Year End

My poor neglected blog - I've been so busy lately that I haven't posted here regularly, not to mention my even more deprived music blog, Fleur D'Amour. It's one of my main New Year's resolutions to get back to both of them. I love posting here, just haven't been able to organize my thoughts for anything longer than a Twitter post lately.

I finally finished moving and painting, and my room looks great. There is some minor cleanup to do putting some office supplies and clothes away, but I'll take care of that this weekend. I'll take pictures and post when I am done, because the room really does look cool. It took a lot of effort to update it but it was worth it. It's a really good synthesis of where I am now combined with elements from my past, both from my family and the life I've lived since I left home. I also managed to include markers from the many distinct phases I have gone through in my own aesthetic development - all in one room!

I plan to do a lot of general wrap-up and organizing over the next few weeks. I've also been neglecting my Etsy shop and I need to reevaluate it. With this poor economy entrenched for the long haul, I'm going to lower my prices significantly and keep them there. I also need to make a lot more stuff to list in the shop - I have been trying to get to that, but was just too busy with the book, conference, etc. Etsy people seem to love the handmade thing even more than the vintage thing, and I am happy to oblige. I don't have all the time in the world for it, but I do have a few hours a week to devote to making things. I wish I could have gotten it done before Christmas, and maybe I can get some of it accomplished by then, but better late than never.

I've also got catch-up to do on my writing. I haven't been writing for magazines at all lately because I've been busy with the books, and I want to line some up for next year that I can contribute to regularly. I plan to work on Parsifal edits all through Christmas, and research more about getting The Flower of Knighthood into Amazon's Kindle offerings and do a cost breakdown for the small print run I want to get underway. In this economy, I don't think I have a prayer of finding a publisher for epic poetry, so better to just get the thing out there. I've been researching the Hogarth Press model, the small house founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf to publish her books and which they started from one tabletop printing press. That's a business model I can get behind - the modern equivalent is a laptop, which I am budgeting to try to get in January at the post-holiday sales. I want to use that to make a big push toward more social networking in 2009, too. I still don't have much readership here and I need to utilize Facebook, etc. in a more integrated manner and set up pages for my books and other projects. Then there is the poetry contest I want to enter in March - that might lead to being published, but only if I can win it, and there is no telling what their objective taste will be. I am going to do my best to impress.

I want to wish everyone happy holidays. It's been a crazy year what with the second Great Depression and all, but let's work to make 2009 successful and fulfilling.

Clothes Make the Woman

I promise I'll stop blogging about clothes soon - it's my most shallow interest and I spend way too much of my time and energy on it, but with all of this cleaning, moving and storage upheaval, it's in the forefront right now. I am about ready to move on, though - I streamlined in order to simplify so I would have more time for greater things like my books as opposed to clothing maintenance. I cleared some mental space by removing physical underbrush from my environment. I wish I could be like Catherine Deneuve - she looks amazing no matter what and she looks like she makes some effort, but not all that much, because honestly, she doesn't need to. I am not that lucky in the glamour department, but I do have my own thing and I am content with it. I mostly sit at the lunch table with the goth kids, but I'm not extremely so. I just like black and vintage or plain stuff like Donna Karan, Japanese clothes and military styling, and I don't veer much from that aesthetic blueprint. When I was in NYC lately, I was also reminded that I still dress a lot more East Coast than West - I bought most of my clothes while I lived there, and it shows. You'll look at the subway or a Manhattan street in winter time and it's just a sea of black wool, which describes a lot of my closet. I've got a little bit of UK in my wardrobe, too, including a Pringle of Scotland bag that I love and a wool capelet that I bought in London in 2003. I think I am sometimes at least slightly frumpy, but if that is the price of comfort, so be it. I never wear heels, I am too tall for them, and I am partial to boots and long skirts and black t-shirts of all kinds. I might as well be wearing jammies today - I've got on Uggs and an American Apparel t-shirt with a kangaroo pocket and a hoodie, and I am as happy as a clam. I am a little bit frumpy and a little bit rock and roll - I also have some awesome music t-shirts including Pink Floyd and the London mod scene. Hopefully that balances any dowdiness I may carry from some of the more old lady clothes I sometimes wear (although I will blog about little old ladies as style inspirations in a separate post - seriously, there is some generational matriarchal wisdom to be gleaned from older women's clothing choices). It really all just reflects my personal interests and experiences, especially with the places I have lived and travelled. For a good example of that, I recently had to replace my backpack (I take public transit a lot and I carry my huge book manuscript around with me so I can edit it) and I bought a black corduroy one at Target and sewed a small embroidered patch from the gift shop at Mont St. Michel onto the flap. In another recent instance of a souvenir purchase, I also bought a gorgeous probably-1980's black floral print skirt in Paris for about five euro, and it fits like it was made for me. Because of little things like those sentimental items, my mother's old costume jewelry, my auntie's perfect black leather clutch bag, my cowboy boots that remind me of a pair my daddy wore when I was little, and my own long-standing thrift habit, I can guarantee you that no one is dressed exactly like me, and that is just the way I like it. I think that is what clothes are meant to be - style rather than fashion, and an entirely personal expression that becomes elevated to art by living it.

