Backer Surveys + Admin Info
over 6 years ago
– Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 07:44:46 PM
Hello everyone!
Just an update on all that's happening over here!
- I'm using BackerKit to send out backer surveys, and these will go out to you next week. Please answer these surveys ASAP as it makes shipping a lot more time and cost efficient if I can send everything out at once. (Sending out a single package after the fact can sometimes increase postage by 4x!)
- You can add items to your pledge level using the BackerKit survey. You can also update your address until December.
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Preorders of the book will be available until December.
- The book and all rewards will be shipped (barring any delays) in February 2018.
- The Becoming Dangerous Mixtape is almost ready to go out to backers! Probably on Halloween - fitting, no?
I'm in the middle of moving countries for the next few weeks, so please excuse me if I'm a bit slow to respond to messages! I'll get to them as soon as I can.
❤Katie
✨WE DID IT!!!✨
over 6 years ago
– Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 09:43:00 AM
THANK YOU SO SO SO SO SO MUCH! I'm so very happy right now! This entire experience has been wonderful so far and I've met so many incredible people who've all been excited by the prospect of this book, making me even more excited.
So many of you promoted and talked about the project and helped make this happen. Thank you so much. Your support was invaluable; this Kickstarter would not be 151% funded without you.
Backer surveys will go out soon from BackerKit. If you have any questions, please make sure you send me a message and not a comment (can't respond to those!).
Thank you for wanting to become a bit more powerful, a bit more dangerous.
❤Katie
10 HOURS LEFT: Katie West Ritual Short
over 6 years ago
– Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 12:44:27 AM
“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.”
- Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
☾☾☾
Here’s my ritual.
Be cursed by a man twice your age as you’re working your first job in a restaurant when you’re fourteen years old. He should place the palm of his hand against your cheek and murmur, “You’re gonna break hearts.”
Throw away your virginity when you’re eighteen years old with a boy too much a boy so much a boy. And when he asks how it was for you, lie. Watch the curse materialise for the first time when he sends you an email saying you belong in a house with other people who break hearts.
Make a choice, embrace the curse. Be optimistic it can bring you comfort, embraces do that.
Train your legs to secure around hips, your fingers to find secret places, your lips to work with your tongue to work with your eyes to work with your reserve. “You’re so mysterious. It’s intimidating. It’s intoxicating.” Smile, take off your clothes. Hold that curse tight against your small breasts, your full heart.
Stand naked before a room full of people, pose. Stand naked before a screen full of people, move. Stand naked before a camera in the hands of a man, do what he tells you. And when he moves your pose under the weight of his gaze, of his body, of his expectations, oblige him with the comfort of knowing he will break for this.
Let any man inside you, it doesn’t matter anymore, they’ll all break in the end. With their lenses trained on you, and your body trained to satisfy, act appropriately.
Listen as other women tell you they’ve never done this before. Write love letters to other women and wonder if your curse extends to all genders. (Spoilers: it does.) Accept the judgement of other women telling you you’re willingly objectifying yourself. Accept the praises of other women telling you how brave you are.
Touch your naked body while you lie alone in the dark between two lovers, lovers is probably too generous. Realize it will take courage to wield this curse.
Continue the ritual.
Discover the power your naked body can summon. Begin to hoard it. Take it wherever and whenever you can. You deserve this. Become dangerous, sweetheart.
[Perform this spell.
Find the men with the most to lose, the men with the most power, and look promises into their eyes. Convince them you can save them from their lives, their wives, their sadness.
Press your naked skin against their clothed bodies. Let them command you to writhe, their fingers pulling strings from within. Tell them the heat of their want makes you catch fire; the taste of their cocks makes you wet. Let them consume you, with their soft bellies and strong hands. Their mouths incapable of speaking lies into the dark wet of your mouth. Let them come however they always dreamed of. Their eyes searching and hopeful. Let them think you innocent and untainted and pure and safe and discreet and harmless and blessed.
Unleash the curse. Gather the power that leaks from the fissures of their hearts and use it as kindling for the next spell.]
