The world is changing, yes, I know, it always is, but in many ways at this juncture of space and time, change is speeding up and seems to be happening around us as we watch. “The time is out of joint” said Prince Hamlet and cursed his fate that he “had to set it right.” I don’t feel the need to set anything right, I am just a minuscule microorganism in the quantum vat of broiling time, but I do feel a need to try and be aware of the waves of change, even if only in some vague and uneasy way. Change is changing change in dizzying fashion.

This is nowhere more apparent to me than in the area of the ever-changing world of the Internet because I am involved in bringing my new novel “Leela’s Gift” into the flow of virtual words in cyberspace. Twenty ago when my political memoir  was published, it garnered attention in the print world of book reviews (there was no electronic world), being widely reviewed in prestigious and well-known places. One thing lead to another in an orderly and time-honored way. Ten years later I adapted a personality system for educators and parents and published these two psychology books. In the fine print of book contracts the words “electronic rights” were now seen, and (of course) belonged to the publisher. Who knew what was coming? While reviews on the young Internet were welcome and easily published by web–site customers, print reviews still had some cachet.

Now several years later (change is exponential) the landscape is completely different. Aside from the venerable “New York Times Book Review” print reviews of books (and indeed newspapers and journals themselves) are disappearing, although sometimes there are two–three sentence blurbs on books in trendy magazines. Yet, paradoxically, the world of words and books is exploding, growing like a virus on steroids inside the box on your desk, or sitting on your lap, or indeed being held in your hand.

This I know from my recent foray into the world of eBook publishing where scores of web sites all over the globe that have no general name recognition electronically carry hundreds of thousand of book titles that you or I can download almost instantaneously at the click of a button to one of many hand held reading device and often for free.

Amazon.com rules the publishing waves. Hand held reading devices, as has been promised for twenty years, will soon be the most common way to read—anything. Even an elderly friend, who is by choice a technological Luddite, uses and loves her Kindle. If she does, so will we all.

Tags: adolescents, Children, colleges, consciousness, creativity, cyberspace, education, high school, mind structure, Mind-training, www.janetlevine.com

My new book, a novel, “Leela’s Gift” has been released. In fact it can be viewed at http://lulu.com/spotlight/JLevine1. It will soon be (early August) available at amazon.com and many online venues where book are sold as well as in book stores (remember www.indiebound.org and independent book stores). “Leela’s Gift” is the story of a luminous inner spiritual  journey. It is set in New York and high in the Himalayas near Darjeeling in northern India. The novel uncovers archetypal and highly relevant spiritual teachings. East meet west in Leela. The book offers teachings on meditation and yoga,  practical paths to freedom from the often dispiriting and desperate quality of our contemporary lives. The novel intertwines Leela’s journey with modern philosophy  and primal wisdom and is infused with some of the inner teachings of Buddhism and the Enneagram. “Leela’s Gift” tells a story as old as the human heart.

Tags: ashram, Children, consciousness, creativity, cyberspace, Darjeeling, Desert Fathers, E-types, Enneagram, fiction, Leela's Gift, meditation, mind structure, Mind-training, Plato, rebirth, relationships, Sufi, teacher, Universal Forms, Vedic origins, www.janetlevine.com, yoga

© Janet Levine 2010

Coming soon to online and brick book stores.

Seven years ago, one July, on a clear but cold winter’s day on a beach in Nature’s Valley, South Africa, one of my sons asked me. “What is your next book?” (“Know Your Parenting Personality” had recently been published.)  I replied that  I would like to write a novel somehow using the personality types of the Enneagram. He thought it was a good idea and we spoke about it a bit. Through many twists and turns “Leela’s Gift” took on a life of its own and became much more than the sum of its parts. I am pleased it will shortly be available (by August) for readers who love fiction and who love to delve into the depths of spiritual and philosophical matters.

In the beginning after two years of working on several drafts , my ex-agent did not like the structure of the material. Two more years, and two more drafts, she still did not like the material. So we agreed to part. Over another year and because certain characters refused to leave my mind and insisted on being in the book,  I rewrote it to incorporate them. I shared drafts with a group of readers, had it professionally edited and hit the slush pile over another year in scores of agents’ offices. So hard to be flushed out of the slush pile, I share great empathy with every writer who tries. But the manuscript idea did grab many agents and I do have a publishing record so “partials” and “fulls” went flying across the virtual world of the wide web.

The problem is I like to be on the cutting edge, I like to write hybrids, I like to break new ground. This is true of everything I have done in my life, from my anti-apartheid activism to how I live my life to my writing. So my manuscript did not fit a “niche”, a “genre”, it is an original. The New York publishing cartel does not take chances on “originals”. I am not a product of the American grad school MFA pipeline.

Agents “loved the writing” “appreciated the material” “enjoyed the well-developed characters” but (and the following are by far the two most common responses) “…I do not have time for a special project like this” “…I can’t give a project like this the attention it deserves to see it published.” What is it agents do, if they don’t have time to be an agent? “No publisher in New York will even ask to read it” one honest agent told me, and when I inquired why, he said “Traditional publishing is in paroxysms of decline and panic and does not know how to save itself…”

Okay…so now what? An agent-friend for over twenty years, semi-retired now, agreed about the decline, “We are in a revolution in publishing, self-publishing is not defeat, it is an exciting avenue to amazing new ebook and other markets. You don’t know how many other authors, well-known, well-published authors can’t find a traditional publisher and I have suggested to them: self-publish. So, yes, do the research, self-publish, you believe in this work, don’t you?”

I believe in this work.

Tags: consciousness, creativity, cyberspace, Enneagram, fiction, Kabbalah, Leela's Gift, meditation, Mind-training, Plato, Sufi, teacher, Universal Forms, Vedic origins, www.janetlevine.com, yoga