Wardrobe Mayhem

For today's style report, I am wearing one of my favorite vintage shirts that I pulled out of storage in NYC. That means I have not worn it for three years and I am happy to have it back. It's a little 3/4 sleeve black polyester top with an interesting button close at the neck that was made in the late '60's or early '70's. The buttons are small and fake tortoiseshell and the neckline has sort of a gathered effect that I like. The sleeves bell slightly, too, which I think is really flattering.

I found several great items right away in storage and mailed a big box back to myself. There are some pretty lace things, a lot of cashmere gloves I bought discount in NYC at after-Christmas sales over the years, a tartan wrap with my family plaid (Leslie, from Aberdeen), an English schoolboy scarf, a big metal medallion necklace with the god Mercury on it and a nice black velvet clutch evening bag with a gold heart clasp that I hope to use over the holidays.

I also rediscovered a pair of grey short cowboy boots with sky blue stitching that I bought at a thrift store in Dallas. I stumbled upon them when I moved my garment rack of long dresses so that I could paint the ceiling on that side of the room. Score. I'll wear them this later this week.

I love clothes, especially vintage ones. This is why I have so many (too many) of them, and why I've been so talking so much lately about having gotten rid of a lot of things. It's a big step for me to do so, and a positive one. I have lots of nice pieces just sitting in storage and other things right in my apartment that aren't being worn much, so my Christmas gift to myself this year is to get them into circulation.

Ciel Ceiling

I am still in the process of moving stuff back into my room at the artist's community and I took the opportunity to paint. I started a while back and never finished it. I had mixed several cans of a pretty pinkish lavendar but found that they are missing; I think they got thrown away. I found a small amount of the base lavendar I used for that batch and mixed it with a warmer neutral color to make a very nice dusty rose-ish shade. I used that on three walls and I painted a door and the ceiling robin's egg blue. A niche by the window that holds my dresser is the original lavendar I mixed months ago with scattered silver stars painted on the ceiling and I am going to paint a few more stars on the blue once it dries to tie everything together. The whole effect of the room is sky colors, which is very pretty and striking. I think the lavendar I had mixed would have been pretty, but maybe a bit too much for the entire big room, so perhaps it is for the best that it vanished. I wanted to use the paint we already had instead of letting it go to waste, and I did not want to spend much money. I did this scheme for only the cost of painting tape to keep the seams even. Not bad. I have kind of a Paris flew market design aesthetic and it looks nice with the pale colors. The floor is hardwood but it's kind of dull because whatever stain or polish was once there has worn off. I may do a rag-rub of a golden oak stain to brighten it a little. I think that would work nicely with the blue and pink. I have a gorgeous comforter from Anthropologie in NYC that looks like a patchwork of many vintage floral fabrics and it has a lot of muted hues that will pull everything together.

