A Mystery Evening with Michael Kelly Sunday 20 April | 9PM UK / 4PM US Eastern | Online via Zoom Tickets: Free – Donations Welcomed
“What connects an ancient Egyptian mummy, a pocket watch, and Tarot cards?”
Join storyteller and mystery-worker Michael Kelly for an extraordinary evening where time bends, the past echoes, and shadows stir. Time Out of Mind is not your typical magic show—it’s a journey into the uncanny, a tapestry of storytelling, mysterious phenomena, and inexplicable occurrences designed to intrigue, disturb, and delight.
From the dusty tombs of ancient Egypt to the ticking gears of a forgotten watch… from whispered secrets of the Tarot to the subtle signs that something—or someone—may be watching… the story unfolds in strange and unpredictable ways. Piece by eerie piece, you will find yourself drawn into a mystery that spans centuries, where cause and effect twist into a Möbius loop and fate begins to whisper.
As the layers build and the tension rises, you’ll experience a series of strange and unnerving effects—some happening in your own hands, others in your mind. The evening culminates in a jaw-dropping revelation: a long-dead Egyptian priestess seemingly foretells the fate of those gathered tonight.
Is it theatre? Magic? Divination? A séance? Perhaps a little of each… and something more.
This is a live, interactive online experience like no other. Tickets are available on a donation basis—pay what you wish—and places are limited to preserve the intimate, eerie atmosphere.
Prepare for the unexplained. Surrender to the story. And remember: once time is out of mind, anything is possible…
FREE ADMITTANCE TO THE ONLINE PERFORMANCE. EMAIL MICHAEL KELLY AT manxbull@hotmail.com AND I’LL SEND YOU THE LINK.
Magical Visioning with AI: Bringing Inner Worlds to Life
A Six-Week Online Course with Michael Kelly
Begins Saturday 26 April 2025 🕘 9.00 PM UK Time | 🕓 4.00 PM US Eastern Time Weekly for Six Weeks | Live on Zoom £10 per class • or £50 for all six classes in advance
Join Michael Kelly for a groundbreaking six-part online course exploring the fusion of magical symbolism, visionary experience, and cutting-edge AI art tools. This is not just a class in prompt-writing or image generation—it is a full exploration of how AI can be used as a magical mirror, a vehicle of transformation and insight, a tool for decoding visions, and even a collaborator in myth-making.
Whether you’re an experienced practitioner or newly curious, this course offers a clear, structured, and hands-on approach to crafting, interpreting, and working with magical imagery using the power of artificial intelligence.
🔹 Course Breakdown
Each week introduces a new level of depth and application:
Know Your Tools Learn which AI art models best suit magical work, how to craft effective prompts, and how to keep characters consistent across images. Discover LoRAs, model strengths, and prompt-crafting tips from years of experimentation.
Runic Imaging Explore a method of visualizing rune sequences as characters and landscapes, then walk through live demonstrations of this powerful symbolic technique.
Expanding to Other Traditions Apply the same visual principles to Qabalistic, Ogham, and Enochian systems. Learn to use AI chat partners like ChatGPT to build tailored prompts for your magical framework.
Practical Magical Uses Discover how to turn divination readings into immersive visuals, use AI art in pathworking and spirit communication, and deepen your magical workings through experiential imagery.
Reverse Engineering Dream Images Decode dream or visionary symbols back into runes or other magical components, uncovering hidden influences and messages. Includes dreamwork applications.
Myth-Making with AI Partner with AI to create mythic stories and uncover deeper meanings. Let images inspire tales, and tales inspire new streams of visual magic.
💻 Format & Practical Info
Each class runs for at least 1 hour, with up to 2 hours allocated to allow for live Q&A and post-session discussion.
Live demonstrations will be central to each session—you’ll see each magical process unfold in real time.
All sessions are recorded, and the recordings (plus supporting PDFs) will be sent to all ticket holders within 3 days after each class.
If you can’t attend live, you’ll still receive full access to the class recording and materials.
💷 Pricing & Booking
£10 per class (paid individually)
OR £50 total for the full 6-week series (save £10)
To book your place, please email Michael Kelly directly: 📧 manxbull@hotmail.com 💳 Payment via PayPal to the same address.
In the previous article in this series on self-publishing, I showed how to set up your book’s page size, margins and headers and footers so that all would be the right size to go to print. You will now be in the enviable position that everything you see on the pages on your screen as you write them will have exactly the same layout and positioning when printed.
