TAISHA'S BOOK STILL NOT OUT : WILL IT EVER BE?

Guess what?  If you go to April 1 2023 and see the post TAISHA ABELAR'S LOST BOOK -   STALKING WITH THE DOUBLE (RESTORED VERSION)  you will be able to read a manuscript copy of the book.

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By now this is becoming an "inside joke"...

A little background.

Many years ago when I was a regular at an independently owned coffee house on Ventura Boulevard and taking night classes at the local community college, one of the servers there, who I really liked, showed me her copy of Taisha Abelar's first and only book, and encouraged me to read it. This coffee house friend had recently gone on a vision quest which she believed had oriented her purpose in life and future career.

I read the book and was utterly mystified and intregued. Since then I've read the book twice more, each time years enough apart to not have remembered everything I read before, and each time having a different pov on it in the end, as my understanding or mystification of my own life changes me.

Since then I've also read around the whole Carlos Castaneda controversy; was Taisha one of his cult members? Did the various "witches," or devotees, or whatever they really were, who published books around the subject, all pass fiction off as nonfiction? Or did they really experience what some of them wrote about?

Castandeda died a human death of cancer, and soon after several of these people, including Taisha, disappeared. There was talk of a possible ritual suicide, maybe in an abandoned mine or cave in the desert. Taisha's family filed a missing person report but many people felt that these people had just staged a disappearance and gone off to Mexico or wherever, to continue their esoteric pursuits. Tellingly, money inherited was left behind as well.

One of the Castaneda "witches," who inherited the bulk of his fortune, continues to live and remains silent and protected by an attorney. She has not written anything.

Then, a couple years ago, it was reported that Taisha had a new book that would soon be published. Some people said this meant that all along she had been hiding out and writing and would soon reappear, possibly to take over leadership of the group. A few years have gone by and speculation is that she left behind an unfinished manuscript which, by now, has seen a number of ghost writers.

The publishing house has announced publication a number of times, and so the book became almost ready to order on Amazon. So far, no Taisha, no book.

C 2012 Christine Trzyna / Christine Trzyna Writerly Life All Rights Including Internet and International Rights Reserved.

STEVEN KING'S 11/22/63 : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

This is a big, heavy hard cover book. It's a long read and it's also a page turner, if, like me, you've been reading around the Kennedys and the Assassination in 1963 for years.

Steven King's 11/22/63 is a book with a few genres intermixing.

It's a story with a mystical - spiritual - quality to it, though King's reputation for gore is maintained with murders and mass chaos. You have to accept that a form of time travel is possible, though it's not science fiction but more a time warp that can be accessed.

There's a love story, one that provides the funniest moments.

But mostly what the Kennedy assassination story and Steven King's book is, is a MYSTERY story. Writing this book was a challenge not only because of the many genres that might have competed for prominence and become confusion in a lesser writer's manuscript, but because it's easy to find yourself searching for the information that his research brought forth, information that you know is controversial, such as if Lee Harvey Oswald was really the assassin and a lone gunman or not, and not sticking with the fictive story.

Steven King is so successful, a master, so maybe it's difficult to say anything revealing about his work overall. I've read Cell and The Dome, and one or two other titles over the years. I'm not a fan of gore but at least he's generally realistic with its possibilities. I do love the way he has set his characters in circumstances. I was left feeling satisfied with the read, which required that I stay home an entire weekend, in bed, with some crackers and cheese and the book.

WILL TAISHA ABELAR'S NEW BOOK COME OUT TODAY - MARCH 30 2011 - AS PROMISED? A PUBLISHING MYSTERY STORY BY CHRISTINE TRZYNA

Guess what?  If you go to April 1 2023 and see the post TAISHA ABELAR'S LOST BOOK -   STALKING WITH THE DOUBLE (RESTORED VERSION)  you will be able to read a manuscript copy of the book.

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NOTE JUNE 2022  I think Taisha Abelar is in life eternal but physically not in the body she came in with during her life that entangled with Castaneda. 

NOTE MARCH 2019 - this post gets lots of hits and as of this moment, this book is not out and I doubt it ever will be.The Promise of Power: Reflections on the Toltec Warriors' Dialogue from the Collected Works of Carlos Castaneda by Tomas is reference type book compiled by a mysterious person that Castaneda-curious people might want to read. "A new Taisha Abelar book is about to be released. It will be released on 30th March 2011,  Penguin: Untitled Sequel Sorcerer’s Crossing."

Taisha Abelar, if you don't know, was one of the close devotees of the writer Carlos Castanada, one of his, if you will, "Witches," though perhaps what she was really was more of a "Sorcerer," or, if you will, simply a Yogini with a different cultural and religious sensibility than Hinduism, a sensibility that was about Ancient Mexico.

Today, March 30, 2011, is supposed to be the release date of a book she was writing when she, and the other "Witches," disappeared after Carlos Castaneda's death. This book has had at least one other false start that I've heard about. It has been "at a publishers" for years and the left behind employees of Castaneda's who give workshops have been very, shall we say, studied, in the way they use language to indicate that maybe Taisha is "traveling."

