The days after a warm sunny Memorial Day, it is misty grey and cool in NYC where I sit in the Milburn Hotel on the upper West Side. I love this unpretentious place of small suites with little kitchenettes, and just around the corner from NY’s famous Fairway Market, a cornucopia of fruits and veggies, deli and all things edible.
Yesterday I got together for lunch with D, who I had met via an online dating site. (Very pretty, super nice, smart, funny and down-to-earth … wow). Tonight I’m taking her out to dinner at a cool place right on Central Park … should be fun. But enough about my social life. The main reason I am in NY is to attend the Book Expo of America, one of the two largest book publishing trade shows in the world.
Over the years, so many Tarot.com and I-Ching.com users have asked if they could get my version of the I-Ching in book form. So, my agent and I will be hobnobbing with the large publishing houses of the world, here in the publishing capital of the world, about my next book which is the text and art of the Oracle of Changes, or the I-Ching feature that you can enjoy on Tarot.com.
It all started in 1988 when I was inspired to create a software version of the I Ching for Macintosh computers, which I produced and named “Synchronicity.” I had always loved software for the wizardry of the way that code could be turned into interactive experiences (like games) and I revered the I Ching for the way it had helped me stay out of trouble for some 20 years at that point. Discovering the intersection between two things I loved — software and divination — and developing something new from that, was the innovation that I was blessed to be able to pioneer for the world.
Of course, at the time I did not have the rights to the text of any of the many versions of the I Ching that were out in book form. Ever the irrepressible inventor, I decided to write my own fresh new version, with the help of a talented fellow author who served as my ghost-writer. The idea was to come up with a modern I Ching that was poetic and lighthearted, more Taoist than Confucian, non-militaristic and non-sexist. The fact that we succeeded at meeting these criteria is the reason so many Tarot.com users have asked for a print version over the years. And now it is going to happen!
On to the interesting challenge of finding a publisher. I’ll keep you posted.