This avoids those awkward errors that can result when resizing pages at a later date, such as when the flow of text positions a new chapter heading at the foot of a page. I have seen this in printed books, and there’s nothing more embarrassing. So if you followed those instructions, you’re already ahead. You can now lay your book out with confidence, you’ll be able to see when you need to put in hard page breaks and so on.
There are one or two other important matters that we need to put in place at this early stage, though. These aren’t quite so critical as the basics of page formatting, and they can be left till later if you prefer, but I always feel better if I can get them in place before I begin filling the pages.
The thing with self-publishing is, you yourself are solely responsible for ensuring that your book contains all of the necessary and expected features. There’s no editor or publisher going to come along and put these in for you before the book goes to print; if you haven’t put them there, they won’t be there at all. And yes, you can get away with that, but nonetheless all of these things will raise eyebrows if they’re missing and it’s good practice to include them.
I’ve put the image from the cover on page 1. This certainly isn’t necessary; sometimes I do this and sometimes I don’t. In this case, the image was a particularly good one, and since it is line art it prints very well in the pages of the book when grey-scaled.
Page 2, being a left-hand page, is left blank. We’ll be talking about these stylistic matters for ease of reading in the next article.
On page 3, we have several important things:
Firstly, it is a Title Page: it gives the title of the book in larger print, followed by the author’s name in slightly smaller print.
Secondly, it credits the artist who created the cover image, and provides a link to her web site. If you have engaged an artist for your cover image, this is good practice and basic courtesy.
Thirdly, it makes a few important acknowledgements of people the author wishes to thank. If you have a lot of these, you may prefer to dedicate a separate page to them.
Now let’s look at the next couple of pages:
On page 4, we find a couple of important things:
There is a list which informs readers of other titles you have available. This can be really valuable. If a reader enjoys this book, they’re quite likely to read more of your writing, so it’s a good idea to point them to it. (We’ll talk more about this in the next article when completing your manuscript.)
Also on page 4 we find a copyright notice. Most people don’t realise that your book is fully protected by international copyright law even if you don’t post a note to explicitly say so. As long as you can prove its first publication was in your name on a certain date (which its publication record on Amazon or Lulu will certainly suffice for), copyright is fully enforceable.
It is nevertheless good practice to actively assert your copyright (providing it is indeed your own work and yours to assert, of course), with with a simple brief statement such as the one on page 4 of the manuscript above, or a fuller one such as appears below. In either case, your rights are fully asserted and protected by law.
On page 5, we have a table of contents. Most readers will expect this, and it’s so easy to create that there is absolutely no good reason for not including one.
In my earliest couple of books, before I really got to grips with the word processor, I simply created it myself when I had finished writing the book; I flipped through, noted down the chapter titles and pages, then typed them up ahead of chapter one.
Now that I know my way around, it is so much easier. From the Insert tab, you can choose to create a table of contents. You then use the text style box to define which text is a heading or a sub-heading, and these will be automatically added to the table each time you right-click upon it and update it. If that sounds like gobbledygook right now, don’t worry, we’ll be going over it in more detail next time.
If you have a table of contents, of course, you’re also going to want page numbers. We prepared for this in the previous article by setting up a footer when defining the page parameters. The footer is the smaller, single line depth text frame you can see at the bottom of each page.
To add a page number to each page, simply click your cursor within the footer frame, then from the Insert tab on the top menu, select Fields from the drop down menu. One of these fields is ‘Page Numbers’: choose that and they’ll appear throughout your document automatically.
Page 6 is blank, then chapter one begins on page 7…
In the next article, we’ll talk about typing up your actual book contents, text styles and formats, titles, and kindred matters; also using the back pages to promote other, related titles.
Over the last few months, I have been working extensively with the runes and in the process have developed new ways of using and interpreting them. One of these realisations and innovations has been how the runes can be used to generate not only divinatory readings, but the themes and life lessons contained in those readings can then be recast as mythic stories, through which the narrative is shaped by the chosen runes, which thread through the story.
Presenting readings as myth means that they can be used as metaphor. Just as the original Norse myths conveyed their teachings and lessons through the metaphorical lens of story, so can these new ones. The value of a story is that as each person reads it or hears it told, they apply it to themselves, and thus the wisdom of the runes, woven throughout the very structure of that story, is profoundly communicated to the reader / listener.