Years ago an employee of a coffee house I frequented turned me on to her first and only book, and it's a book that I've read more than once, several years apart; I like to see how the material sits with me and my own emerging sensibilities.

This book has more than the disappearance of Taisha and a few other cohorts - possibly in a suicide in a mine shaft in the Arizona desert but the bodies were never found - as a mystery.

It is also a publishing mystery. You see, the ISBN, which are printed on the back of most books published so that they can be identified by a code that allows them to be purchased by book stores with ease, are purchased by the publishing house in a block. This sequel will be sold with an ISBN code in that original block. Some interpret this standard practice as indicative that the book was actually written at about the same time, in the works anyway, and suspect that what has actually happened is that Taisha's estate took some notes and turned them over to a ghost writer - or two - or a dozen by now - to turn it into a book akin to the original. So did Taisha actually write this book and will it be anything at all like the original which was written, though she is called a "Stalker," while "in Dreaming?"

In order to turn out a book that is truly Taisha's, if the manuscript (or not) that she left behind was indeed in need of major reworking, the ghost writer(s) would really have to get into her head, maybe even live her kind of life, in which there was NO TIME for anything much besides the search for eternal life of a not Christian kind. And will this ghost writer(s), like all ghost writer(s), who never get credited, remain silent and be possibly the biggest publishing business secret since the supposed secret of who actually wrote Castaneda's books?

I've been fascinated with this story from the beginning when, after the disappearance, it was Taisha's estranged family who wanted her declared dead, some said, so they could benefit in some way from her estate, which was an inheritance from Carlos. Maybe those left-behind didn't want a planned group suicide to dirty up the Castaneda inheritance of magic or maybe, for all we know, it will be Taisha returned to this world, who will do the book signings?

C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved Including International and Internet Rights

BRANDING CHRISTINE TRZYNA or I THINK OF ANDY WARHOL

I've been thinking a lot about BRANDING. (And that Andy Warhol was a futurist in his understanding of this concept.)

Branding is a marketing term for moving a product (a person/writer is a product) into a category that is evocative of the essence of that person/writer, sometimes through associated product.

State that again?

It is assumed that what I buy says a lot about me - my personality, character, values, class.

I think maybe what I DON'T BUY SAYS MORE!

I'm in love with cutting edge advertising as pop culture. I love paging through a VANITY FAIR or a VOGUE and looking at the ads - what models are being used - what is the "story" each pictorial promotes. (High fashion ads are sometimes creepy. I hated the lurking molester/rapist of young sexy girls jeans pictorial a few years back.) But I can't say that I have bought anything I've ever seen advertised in either magazine.

Anyway, I'm going to have fun with this idea of me being a BRAND, as associated with PRODUCT, during the most materialistic time of the year in this "Christian" country; the Christmas season. I'm going to pitch products I like, just like I used to play at being a TV commercial actress and promoting a box of cereal when I was a kid.



C Christine Trzyna/ Writerly Life 2010 All Rights Reserved Including Internet and International Rights
C 2016 Christine Trzyna Blogspot

MY OLD WRITERS GROUP WAS TERRIFIED OF SENDING WORK OUT

I belonged to a writers group years back that was comprised of some talented people who were dedicated to short story writing. But they were so perfectionistic, that despite writing and rewriting stories, and going through our critique process, they were terrified to send work out.

THE REASON WAS NOT JUST REJECTION! The reason was that they feared that everyone in publishing knew each other - and that if they had the nerve to send out a story that some editor thought of as less than A-plus, unworthy, then they would face something equal to being blackballed out of being published - ever. Their efforts - their very name -would exclude them from the very world they so desired to be in, that is if there were a lot of truth to this almost paranoid notion.

Being published does not make you a writer, writing does. And the best way to become a better writer is to write. No doubt being published can sometimes be a personal rather than professional matter. I simply do not believe that a writer who wants to be published should worry that rejections, even a series of rejection, means that they will become infamous within publishing circles.

If you have had an experience that would prove the paranoid notion, please contact me and tell me your story!

Christine

WRITER, AUTHOR, PUBLISHED AUTHOR

What's the difference between calling yourself a writer, or an author, or a published author? I have sometimes felt so defensive of someone's attitude and behavior and words towards me when I say "I'm a writer," that I wonder if I should say author or published author. One writer I know answers that she is "a novelist." She's British and no one seems to question this as an honorable activity for an upper class British woman.

Now I am not a member of the Screenwriter's Union and Screenwriters have not been particularily supportive of me. Yes, this is true, and it is also true that I am for them and their strike.

I think the term writer covers us all, and is the most general and least defensive term. It's the one I use.

What people seem to be asking me/us when they ask us what we do and we answer writer is "Are you published?" "Have you sold?" As if that will legitimitze our activity.

Trouble is a writer has to write even if one never does get published, or published for money, big money. I also think that writers have a more difficult time with all this because an artists' work is more a product. An artist can show a drawing or a painting and it says what it says to the viewer without words, while words can help a reader see in their mind characters and the world of the novel. My writing partner on his memoir, Wes Bryan, got me into calling musicians, singers, anyone in the arts an "artist" but to me it still means painter.

What's on your business card?