Hi friends!

If you haven't seen the original post for the Psychic Witch readalong, you can find that .

Throughout the year, I will post the schedule for upcoming reading and which exercises to do. There will be a channel in the Discord () where we will discuss week to week, and then we will have occasional scheduled live chats as well as an end of book discussion.

This readalong has been a learning process, as it seems like most people participating, myself included, are having a hard time finding the time to do the exercises. I am also reading this in-person with two friends and we have adapted the schedule to do more of the exercises in person, as that forces us to set aside time to it.

Together, we did the Tuning In exercises 12-17 as well as Closing Down exercises 19-22. In our discussion, we found that we wanted to adapt some of the exercises to fit better with how we each individually visualize things, so we will be doing that alone over the next few weeks when we do this exercise sequence, as well as completing exercise 18: Setting a Psychic Prompt, as that is an individual exercise. In particular, the Centering and Entering Alpha exercises are the ones we plan to adapt and I will write about that more here in coming posts.

Please complete this sequence yourself if you haven't already.

Next up is Chapter 4: Extrasensory Perception.

For this, we will be starting with Clairvoyance and reading up to exercise 29. In person, my small group will be completing all the clairvoyance exercises up through 29 on May 3rd, so plan to complete all of those exercises by that time. After that, we will be moving onto the Clairtangency exercises, and I will create a post then with the schedule for those.

Looking forward to talking to you all more about this on Discord! We've discussed the possibility of meeting via Discord voice in order to do these exercises together like I am doing with the in-person group, so if that interests you, please let me know :)

APRIL PROMPT: 

We have to answer an important question for your character - what pet do you have!?

Originally, I was only going to have a few options with prompts for those specific options but I'd like you to be able to choose whichever animal you see fit (real or otherwise). So for this prompt:

Choose a book with your pet of choice on the cover! 

You can access the character sheet to edit via Canva:

Also, Bethany has posted another template in the Discord that shows all the book covers for prompts that coordinates with the character sheet so join us there if you haven’t already!

(Note: If you are reading this later: you can still catch up! You don't have to read a prompt each month, that's just how they are being released. You can catch up on prompts at any time, you just can't use the same book for multiple prompts!)

xoxo Sam

p.s. if you're interested in switching over to the Bindery community, check out the offerings here:

EDIT: So turns out when I made the character sheet (I vaguely remember this actually because I realized your character should probably have a job before we worry about the pet lol), I swapped around what months would be what prompts and didn't update it in Notion, which is where I pull from for the posts every month.... OOPS! So - you can still do the pet prompt if you have picked a book and you're excited for it but here is the job prompt as well. You pick whichever one you'll do now and then November will be the other prompt so you'll see a similar post to this one when November comes around :) I'm doing this so that we don't have to shift the entire character sheet around!

So: JOBS!

• Farmer - the classic cozy game profession - read a book with green on the cover

• Shop Owner - you curate the perfect items for the town's people - read a book you physically own

• Healer - you cure the town's ailments - read a slump curing book (whatever that means to you)

• Chef - you spread love through food - read a book primarily while cooking or eating (you don't have to exclusively read while cooking or eating but use audiobooks if that's easier and make sure you read instead of scrolling on your phone while eating :))

Allow me to set the stage:

It's the end of February. I'm visiting Mari in Florida. Trump has been in office for over a month and every day is a chaotic hellscape of information. Billionaire tech bros are trying to form an oligarchy. And I have insomnia. So what do I do? I start spiraling about Amazon specifically.

I have not engaged with anything Musk owns in years. Never been a fan of that melting wax statue of a man, and as soon as he bought Twitter and started running it into the ground, I was no longer on the platform. I deleted all of my former tweets and my account at the beginning of the year when they announced they'd be using tweets to train AI.

I begrudgingly still interact with some Meta platforms, specifically IG, because it is the only app of it's kind at the moment. I am patiently waiting for BlueSky to create an alternative, which they've announced they are working on.

But Amazon.... Amazon felt like a hard one. But it was 3am, I couldn't sleep, and I was mad.

So I looked at my account and realized that most of my Amazon purchases were for convenience. Most of my Amazon purchases were pharmacy-type items, like skincare and vitamins. And many of my purchases were due to poor planning where I needed something overnight because I ran out.

None of these things were things I NEEDED from Amazon specifically. And I needed to force myself out of my convenience bubble. So I cancelled my Prime membership. The customer service rep originally said they couldn't refund me for the months I hadn't used, but I knew from checking forums that they could, so speaking to a manager got it cancelled and my remaining months refunded :)

Since then, I have just planned for things the same way I did before I had Amazon and got used to the convenience - and it hasn't even been that hard! Most items you can still get online directly from the companies that sell them for shipping that isn't even much longer. It also prevents impulse purchases, like thinking I need something RIGHT NOW when I really don't.

I haven't gotten books from Amazon for some time, so that didn't change at all and I support my local indies. Wellness items like vitamins I can get from the local pharmacy and even have them delivered. Skincare items I can get for much cheaper from Korean websites (I mostly use Korean skincare), I just have to plan to order in advance because of the shipping times. Other items I try to find locally and just have to make the effort, but that also cuts down on me getting things that I mayyyyybe don't need.

It is hard to divest from Amazon completely. I recently read How to Resist Amazon and Why, and that book goes into all the different ways that Amazon is EVERYWHERE. But every little bit still counts. There may be a few things I'll still need to get from Amazon - for example, a lot of coloring book companies I enjoy print through Amazon as it's more cost effective than trying to print in bulk themselves. But for things I can get anywhere else, I will be.

Have you also stepped back from Amazon? Let me know how it's going!