This is the forgotten secret of proper magical / mythic storytelling, which truly brings us closer to the mythic world (which is a real place, make no mistake about that) and communicates its patterns and wisdom to our waking lives. The old storytellers of the Norse and the Celts truly believed that to tell or hear a story was to receive a very real and tangible blessing. Thus we see it expressed in the Havamal:
“Now are the High One’s sayings said in the High One’s hall: Hail the one one who speaks them; Hail the one who knows them; Gain the one who gets them; Hail those who hear them!“
I have written more than 50 mythic stories now using this method, set in the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology; many interweave with the known stories we already possess from the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, or the Sagas; others feature familiar characters and mythic figures; others stand on their own. All are absolutely congruent with the mythology.
Over the past couple of months I have compiled and edited these stories into three published volumes, under the umbrella title Tales of Yggdrasil. The stories are collected in pretty much the order they were written. There are about 200 pages in each volume, which equates to 600 pages of brand new Norse myths. Not fiction; these are most definitely myths.
In addition to the text of the stories, each myth has been illustrated with several pieces of high quality AI artwork, worked and reworked by myself to accurately convey the spirit and essence of each story. Examples can be seen on the book covers pictured at the head of the article, also on the page shown below.
Finally, for those who know their runes, the divinations which gave the myths their shape are included. Following each story is a runic magic square. The top line of each square contains the runes from the divination that communicated the essence of the story from the Mythic World. These runes are then reflected back and forth throughout the square to show how their flows of power interplay to weave a complex reality. These are a great tool for contemplation if you know your runes, and a piece of real magic to marvel at if you don’t.
These three books contain all of the myths my divinations have generated to date. There will be more later in the year, but first I am taking time to apply the same principle to the oghams and am generating fairy tales in the same manner.
The three volumes of ‘Tales of Yggdrasil‘ are available from Amazon in print or Kindle forms in the USA here or in the UK here. Or in deluxe editions with premier paper and colour inks at Lulu here.
Self-publishing is the only available option for many new authors these days. Although it’s fairly easy when you have a bit of experience under your belt, it can be a labyrinthine nightmare when you’re first feeling your way. In this series of mid-week articles, I’ll be sharing many of the tips, tricks and short cuts I have discovered through publishing dozens of books.
I’m going to tackle one topic at a time, so hold your horses if you’re looking for information on cover creation, e-books, art, which services to use, editing, and other such things. We’ll get around to them all.
For this article, before you even begin writing, I’m going to talk about how to format your document in your word processor so that it will all be print-ready from the outset. This will make your life so much easier. And I’m going to talk about a print book first rather than an e-book. In most cases – unless your publication is only pamphlet length – it makes sense to publish for both print and e-book. It doesn’t cost you any more to publish in both formats and it makes more sales possible, so it should be a no-brainer. But I’ve always found it easiest to begin with the print book and you can then adapt your finished book to e-format very quickly and easily indeed.
The first and most important thing you want to do is adjust your word processor’s page size to match the page size of the printed book. You are going to have to do this at some point or another and upload a file of the correct size, otherwise it will be rejected; after all, you couldn’t fit a 3′ X 6′ door into a 4′ X 7′ doorframe or vice versa.
The most common size for a printed book, and the one you will probably use if your book is primarily text rather than an art or photography book, is US trade paperback size, which is 6″ X 9″. Fortunately, it’s a piece of cake to adjust your page to this size. If you’re using MS Word, you’ll find the page size and formatting options under the Layout tab. I use Open Office as my word processor because (a) it’s free; (b) it’s great to use and fully-functioned; (c) it automatically embeds all fonts when producing a PDF (we’ll talk about this in a later blog, but this ability is a big plus).
If you’re using MS Word, you can input the page size in inches, but with Open Office you’ll need to convert to centimetres. In Open Office, you choose the Format tab, then click on the Page option, which will open the following dialogue box, which displays all of the essential settings.
So you can see that the metric equivalent to 6″ X 9″ is 15.24cm X 22.86cm. The page should be portrait orientation by default. This will set the size of your page correctly.
In the highlighted option on the right, you’ll notice that I have set the page layout as mirrored. This means that when you set the margins (in the lower left highlighted section), instead of setting left and right margins, you will be setting inner and outer margins.
This is because in a book, the formatting of left hand pages and right hand pages are not the same; they are mirror images of each other. On a left hand page, the left margin is the outer margin, the one which is at the book edge, and the right hand margin is the inner one, nearest the fold in the centre of the book.