Continue the ritual.
Become an advanced practitioner in the ceremonial arts of the broken-hearted. It’s happened to you, but so far, you prefer to make it happen to them.
But now you are twenty-five, and married, and shouldn’t this all stop now? (Spoilers: it doesn’t.)
It's not that you're tired or that you have regrets. It's not that you're lonely or unsatisfied. It's not that you're unhappy or depressed. You just hate having to rely on others to summon the power to survive.
You make a choice. Fuck the curse. Curses can’t hug you, why did you even think that, you idiot?
In fact.
Curses aren’t even real, YOU IDIOT.
Take a long long while to recalibrate your ritual. An optional step is to move across an ocean; saltwater is proven to clear your head, your heart, your sinuses.
Perform the ritual anew.
Look at yourself in the mirror. Use your legs that are so familiar with securing to connect you to a new sense of self. Use your fingers that are so used to finding secret places to lay bare the truths you can’t forgive yourself for and then forgive yourself. Have your lips work with your tongue work with your eyes work with your reserve to preserve the parts of yourself you value most. Set fire to the rest. And once you’ve done all that, smile. Take off your clothes.
Set up your camera, point the lens in your direction. Resist the male gaze. Move the furniture to allow yourself to take up more space. Resist societal expectations of appropriateness. Don't be ashamed of your body. Listen to music that encourages it to writhe, for you, alone, truly. Resist systems of oppression that work to pit women against one another. Celebrate the babes in your life. Listen to the camera shutter click. Become someone else. Click. Become more yourself.
Continue the ritual.
Power blooms inside you. You did this. You summoned this power into being. Deliberately and with intention. It belongs to you and no one gave you permission or approval to have it. Which means no one can take it away from you. Which means here you are, free from curses and uncontrolled. You’ve become dangerous, sweetheart.
That’s my ritual.
❤Katie
20 HOURS TO GO: Jenn Culp Ritual Short
over 6 years ago
– Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 10:40:59 AM
Holy heck. There's only 20 hours left for this Kickstarter. Tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell your grandma!
[Hey, remember how so many Terms of Service agreements for sharing platforms used to say, "Don't post anything you wouldn't want your grandma to see" as some sort of line in the sand regarding what was appropriate content to post? My grandma is 94 years old and she's been seeing my photography for a decade and it's full of naked people and she loves it and respects it. People shouldn't assume you get old and suddenly become completely too pure for nudity, sensuality, and sexuality. Also, did you know the first book I wanted to do was called GRAND and was all about grandmothers? Maybe I'll still do it someday.]
ANYWAY. Back to the matter at hand. With only 20 hours left, we only have two more Ritual Shorts for you. This one is by another contributor to Fiction & Feeling's first book, SPLIT. Jenn Culp is a force and she's powered by rainbows.
☾☾☾
Searing, that’s the word for them, their chroma so vivid it burns the drear away. They hurt a bit exquisitely to look at directly, though not so much as to stare at their source, which literally blinds. I’m no dark witch, they’ve taught me; I can’t read tarot reliably beneath the moon. My magic is borrowed from starlight split asunder by glass, which spills too-briefly across my sight, lighting my soul. My magic is powered by spectra.
There are 1,235 prisms in the windows of my house. I hung them there myself, one by one with copper wire. A handful are actual “prisms.” Most are discount chandelier pieces. One is a submarine periscope component, so powerful I’ve worried it might light the ceiling afire like a blade of dry grass beneath magnification.
I purchased none of the prisms myself. They are all gifts from men: my husband, my father, an eccentric elderly internet friend who enjoys antique small engines and my rainbow photos. I didn’t plan it that way. I didn’t plan it at all. I took them gladly as they arrived and placed each with care, mindful of the weight of an act such as breaking the sun that spills into my space. I rearrange them, sometimes, according to acquisition and preference, always with reverence. I dust them regularly; I would never want to be responsible for dimming the color they cast through an act of neglect.