NYC

I want to say, by the time I moved from NYC three years ago, I was so tired of it that I would have been happy never to see it again. Now that I don't have to live there anymore and deal with the expense, overcrowding and stress, I learned that I can enjoy it again, maybe more than ever. On this last visit, I stayed on Staten Island for two nights in my old neighborhood and saw people whose company I found really stimulating. I love that area, too, with the harbor and the Verrazzano Bridge. It's really homey and comfortable. I stood on the street behind my old building for a long time, looking up at what had been my bedroom window, and remembered sitting on the fire escape watching boats go back and forth. I also recalled an amazing storm over Presidents' Day weekend one year when the wind blew so hard that it forced snow in through the cracks around the old, unsealed windows. It literally snowed in my apartment. I spent the last night of my trip at my friend's apartment in the Bronx, and we walked around the neighborhood looking at the beautiful old homes and ate dinner at Montezuma, a great restaurant there. The next morning, I commuted in with him on Metronorth. His train stop is at Marble Hill, which really is a huge marble hill. The station is right on the Harlem River and the ride into Manhattan was gorgeous. I got off at 125th Street to catch the bus to LaGuardia, and that went really well. The ride is pretty short, and I got there with plenty of time to spare. Yaay for planning well. I also spent a little time in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and overall, it was one of the better trips I've ever made.

Catching Up

A lot has been happening lately. I was going to move, but decided against it at literally the last minute, and I am glad that I decided to stay put. I've had to move a lot in the last few years due to hurricanes and other disasters and I realized I have put down some roots where I am and that I need to stay in the network I have built. That feels like the right decision for me for now, and even though I lost a little money on a deposit at the other apartment (I had even moved some of my stuff out and into the new place), I still feel good about it.

One benefit of almost moving is that I ruthlessly pared down some of my possessions in order to fit into what would have been a smaller living space at the new community. I cleaned out my closet and had a yard sale and took stuff to resale shops, all of which netted me about a hundred bucks, and I also donated about fifteen bags of random stuff to charity. Something about this near-move seems to have thrown a kind of switch in me that made me want to streamline my life. I think the horrible economy is working on me, too. I have always enjoyed buying new clothes, but I am not only content to just work with what I have for now, I suddenly want even less. I got an immediate reward from editing my clothes: I kept what I actually really, really like rather than having a lot of things just for fun, and I feel more personally connected to my wardrobe now. I still have a lot of clothes, I'll never be a Zen master with two robes and a pair of sandals, but now every single item in my closet has been seriously thought about. I have a small pile for repairs and alterations, too, that I have been meaning to do, and will budget for those expenses rather than buying anything new.

This attitude carried over into my just-completed NYC trip as well. I still have storage there, and I plowed through it over two days and donated more than two vanloads full of stuff to the Salvation Army and dumped some old furniture. I stored most of my Staten Island apartment contents when I moved to New Orleans in 2005, and it's all stayed there ever since because I had to move on to Los Angeles after Katrina. The plan was to haul it to NOLA from NYC over several trips with a cargo van I had bought for the purpose, but after evacuation, temporary residence in Dallas and ending up all the way across the country instead of just halfway, I had to just leave it in storage for a long time. I finally decided that I don't need all of it, and made a trip about a year ago that pared down some, and did the same this time. I've reduced the monthly rental expense by more than one-third and the volume by at least that, and I plan to go back for several days in April when it warms up and finish the winnowing process. Then I'll be equipped over the summer to bring back what I want to Los Angeles, and, sadly, probably store it here for a while, too, but at least it will be in the same region/state/town as me. I am tired of being so scattered, and I want to move on with my life after so much disruption. Gas prices have gone back down, but when they topped $4.00 here a while back, I realized it made no financial sense to move furniture all the way out here. It would be cheaper to replace it than to ship it so far. Just like with the clothes I mentioned above, I went through boxes of stuff with the sole criteria, what does this mean to me? I only kept things that I have a genuine attachment to. If it was just pretty or something I don't really use but thought I should keep just in case of a future need, it got donated. I come from a long line of hoarders, and I want to grow past that. I thought I might be in that Staten Island apartment for far longer than I was and I accumulated a mountain of possessions. Realistically, I won't be moving into another space that large any time soon. I had a rent-stabilized one bedroom there in an old building with lots of room, and I can't afford that in Los Angeles at the moment. I also have other priorities now: I want a much better laptop, I want to travel more, I want to beef up my savings and retirement and I want to finance my art projects. Knocking out that storage expense and the cost of maintaining so much stuff will get me to those goals more quickly, so it's worth the sacrifice to me. I needed a stable and attractive home when I created that situation, and I enjoyed it for more than three years. I still have a nice living space and plenty of pretty clothes, I just don't feel I need as much as I did then. It served its purpose and I can move on now and share my discards with someone else who can give them new life.

