Posted an author unboxing (actually no, it’s not really an unboxing) and first impressions (is it a first impressions?) of my third book, I Ching, The Oracle.

Then decided to swing by over here on my blog to repost and share some additional personal ruminations. Here are some of my thoughts and reflections after publishing three books.

Holistic Tarot debuted in 2015, then The Tao of Craft came out in 2016. I didn’t publish another book until 7 years later, 2023.

There’s this unspoken pressure on writers to crank out books on a fairly regular, repeating basis. To be clear, no one demands it of us; it’s more of an unspoken self-imposed peer pressure. You look around and all your colleagues are writing a book a year.

I often wonder about myself why, despite having so many half-baked book manuscripts in the archives, I’m slow to the finish line when it comes to publishing books. A 7-year gap between Books 2 and 3 is a pretty big one.

Books 1 and 2

Holistic Tarot (2015) and The Tao of Craft (2016) appear to be back to back, but they weren’t. I finished writing the manuscript for Holistic Tarot in 2012, then immediately started on The Tao of Craft, which I finished writing in 2015, the year that Holistic Tarot came out. So when Holistic Tarot was out in stores, fresh and new to everybody, and that was the book I was supposed to be promoting, my brain was completely immersed in The Tao of Craft.

My experience with the publishing process for both books was pretty good. I really liked the layout of Holistic Tarot, and the book design editor stayed true to my preferences. I really like the book cover for The Tao of Craft. The first few options presented to me were bleh, and the publisher listened! And the revision to what you see now on the cover was designed based on my suggestions!

As for how I chose the subject matter for my first two books–

A nonfiction book on how to tarot was not the topic I thought I would ever publish on, let alone become my debut book and come to define my brand. Because Holistic Tarot was my first book, I’m now forever known as “a tarot person,” which I am, but esoteric Taoist and Buddhist practice is a much bigger part of my world than the tarot. So it’s just really interesting to consider what one becomes known for vs. what is actually the true defining practices in one’s personal life.

I didn’t choose to write a book on the tarot, or at least it didn’t feel that way; it feels like the topic chose me. Like many, I had this ongoing tarot study journal. One Thanksgiving week, for shits and giggles, I organized all my notes from that tarot study journal into book format and the first complete draft of Holistic Tarot, initially titled Tarot Analytics, came to be.

Now that I had finished what amounted to a pretty chunky book, what do I do with it? I submitted it to various Mind, Body, Spirit publishers, didn’t hear back from any of them, and got ready to self-publish under a pseudonym, just to put it out there for funsies. Right when I was about done with formatting design and readying to self-publish, I got an offer for publication from North Atlantic Books.

The Tao of Craft happened because I wanted to write a primer on esoteric Taoism that would serve as a “pre-requisite” for learning more advanced Taoist occult practice. If someone wanted to deep-dive into East Asian occult practice, then I would say, here, read this book first, then we’ll talk. Yes, it’s only on Fu talismans, but the cool thing is, to craft a Fu, you need to utilize all the bare minimum fundamentals. Hence I wanted to impart introductory knowledge and experience by way of learning how to craft a Fu.

Both of my parents were staying with me throughout the time that I was writing The Tao of Craft, so I received a great deal of input and support from them, especially with sourcing the texts I would be citing and interpreting. The older some of these texts are, the harder it is to make sense of what they’re trying to say. Language use, word choice, sentence structure, word meanings, all of it changes over the centuries. It’s like parsing through a grimoire (already an obscure subject in and of itself) written in Old English. Just because you’re fluent in modern English doesn’t mean that exercise is going to be easy. Fortunately, my mom is a practitioner and my dad is an academic.

Considering how different in subject matter Book 2 is from Book 1, after both were released, I felt like I was in an interesting uncertain position. When you publish two books back to back on two diametrically different topics, what are you going to do for your Book 3?

A key reason for the 7-year gap between Books 2 and 3 is because I was stalling. I stalled in large part because I didn’t know what my Book 3 should be. And intuitively I sensed that it mattered. The decision had to be very well thought through and deeply intentional.

Between Books 2 and 3

After Book 2, I tried my hand at finishing a novel I had been working on for what now feels like forever. It’s historical fiction and balancing “entertaining, compelling character development” with “historical accuracy by way of a ton of research” was the key challenge.

I finished that novel, then decided it was not as well written as I would like, so trashed the draft and started over. I finished a second draft, and again it wasn’t great. But then after two failed complete drafts I lost steam.

Another bummer thing about the novel is when I first got the idea for it in 2012, I didn’t see anything like it out in the market, so it felt “original.” But at this point, there are now several books almost exactly like my premise, so if I publish my book now, it’s going to look like I copied. =( So sad.

Oh, and how could I forget to mention, I drew and released three editions of SKT between Books 2 and 3. =)

Deciding on Book 3

Around March of 2022, my publisher North Atlantic Books reached out and asked if I had any book project ideas I’ve been working on that might be right for NAB. I took some time to think about it, and realized, well, I do have this completed translations of the I Ching plus several researched commentary chapters already written out. I could probably flesh that out into a coherent book.

I pitched the idea and they said yes! Let’s do it!

