Nova Scotia astrologer and spiritual counselor Deborah Young launches her first novel, Gabriel’s Great Perhaps, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 7 to 8 p.m., with a Facebook Live event.
Nova Scotia-based astrologer, writer and spiritual counselor Deborah Young found writing a novel to be the bravest thing she’s ever done.
This after travelling much of the world, experiencing the death of close family members as a child and working for over 29 years to help people, many of whom have suffered trauma.
Young did not plan to write a book. This fantasy novel about querulous and highly disparate souls needing to work together to save a troubled Earth entered her mind and her dreams unbidden.
“I was gazing lightly out the dining room window early evening and these visions started coming to me,” says the Halifax writer and “voracious” reader in a phone interview. “They felt like they were being given to me.”
She had dreams about her characters’ lives. “I felt this bone-deep commitment to show up at the computer and start writing.”
Young launches her first novel, Gabriel’s Great Perhaps, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 7 to 8 p.m., with a Facebook Live event (Facebook.com/GabrielsGreatPerhaps). Her son, Toronto actor/ screenwriter Joshua Young, facilitates a Q&A.
Young compares her experience of writing to the archetypal story pattern of The Hero’s Journey, which she uses in her practice. “You are called out to do something; you find yourself in a strange land; you encounter monsters.
”I had to get out of my own way to write. I couldn’t push the storytelling but I had to show up and give it my energy. I have a lot of people who say: How can I begin writing? And I say, show up.”
Gabriel’s Great Perhaps is about seven people who have just died and are brought to a transitory, celestial realm, including The Great Unnamed Room, by a navigator-angel Gabriel, “not the Gabriel” as he must tell everyone.
Gabriel has a crucial mission for the seven to save the Earth but, as they are from vastly different religious and cultural backgrounds, they must first learn how to get along.
Young’s characters include Susan, the out-there, 62-year-old New Ager and painter of fairies; Khalid, a Muslim comedian; Reinhardt, a stern, German, Buddhist environmentalist, loosely based on Young’s German partner; Joshua, a 35-year-old obnoxious, American atheist, and Alter, an elderly Jewish man from the Jewish ghetto of 1600s Venice.
This book is full of confrontation, humour and the serious issues in life (and death) with an ultimate, uplifting message about the importance of love and unity in diversity.
“To me astrology at its best is a celebration of humanity and diversity,” says Young.
The life-long astrologer encountered the spirit world as a small child in rural Prince Edward Island.
“I grew up in a house that was haunted and there was a lot of death around me. My grandmother was a visionary; it was normal to talk about your dreams at breakfast.”
Her father, aunt and grandparents died before she was four. “In terms of spirits coming to me that happens,” she says.
For the last 29 years Young has operated a busy practice of teaching, leading workshops, writing popular posts and “translating the language of Astrology and other esoteric teachings to help people make sense of the world.” She has a waiting list of clients are from all over the world.
What she loves most about her work is “helping” people, “liberating them from a pattern or a perception about themselves and the world, helping them to a radical acceptance of themselves. I do a lot of work with trauma. That piece of radical acceptance is very key.”
Young started writing Gabriel’s Great Perhaps six years ago. “I was unaware how aligned the story would be with today’s challenges of religious, racial divisions, disintegration of our environment, global disruptions and loss of human heart,” she says, in a press release. “Have heart, there is a way through this grand upheaval.”
Gabriel’s Great Perhaps is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.ca/Gabriels-Great-Perhaps-Deborah-Young/dp/1777103304
For more information got to: GabrielsGreatPerhaps.com
Follow #DeborahYoung #GabrielsGreatPerhaps socially on:
Facebook: Facebook.com/GabrielsGreatPerhaps
Twitter: Twitter.com/DeborahYAuthor
Instagram: Instagram.com/deborahyoungauthor
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NS reviews 
Congratulations Deborah on your Book!!!
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