You’ll notice I have set the top, bottom and outer margins all as 2.50cm, a good size. But the inner margin is slightly wide, at 2.80cm. This is to allow for the fold in the centre of the book. In practice, when you open the book carefully to read it, without forcing it enough to break the spine, the pages will still look equal, as the extra on the inner margin takes the printed text out of the central fold. It’s a small point, but makes a world of difference to the reading experience and aesthetic quality of the book.
On the same menu, you can choose the Footer tab, which will allow you to display page numbers at the bottom of the page (I’ll discuss exactly how to do this in the next midweek blog). You can also choose to have a Header at the top of the page if you wish (not so crucial as page numbers; sometimes I do this, sometimes I don’t – it depends on the book).
That is all it takes to set up your page format so that you can begin typing and getting that masterwork written.
You do have the option of going into these menus and changing these values at any time, of course. So if you have already finished your manuscript in A4 or Letter paper size, you can reset the page size and the text will all flow into its new configuration. But this will, of course, drastically alter your page count and any carefully constructed page layouts you had made. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s so much easier to set the pages before you start, then you can see the exact space you’re working in.
Next time I’ll look at some of the other essentials you really need to include in your manuscript before self-publishing.
2017 … That’s when I last used this blog. It’s just a tad of a long time, isn’t it? Especially considering my intention was always “Oh, I’ll get around to it next week…”
Well, here I am again at last. So what’s brought me back? I haven’t been idle in the intervening time, and there’s so much that I need an outlet for. I have published more books than I can count in that six years, writing an incredible word count without cease. And as every author knows, when your new creation sees the light of day, you want nothing more than to talk about it. So you’ll find plenty here in the weeks and months to come about writing: both my own writings and the writing process itself. I guess I’m a really old hand at the whole business of writing books of many genres and styles and self-publishing them by now. And I know there are plenty of people navigating those waters who would like some advice from an old hand. How do you engage readers? What is your own writing style and how do you find it? How do you format your MS for publication anyway? Why is cover creation so difficult? how do I market this thing when it’s finally done? Welcome to the place you will find out.
I have had considerable success – and international acclaim – as a performing magician, specialising in storytelling and spookier themes. I have also had considerable experiences of the trials of the post-Covid world, with closures of venues, difficulties with getting hired in a time of evaporating budgets, and the headaches of going it alone. If you’re a performer of any description, you’ll find a sympathetic ear here and a place to discover how someone else tiptoes through the minefield.
I will shortly be offering esoteric courses, most specifically in divination and fortune-telling to begin with, and I’ll be talking about those here, a place where I can talk about them in more detail and let people know what they’re really all about.
And I will definitely be sharing things here that you absolutely will not find anywhere else. With a real sense of humility, I have begun to realise just how many decades of experience in all of these things I have, and just how valuable that is. I’ll share much of that here, as well as point to where you can get more on specific subjects.
You can also expect book reviews, film reviews, music reviews, and course reviews, because our own creativity is very much shaped by and beholden to the creative efforts of others who inspire us. The very least we can do is acknowledge and be thankful for that inspiration.
I want to keep this introductory post short, just to let people know this blog is up and running again and I have very big plans for us. I’ll be posting twice weekly, at weekends and mid-week. The weekend post will generally be sharing something I’ve done or am doing; the mid-week one will be more advice and inspiration oriented. Neither will ever be dull!
Some while ago, whilst listening to The Mystic Menagerie Podcast, co-presenter Dan Baines mentioned an article he had discovered in the May 1921 edition of The Occult Review, which made mention of a very curious book. This issue of The Occult Review may be read here, but the pertinent passage is quoted below:
“On April 3 last, at Kingston-on-Thames, there passed away Mr. John Herbert Slater, a writer better known to the book collector than either to the occultist or the man-in-the-street. He was, however, the author of an interesting work entitled Problems of the Borderland, which certainly deserves a greater popularity than it has ever obtained. Probably most of those who knew Mr. Slater as the author of Book Prices Current and Engravings and Their Value, little suspected that this kindly and genial gentleman was deeply interested in occult research, and in especial a keen student of the philosophical side of occultism. Problems of the Borderland claims to be “a summary of some of the elementary teachings of a very ancient faith, which, though not generally known, have nevertheless been preserved to us, to some extent at least, by the writings of mediaeval and later adepts, and also by tradition.” A perusal of the book, which still remains at the original price of 3s. 6d. net, is well worth the while of every serious student of the occult.”
