Turn, Turn, Turning in a New Direction

We're launching a second channel!

To everything, there is a season, and as we look from the slowest part of winter toward spring, I'm very excited to announce a corresponding evolution here at God of the Desert Books. After nearly seven months of success with the God of the Desert Books Substack, our company is pleased to launch a second channel - a new imprint - spearheaded by me. I invite you to come check out the new Goddess of the Desert Books Substack!

This new space will still celebrate spirituality and faith, explore culture, examine mental health topics, and shine a spotlight on both the beautiful and the difficult moments of life - but we'll be doing it a little differently. The God of the Desert - the God of Israel - is swift, severe, opinionated, and even wrathful. The Goddess of the Desert, is, well, not. She's gentle. She's soft. She's understanding.

Unlike our flagship publication, Goddess of the Desert is not named after a specific eponymous figure. Rather, the name was chosen to celebrate the spirit, residing in all of us, who tends and nurtures even the most barren environments, even the most challenging life circumstances, and is rewarded with value, joy, and beauty. The Goddess of the Desert is the spirit I invoke every day - this is the energy I want to breathe in and radiate out.

When I explained to David that I didn't feel represented by his aggressive, often confrontational subject matter and blogging style, he urged me - yet again - to balance him out by contributing more of the kind of content that I'd like to see. We've been trying it that way for awhile, now, but I recently decided that the best way to "balance out" this radically political, ruthlessly personal, and righteously angry content is to provide an alternative to them.

And Dave wholeheartedly agreed! It was time to make a change. It was time to provide content by and for a different audience. And it was way past time for me to focus more on life's positives - they're everywhere!

You see, I thought there must be other potential readers like me - and I knew there were other writers and artists who felt the way I did. Goddess of the Desert takes a kinder touch. We aim to focus more on our blessings than on the grievances of the world. We want to make the world a kinder, gentler place through our choices to see it that way. We are unapologetic enjoyers of life, through the good times and the bad, and we want to celebrate the exquisite range of experiences that make up the human experience.

And, I mean, sometimes I just want to write about plants, you know? Or tea. Or meditation. Which of the newest historical fiction offerings are most engrossing. The ways in which British chick-lit of the late '90s warped my dating expectations. Or chocolate.

Maybe sometimes you just want to read about that stuff, too. Goddess of the Desert will be a place to do that.

You can expect to come across all kinds of features on our Substack! We're looking to run:

Personal essays

Poetry

Mystical, spiritual content

Short stories

Pop culture commentary

Photography

Podcasts

Cooking and food-related content

and a bunch of other things that I haven't thought of yet, but that will be positive, affirming, and fun.

David and I share a deep love of 1960s music, and one of our favorite songs is "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season)," by the Byrds. In writing and arranging it, Pete Seeger crafted a masterpiece, but it's no surprise that a piece whose lyrics are taken mainly from the lyrics of 3 Ecclesiastes, that immortal source of wisdom, would have such staying power. And it's due to our appreciation of this wisdom that David and I understand there's "a time of love, a time of hate, a time of war, a time of peace." One of the reasons we make such a good time is our innate enjoyment of our ability to balance each other out.

I hope that, when it's your time for love and peace, you'll come check out Goddess of the Desert! Launching the first week of February, we aim, at first, to publish on Wednesdays and Saturdays. We'll let you know when we're live! And please, feel free to email me at sallyshideler at live dot com if you have submissions you'd like to have considered!

In the meantime, your content at God of the Desert Books will continue: I will pivot from Managing Editor to Associate Editor and occasional contributor. David and some of your other regular God of the Desert writers there will make occasional appearances at Goddess, too. But if what we want is to bring readers the kind of content - and writers the kind of exposure - that they want, we realize our best bet is to provide two channels for this.

Happy reading - and stay tuned!