UPDATE

It has been a while since I posted on The Buddha Diaries.  I have been much occupied elsewhere, principally with the promotion of the new novel and with the associated blog.  Still, though I have remained largely silent on the blog, I have been keeping up with my meditation practice.  If nothing else, it helps with the sanity.  Given the competition out there, with thousands of new books showing up on the Internet every week, I could easily go crazy if I get too attached to the book's "success."  And meditation helps let go of the attachment.  Eventually, of course, the book will sink or swim on its own merits.  If enough people read it, like it, and pass on the word, I'll get some readers.  If not, not.

As if the PR activity weren't enough, I'm already embarked on that I hope will be a sequel to The Pilgrim's Staff.  Tentatively, I'm thinking that it might be called "David: Self Portraits."  Plural, because I plan to explore some of the many selves of David, the artist/primary narrator of the earlier book.  If you haven't read it (yet!) he's a painter and a blogger.  His "Studio Notes" is a (fictional) blog in which he examines his life, his work, his relationships.  Now (fictionally) he has decided to do what he refuses to call an autobiography--too pompous! too literary!--and instead thinks of as a series of self-portraits, of the kind he has made numerous times on paper and on canvas.

Thus far, I'm having fun with it.  And am learning more about this guy with every page.  One of the dangers of The Pilgrim's Staff is that it reads like autobiography, and people who know me tend to read me into my "characters."  And it's true, both of these men have a great deal in common with myself, my own background, my own experiences.  And yet they're "not me."  This David, further examining himself, is in the same way "me" and "not me."

I come back to that mantra that I love so much: "This is not me, this is not mine, this is not who I am..."

With metta for all, PC