Though I had this completed I Ching book on the back burner for quite a long time (and it took me about 10 years to fully complete), I thought I had heard somewhere that “Confucius says” that you can’t really understand the I Ching until you’re over 40.

So I had been stalling on publishing the I Ching book until I was over 40. And as it turned out, when NAB reached out about a possible third book, I was over 40. So, in my mind, now I could credibly talk about the I Ching. =)

By the way, my presumption that “Confucius says” you can’t really understand the I Ching until you’re over 40 was a mis-remembering of this maxim attributed to him:

子曰：吾十有五而志於學，三十而立，四十而惑，五十而知天命，六十而耳順，七十而從心所欲，不性質。

In other words, Confucius says…

• At age 15, you’re eager to learn
• At age 30, you’ve solidified your opinions and points of view
• At age 40, you’ve attained confidence and clarity
• At age 50, you’ve come to understand Heaven’s Will
• At age 60, you learn to listen [alternate translation: you learn to go with the flow]
• At age 70, your own True Will aligns with Heaven’s Will

This comes from the Analects 論語 of Confucius. It may amuse you to see the minimal Chinese characters and then the verbosity of my English translation.

You’re going to find that to be so in I Ching, The Oracle as well. Look over at the minimalist number of Chinese characters from the Oracle. Then look to the left at my English translation. You’re like, wait, there are a lot more English words than there are Chinese characters… Yeah. Because one word in Chinese holds multiple prongs of meaning. A strictly literal translation isn’t going to translate the full depth and scope of meaning.

But back to what Confucius says. =) What I’ve translated as “Heaven’s Will” for age 50, 天命, is the Mandate of Heaven, for those who recall their Chinese history studies back in high school World History class.

These two words hold so many layers of meaning though. To say the term means destiny doesn’t do it justice. A Christian might interpret tian ming as “God’s Plan for you.” I like that actually.

Juxtaposed with the maxims for ages 15, 30, and 40, before age 50, the implication is you are asserting yourself onto this world. You’re proactively carving out your place, figuring out who you are and what you will stand and fight for. But then at age 50, there’s a yielding, but it is a form of wisdom, to yield. There is a strength and courage to the yielding that you don’t fully acquire until age 50.

And then for age 60, 耳順, is translated to “listening and going with the flow.” It implies matured spiritual cultivation. But it also means truly being able to listen to what someone is saying to you, going deeper than just word meaning and speech. Your heart learns to hear another’s heart.

“Listening” also means obedience, though a modern Westernized society is going to get up in arms when they hear the word “obedience.” If by age 50 you understand Heaven’s Will, then by age 60 you’ve learned how to yield to it. Yielding to Heaven’s Will, in turn, also means that your spiritual cultivation has matured.

And then by age 70 you’re fully indoctrinated by Heaven’s Will. Kidding.

On its face “七十而從心所欲，不性質” (i.e., age 70, your own True Will aligns with Heaven’s Will) means that you’re no longer a rebel without a cause, not someone who feels the need to break the rules just to figure out who you are or where you stand. You can be exactly who you are and what you want to be without compromising who you were meant to be and what’s meant for you.

I’m curious to see what book I come out with when I’m 50!

Wow, what a long-winded tangent. Back to how I decided on the I Ching for Book 3.

Many native Chinese and Taiwanese fluent in the I Ching read my translations and annotations, and said they liked mine! =) Now, whether they were just saying that to be nice to me is another issue entirely, but their words certainly gave me the confidence to proceed with publishing this book.

I also wanted to write and publish a Taoist grimoire, and so I did. Embedded within I Ching, The Oracle is a book of practicums, and you’ll even find a listing of all practicums in the front pages.

The word count on the MS Word doc file I submitted for I Ching, The Oracle was 268,000. For comparison, Holistic Tarot was 175,000 and The Tao of Craft was 156,000 words. Yet if you look at the book thickness of I Ching from 2023 and Holistic Tarot from 2015, they look to be about the same! Reason for that is the font size in I Ching is just a smidge smaller than it was in Holistic Tarot and the paper quality is slightly thinner in I Ching than it was in Holistic Tarot.

I’m very proud of I Ching, The Oracle, and in my heart I have faith that my ancestors are proud of what I’ve done. I have faith that this book is something Asians and Asian Americans will be proud of me for.

In a lot of ways, this was an endeavor to de-colonize the I Ching.

To give you a sense of where I am at with Book 3 compared to Books 1 and 2, I had to seriously consider and debate whether I wanted to continue publishing Book 3 under Benebell Wen or whether to publish Book 3 under my real legal name.

Eagerly Awaiting Book OSD (On Sale Date)

Book 3 will finally be released later this month on September 26. If you feel ever so inclined and you’ve purchased a copy of Book 3, please leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. This is one of the biggest favors you can do for authors. Consumer reviews help a book to get discovered and boosts its rankings.

All right. Now comes the waiting game. It can be anxiety-inducing, when you know the OSD is just around the bend and soon the public will start to publicly react to your book. Will they like it? Will they hate it? How will you, the author, take it when critics poke your shadow? You’d think after experiencing this for two books, the third should be easy. Not so. Not so at all. =)