a practitioner of Gentlidecht. or a gent.
Gentlidecht– A detailed explanation of what Gentlidecht is…
Finn the Wolf/Stag/Hunting god – a re-write of an older article entitled ” Fionn mac Cumhal: The Stag/Hunting God of Ireland”
Two other topics are:
Weapons in the Sanctuary – a presentation of historical rules for weapons in holy sanctuaries in IE cultures.
Outsiders – a presentation of the outsider in the 21st century via interviews with self-identified Outsiders.
Fénidecht will be the first article completed, its publication will be in the Spring edition of “Oak Leaves” the members magazine from Ár nDraíocht Féin (ADF). Once it comes out in print I will publish it here in my blog and up on a more permanent website yet to be designed.
I am not much of a blogger and I write articles in spurts that have lasted years…but this will be an attempt to post more articles on subjects of my faith. My blogging name is obviously not my real name but that is more to avoid Google searches of my real name turning up my blog. Just to help keep my secular and religious lives separate on the internet. My employer and anyone with any search skills can connect the dots of my identity if they wished.
Anyway, I hope to have interesting articles in the future.
Oh, and happy Samain.