The prisms themselves are beautiful, but they are tools. They don’t light a room until the sun passes at an optimal angle, forcing photons through the glass that protects me from weather and then the glass that redirects them to form color. They burn through closed eyelids, the rainbows; they dazzle! They’re so beautiful they’re surreal to look upon, but I can touch them, sort of. I imagine I can feel them as they pass across my skin. I know the sensation of green, of indigo. I know the far-beyond-Lisa-Frank-saturated hue of magenta created by the crossing of red and violet—it looks nothing like the dull wax shade Crayola foists upon impressionable children. The color burns, but more gently than the harsh glare of the unfiltered sun. The spectra stain my skin and hair like impossibly bright dye, then they vanish, caressing the walls, floor, and dogs as they pass.
Rainbow Time changes with the seasons, obviously, dependent on the position of the sun. The sacred hour or minutes of its existence provide something of an ungrounding to my days, laying an uncanny celestial aura atop my familiar environs. And yet, it’s also served to tie me more strongly to the earth. I’ve become very aware of the position of my planet in relation to its star since I first hung a prism in a window. I’ve become fascinated with tracking the blooming cycles of nearby plants, feeling a kinship with other entities that blossom under sunlight. I note that the irises in the pond unfurl into the exact shade of violet the prisms paint across my home. The azaleas come closer to emulating true magenta than any other earth-bound object I’ve seen. Yellow is a funny shade. It tries to disguise itself as white when confronted with a phone camera, but the day lilies in the garden manage to match it nonetheless. Like a plant myself, I struggle in mid-winter and hot summer, those times when the sun rides high and my color is scarcest.
“So, the rainbows...what’s that about?” some guy said to me once. “Have you seen them?” I finally responded, incredulous that he would even ask, that anyone would ever assume the miracle of light needs to be “about” anything other than its glorious occurrence every sunny day. It’s “about” color. It’s about connection. It’s about a massive sphere of nuclear-powered plasma reaching nearly ninety-three million miles across the void to touch my home and skin with perfect hue. It’s about the flowers in my garden, the scents and sights that fill my immediate surroundings. It’s about my own mood and mental wellbeing. It’s about beauty and my worship thereof. It’s about energy! It’s about life.
Perhaps he didn’t understand because he was too frightened to look. It’s not safe to stare directly, after all, but I’ve never been afraid. To me, the glow of refracted dispersed starshine is an embrace. My eyes are so grateful for the spectral components of visible light, the manifestation of wavelength, that I cannot help but be awed by the universe in which I exist.
I too am holy when I stand in the colored light, shining and dangerous.
Jennifer Culp is an artist and writer. Her work lives in The Kinsey Institute Gallery's permanent collection, Lark Crafts Ring a Day book, NICHE magazine, Racked, Millihelen, The Hairpin, The Toast, The Mary Sue, The Establishment, the homes of private collectors and friends, and on Instagram. She lives with a man, three dogs, two fish, a tortoise, a wizard in a glass globe, and hundreds of prisms.
☾☾☾
Until next time (which won't be too far away),
❤Katie
48 HOURS LEFT: Sarah Miles Ritual Short
over 6 years ago
– Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 04:24:00 PM
Only 48 hours left of this campaign! Wowza!
Just some admin:
- If you have a question about the Kickstarter, please send me a message as I can't respond to comments and I can't message you if you post a comment!
- To clarify, if you chose a Becoming Dangerous pin, you will choose the gold or silver option when you fill out the backer survey after the campaign ends
- All backers will receive the Becoming Dangerous Mixtape and it's almost ready to be released!
- All backers will also receive the Becoming Dangerous spell booklet, which will go out sometime in November
- All backers who backed at the £15 pledge level or higher will receive the bookplate by Lights
- Silver seem to be the consensus for the book cover, but I'm not convinced. The lines are very fine and silver against black doesn't always stand out the way gold does. But I'm thinking of maybe doing a platinum, which is basically gold and silver together. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And now on to today's Ritual Short, this one coming from Sarah Miles, who I met when I released SPLIT. Rituals are often associated with witchcraft, but to me, a ritual is anything done with purpose and intent, and for Sarah, her ritual is baking.