Dan, whose blog may be read here and is always a treasure trove of material on fairy lore, the supernatural, and all things weird and wonderful, had managed to get hold of a copy of this old book and had discovered that it seemed to exhibit strange properties, such as completely vanishing for a while, only to later reappear in a room where it had never been.
Intrigued, I determined to hunt down a copy myself. It wasn’t easy and it certainly wasn’t cheap. I could find only two copies for sale online worldwide, and at prices close to three figures. I ordered the one which promised to be in best condition and sat back to await its arrival.
When I received it, the book was indeed in good condition for its age. Nevertheless, the paper was so old and brittle that the pages literally cracked as I turned them, no matter how carefully. This rare book could so easily become rarer still. So the question became, was it worth preserving?
The answer is a definite Yes! The book is not quite what I expected it to be upon ordering, but it has a quaint, antique charm all its own in its use of language and its notions. But it certainly deserves to survive and to be read by a new generation of readers.
To get the negatives out of the way first, it is most definitely old-fashioned in both its language and its attitudes. Some of the sentences are so tortuous, lasting entire paragraphs. But this is a feature of its time and those occult readers who have read the writings of many of the Golden Dawn or Theosophical luminaries will have struggled through much, much worse. The book also contains a strongly ascetic tone which is at odds with my own conception, but this too comes with the territory.
What this book has to offer are some insights into the fourth dimension, its nature and its influence, and the ways in which we humans interact with it, which are quite unique in their thought and nuance in my experience. The author’s speculation upon spirits and the means by which they may influence and manifest, through to actual materialisation, is also one of the most thorough and rational discussions I have read on the subject.
So there is plenty of gold to be mined from this source, and it is a damn shame that so few people have ever read it and that it looked as though it would in all likelihood vanish altogether. For this reason, I decided to republish Problems of the Borderland, and it is now available on Amazon and Lulu for considerably less than Dan and I paid for it.
There is no ebook version, as this simply felt completely inappropriate for this title to me.
The Amazon edition can be obtained through these links for the USA or the UK.
So… I wrote a new book, my third book about runes. The first, Aegishjalmur: The Book of Dragon Runes, taught a curriculum of the Elder Futhark of 24 runes, tying them in with my Apophis programme of Draconian Magic: Norse dragon lore, best in the world! The second of my runic titles was Runes of Mann, which was a catalogue of the runic monuments on the Isle of Man, my home, together with a few brief suggestions for their practical use. The new book, Runes of the Valiant, is a more thorough account of the theory and practice of the Younger Futhark, the 16 rune row which was used by the Norse settlers on the Isle of Man.
This is a very personal and meaningful project for me, a chance to take all of the lore and practice I have acquired over the years and apply it to the specific runes used by my own ancestors, because there is actually quite a philosophical and pragmatic leap in the transition from the Elder Futhark to the Younger, which occurred at the dawn of the Viking Age.
Before a rune worker can make the shift from the Elder rune row to the Younger, he / she must address several fundamental questions and deduce satisfactory answers for them, in order to understand the new dynamic behind both the philosophy and the base meanings of the runes:
Why was the 24 rune Elder Futhark reduced to the 16 rune Younger Futhark?
What became of the ‘missing’ eight runes? Are they to be ignored, or were they combined with other runes?
How did the ancient runemasters decide which eight runes to condense?
Why sixteen runes specifically? Why not some other number?
Have the meanings of the remaining runes changed to accommodate the reduction of the rune row?
These questions are all addressed in the pages of Runes of the Valiant, together with considerations of updated models of cosmology and so forth, based upon the new arrangement. Specific practical methods of using the Younger rune row are then presented.
The Isle of Man is a place which the Northmen did not simply raid. Instead, they chose to settle here, establishing themselves as Lords of the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles, intermarrying with the existing Celtic population and establishing a rich mixed heritage. Nevertheless, when speaking of Manx heritage, the Celtic is often emphasised at the expense of the Norse, ignoring the richness of the intermingling. The Norse heritage is still represented in the many carved runic memorial stones; the burial sites; the place names; and of course – most powerfully – in the Manx bloodline itself.
It is my hope that this book will give that heritage a new lease of life, perhaps stimulating some to Seek after the Mysteries their forefathers sought.
As a self-published author, I go where the readers are. Which means, of course, that my prime medium for sales is Amazon, with their CreateSpace publishing arm for paperback books, and Kindle for ebooks.
