Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss

Author:Robert Moss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library

GAME #8. NOTICE WHAT’S SHOWING THROUGH A SLIP

It’s a game I find fun and helpful almost every day: notice what’s showing through a slip. By playing this game, I found a dream editor and the wonderful publishing house that has brought this book, and five before it, into the world. I told the story in the acknowledgments to the first of my books published by New World Library, but it belongs here as well.

I had just devoted an hour on my radio show to the theme of “three ‘only’ things,” the notion that we have three wonderful resources for guidance and everyday magic that we tend to dismiss as “only” this or that, by saying (for example) that a dream is “only” a dream, or that a moment when the universe gets personal is “only” coincidence, or that a flash of inspiration is “only” imagination.

The show went very well, and I had a strong urge to reach out to someone in publishing immediately and propose a book on this theme. When I picked up the phone, I intended to call a senior editor at a major New York publishing house with whom I had worked before. On a sudden instinct, I looked up the number for an editor with a smaller house on the West Coast.

Her name was Georgia Hughes, and she was the editorial director for New World Library, an independent publisher based in Novato, California. Up to this point, I had communicated with Georgia only by letter and email. First contact was made when she approached me for an endorsement of a fine book on Celtic tradition, Frank MacEowen’s The Mist-Filled Path. Later I had emailed Georgia to advocate Wanda Burch’s beautiful book She Who Dreams.

I did recall a dream from many years before in which it seemed that a woman called Georgia — who appeared in an American Indian setting but was not herself Native American — was playing a very important and positive role in my publishing life. I found the number for New World Library. A robot voice guided me through the in-house directory, which eventually revealed Georgia’s extension. I punched it in, expecting to get voice mail. After all, she was the editorial director of the house, and such people tend to be very busy and not often — if ever — available to first-time callers.

Georgia answered her own phone and greeted me warmly when I said my name. She spoke to me as if we were old friends, referring to a recent phone conversation.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, puzzled. “We’ve never spoken on the phone, though we did trade some pleasant emails.”

“Of course we’ve talked on the phone. You told me about your vacation.”

“Do you know who this is?”

“Absolutely! You’re Robert Moss. You’re the author we are publishing.”

“That is amazing. I’m calling to discuss a book you may want to publish, but in my reality, you haven’t even heard about it yet.”

There was a short pause on the phone. Then Georgia realized she had confused me with another author, Richard Moss.

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