☾☾☾
I can mostly operate day to day events with a baseline of anxiety, a simple underlying feeling of unease, wrongness, discomfort. I can deal with it, I can pass myself off as an average, basic, fully-functioning human being. However, on the bad days, the mean red days, my anxiety also manifests itself in panic attacks as a soaring white noise, a tumult of blood pulsing in my ear and cracklings just outside of earshot. I become painfully aware of my own heartbeat, the rate of my breathing, the tiny noises of people around me being Perfectly Normal, whilst I most certainly am Not Normal. I have to pace myself, concentrate on breathing, make sure that I’m not moving too fast or too slow, take each step, one by one by one. These small rituals help me get through, but sometimes I need something bigger to maintain the baseline or to stave off the impending hurricane rather than just boarding up the doors and windows. So I bake.
I can cook, that’s fine, throwing together whatever is in the fridge or making something up based on a half-remembered meal in a restaurant once. Baking is different though. Whilst a cake recipe is simply a series of steps, it is also something more to me. A spell if you will, a ritual. You have to follow each step of the process in order, be methodical, reasoned, measured. Literally measured. They say you can’t make am omelette without breaking eggs, and you can’t make a Victoria sponge without measuring out butter, sugar, flour, eggs. Each simple step is a step back from the imagined edge, a step away from fear and panic, into the version of reality that passes for normal to me.
Setting out the items on the worktop in order. Gathering the tools together; bowl, scales, spoons, tins. Making sure the oven is heated to just the right temperature for the perfect rise. Each little step builds upon the last until I have a perfect path to follow, with no need to worry or fear, the knowledge that I am following a guide that keeps the way ahead clear. The utter concentration needed to make sure that everything goes right allows my mind to stay focused while still wandering.
Baking makes me think of standing on a chair next to my mother, I am only five or six and a Walt Disney Jungle Book audiobook is playing on the cassette player atop the fridge freezer. She lets me lick the spoon when we have finished and I’m happy. Baking takes me to my university days, standing in a tiny rented kitchen trying to conjure up weird and wonderful concoctions with flatmates to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, and deadlines met. Baking brings my little nan back to me, not the nan that lives in a care home under sedation to stop her being a danger to herself, but the nan that helped eight-year-old me make tiny butterflies out of cakes, cutting out their middles and filling them with glittery buttercream, replacing the halved tops as their wings. Baking makes me happy, and carefree, and ageless. Baking keeps the wolves from the door.
There is an irony in my baking too, that makes it more than just a recipe and turns it into a spell I can pass to others for happiness, for thanks. I have to be very careful about what I eat for the sake of my physical health, and cakes often just don’t make the cut. I bake to keep myself sane, but also to thank people for putting up with my crazy, my anger, my crying, my anxiety. Once even for my need to sit down in a shop and breathe deeply; in through the nose, out through the mouth, to stop myself collapsing and “making a scene” as they used to say. I’ve found that a lemon drizzle makes a good thank you gift, even if people don’t know that they are being thanked, or what they are truly being thanked for. Giving someone a gift for no reason makes them happy (or suspicious, but I’m afraid that’s their issue to deal with, not mine), and when that gift has taken time and effort, a degree of practise and learned skill, it makes the gift better, it passes on the love that I have imbued into those muffins, those biscuits, that four-tier rice krispie cake covered in sweets and treats. It shows the recipient that someone cares about them, someone loves them, someone is thinking of them. A cake recipe is simply a spell for happiness.
Hailing from the South Coast of England, Sarah Miles has been called a "genius" by Jock, and "almost normal" by a medical professional. She enjoys comics, movies, games (computer and board), books, cakes and the occasional glass of red. She can often be found on twitter spouting random nonsense about all of these things, as well as bemoaning/celebrating living in the middle of nowhere with her cats & her family. In that order.
☾☾☾
Only 48 hours left. Let's do the thing. (The thing is telling everyone we know about this book so it ends on a HIGH NOTE.)
❤Katie