Now a lot of authors knock Amazon, but I never have and I’m not going to now. Certainly, they’re not perfect and some of their policies regarding reviewing and so forth have caused considerable frustration and upset to some friends of mine. But when it comes to getting books in the hands of readers as quickly and as cost effectively as possible, they really can’t be faulted. And that’s what it’s all about. An author should never forget that a good service is a service that’s good to the reader, and readers love Amazon.
Their pricing and royalty rates are pretty good too. They’re not the best that are available to self-published authors, but they’re plenty good enough. The quality of their printed books is high also. Probably 95% of my book sales are made through Amazon and it’s a working relationship I am very happy with.
But if people ask me where they can get hold of my books, I often direct them towards Lulu. This is because I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Lulu, for the following reasons.
They were one of the pioneers of self-publishing, one of the very first companies to say, “Hey, authors should be able to publish and market their own books!” I admire that pioneering spirit, that visionary zeal, so all my books still have a presence there. Indeed, Lulu is usually the first place that a new book of mine will appear.
Lulu are good to authors. Their royalty percentage is very good, higher than Amazon’s, so I get a little extra every time someone buys from Lulu.
Lulu are good to readers. There is ALWAYS some sale, discount, free shipping or other special deal going on. Discounts of 20% – 30% are quite common. If you’re planning to buy, always check Lulu’s home page for their current deals and grab yourself one. If there’s not one that meets your needs, come back the week after and there probably will be! You can save big time if you buy using Lulu’s regular discount codes.
This one’s a biggie for me: Lulu publish hardbacks, but Amazon don’t. My own shelves creak under the weight of beautiful hardback editions of all my books (and they really are beautiful quality books). So if you want the best possible quality edition, you can only get it from Lulu.
The only things I don’t do on Lulu are ebooks. The advantages offered by Amazon for exclusivity in their Kindle Select programme are too good to be ignored, for myself and readers alike: all of my Kindle titles are free to read for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
But if you’re looking to buy a print book, take a look at Lulu. You’ll also find a whole load of titles there that simply aren’t available anywhere else, so take your time and browse.
Lulu’s home page can be found here, where you will find details of their current deals and discounts, with codes. And my own Lulu author pages can be found here (hint, hint, wink, wink).
I performed my second bizarre magic show this weekend. Once again, it was a great evening, and once again I learned from the experience and have made adjustments to improve the next show. It was very well attended, much more than I expected. Indeed, the function room was almost full. My heartfelt thanks to all who came to support the evening.
But … Why am I doing this? I know that there are people wondering why, after all these years, I have started performing magic?
It’s actually an interest I have had for a long time. I have always been fascinated with myth and magic and have a library full of books on these subjects. I have been buying props and routines for stage magic for approximately eight years, delighting in discovering how the effects work, and learning just how much of the impact of magic is due to the creation of a powerful atmosphere, achieved by drawing the audience in with an evocative story.
I am, first and foremost, a storyteller. I love to craft stories and characters and write novels about them, drawing readers into the world I have created. But bizarre magic performance offers me a new and more immediate opportunity: the ability to tell stories expressively to an audience and gauge their reaction in real time. It is a very satisfying and immersive kind of storytelling. The kind of supernatural themes that run throughout bizarre magic performance suits my style also: tales of spirits, hauntings, curses and murders.
That’s all very well, so why not just tell stories? Why bother with the magic? This is simply answered. Doesn’t a film benefit from special effects? The ‘trick’ is the punchline to the story, the clincher that makes the audience go wow, or sends a chill down their spine, or simply say, “How the hell did he do that?” Tricks occasionally fail, of course, and for various reasons, not all of them preventable. Sometimes I may become so engrossed in my tale that I forget to set up the trick properly; sometimes an audience volunteer may simply forget the thing they had to remember in order for the result to manifest. Each show so far has had one or two routines that haven’t gone completely to plan. But that’s okay, so long as the remaining 80 – 90% do work out. And even the ones that don’t have their ‘special effect’ work quite as it should are still appreciated for their most important element: a damn good story. I will, of course, keep aiming for a completely flawless show, but I won’t lose any sleep when things go wrong.
There’s another element to consider too. The ‘trick’ isn’t the real magic of the performance. The true magic is the stimulation of the audience members’ imaginations through the stories told, and the awakening of their sense of wonder. This is real magic: for them to leave thinking the world is a little bit stranger and more wonderful than it was when they came in.
manxbull 