“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last Wednesday, July 5, we mailed Emir to Eleanor Friede at Delacorte. This morning Eleanor called Jane to say that she “loved it,” and made a Jane a firm offer for its publication. Jane accepted the offer. Eleanor is to call again Friday after conferring the production manager about costs, etc., but in the meantime is preparing contracts. The production manager has the script with him in Albany, New York.

(At about the same time Emir was mailed, Jane sent Richard Bach “a crazy poem” that she’d written a couple of days earlier. Sunday, Richard called us from either Nevada or California. He gave Jane the excellent news that wherever he went the Seth books were known, and that Jane truly was changing our society through her work. This sort of news always surprises us, I guess, because we must be more isolated than we know; also, the sales aren’t all that great, so I always wonder just what the person bases such statements on when making them. But Dick’s message was certainly a heartening one, and one I’d say that Jane could really use to good effect.

(I had three questions for Seth. 1: Jane’s weight, which I’d realized recently, had dropped without my noticing it. Seth’s recent remark, that she was beginning to gain weight again, had alerted me to it, although I’d noticed in recent weeks that Jane was much too thin—when I helped her put on a shirt, take a bath, etc. 2: What’s going on generally with her, physically, or as Jane put it “Why is it—her recovery—taking so long?” 3. At least a few words from Seth generally on the whole Emir thing.)

Ruburt’s impulse to take Emir from Prentice—his impulse to call others, his call to Eleanor—all of these events represent a change of mood, and inner decisions of which Ruburt is not as yet aware.

He is moving out of one house. He is no longer on dead center, wondering what kind of treatment he might receive at another house—and so he is moving at important psychological levels. He was willing to take a chance, therefore he was not quite as determined upon safety above all. He allowed the impulse to surface initially, and then he allowed himself to act upon it, in a sense “throwing caution to the wind.” That is, he was not going to have Emir cut in two, period, even if it meant, as he hoped it would not, that he must ship it around to many other places.

So the affair with Eleanor is significant, particularly since the book was assured publication with Prentice. He has been concerned about Emir.