This was intended to be a much more in-depth look at the realms covered by my previous book Inventing Reality: Towards a Magical Technology: namely the relationships between skills, science, technology and magic. It was 'temporarily' shelved about one-third the way through the first draft in 1989, when I moved from continent to continent to continent in rapid succession, and never quite got round to picking it up again. It's probably worth finishing sometime... any publishers interested, let me know!
This is something like Version 3 of a book - or at least a theme - that I've been working with on and off all my life. (Bits of this general theme have appeared in most of my writings in one way or another, of course: a recent example has been the section on the 'technology of wyrd' added recently to the Wyrdsmiths site.) This particular version was planned as a joint project with my colleague Cindy Pavlinac, in Marin County, California. Cindy had (has!) a great deal of expertise as an editor and as a researcher into the development of intuitive skills: it seemed a useful synergy for both of us, and Cindy had intended to include some of her own work and experience in shamanic practice. But although she did help a lot with the planning and early review stages, Reality Department intervened in the form of the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service, which decided that I'd visited the States a bit too long for their liking, and sent me on my way! It was kind of difficult to work on a joint project when I didn't even know which country I was supposed to be living in... So we shelved the project, and never quite got round to taking it back off the shelf again.
This is another project in which I based the structure round the 'skills-learning' model of the labyrinth: each chapter is either a circuit of the seven-turn, single-path labyrinth, or one of its transition-points. As a model it works quite well; what didn't work so well was my attempt to use pendulum-dowsing ('the inner clock') as an example of a practical intuitive skill - the book fell apart when I tried to expand that, which was another reason why we chose to abandon it for a while.
Looking at the project again more than a decade later, it still seems quite useful, if a bit forced in places. The three full chapters that are complete (other than for the still-missing illustrations) do work quite well; even more useful, perhaps, is the Glossary section, as the definitions and descriptions still seem to me be the some of the clearest and 'cleanest' around in this difficult and often highly ambiguous field.
Over to you: comments/brickbats much appreciated!