Regarding my artistic goals, I received my receipt in the mail today from the grant application I submitted in October. They have processed my package, and I am in the running. The winner will be announced in March. I also worked some on book edits while I was travelling to/from New York. I really enjoy reading my Parsifal book, even when I am laboriously combing though it to polish it. If I win the grant, I plan to use the money to self-publish at least two books, and to found a small press to keep them in print.

Twin Peaks

I watched all of the Twin Peaks gold box DVD in less than two weeks. That is thirty hours of programming and a lot of bonus material, by far the biggest marathon of media absorption I've ever undertaken. I have been Twittering about my theories about the show and its deeper meanings, and I want to write a long post here gathering all that together - it was fascinating to me, and I can feel an essay coalescing. As they say in TV land, stay tuned.

Moving Right Along

I am almost moved out of my old artists' community and into the new one. I have one more big push this weekend. I've been a basketcase dealing with all of this, but I keep getting signals that I am doing the right thing, so I am trusting the process, as they say.

I finished my artist's grant application and mailed it in yesterday. That is the first grant I have ever applied for, and it was an interesting experience. It's for a very large sum of money, with this organization:

http://www.aroomofherown.org/

The grant is for $50,000 over two years to help a woman writer carve out the time to pursue her writing projects. I pursue mine no matter what, but a stash of money to help me publish them would change my life. That is what I said I would do with the award if I won it. I would buy a better laptop and start a tiny publishing venture for my work. This economy could not be worse for trying to launch anything, but the award won't be announced until next March anyway, and it would take me a little longer to set everything up and roll it out. I am working on that anyway. My priorities for next year are saving money, paring down and simplifying my life, upgrading my laptop, working on music, visiting my family in Texas, and self-publishing a small run of my books.

Very David Lynch

Regarding my move, my housemate at my old community brought home the complete set of Twin Peaks on DVD and we have been watching it. I borrowed the DVD's and am working my way through them as I pack up my bedroom. All I have to say is, that is a way to make this move even more surreal.

The Next Step

I am suddenly moving from one artists' community to another, staying in Los Angeles but relocating to a different neighborhood. I have been at the first community, The Sugar Shack, for two years almost to the day, and I had no plans to move as recently as two weeks ago, but I stumbled upon another one that is more music-oriented and that I think will be a good place for me to live for a while in terms of developing that part of my career. It's closer to downtown and the music scene in Silver Lake/Echo Park, and the other residents are almost all professional musicians. It's in an old convent which reminds me of something in New Orleans, where I lived briefly until Katrina put a stop to that. It also reminds me of another artists' community in Dallas in an old church where I lived for a while after I was forced to leave New Orleans. I've met five of the people there, and I like all of them. I am still friends with the housemates at the first house, but I got a strong feeling when I found this place that I need to go there next. It's certainly shaken my energy up - I got a move on this week and brought home a truckload of free boxes for packing and I've been sorting through clothes and stuff to give some away and sell some more. I've had an issue that has dogged me since I left home to go to college that I have more personal stuff than I ever really can rent enough room for. Cities are so expensive and space is at such a premium that I've always had to cram stuff into a little apartment or pay to store too much, and I am sick of it. This space is smaller than where I have been living, so I need to pare down, and for once I don't feel bad about it. I had a big rent-controlled apartment on Staten Island in NYC for three years and I accumulated too much. I also picked up a lot from family storage in Texas and enough is enough. I won't get rid of family things, but I have enough vintage clothes and purses and shoes that I could go the rest of my life without buying a thing and still be okay, so it's time to purge. I have always thrifted and yard saled for entertainment, and I have a lot of lovely things that I paid pennies for, so I feel okay about recycling some of it. I am supposed to be moved by the first weekend of November. It's interesting, I have a very intuitive feeling about this place and there is a lot of synchronicity around the move. My aunt told me that her very first apartment in Los Angeles was only a few blocks from my new one, which I take to be a good sign.

Grant Money

I am working on a grant application to try to get some funding to publish my books. It's a very long application and I have to prove some level of financial need, providing tax forms, etc. I've been pulling all of that together and completing the nuts and bolts part of the application, with contact information, etc. There are several required essays and I have finished two of them in the past two days, one asking for a description of how the cash award would help me meet my artistic goals, and the second requesting a description of what my writing means to me. It means the sun, the moon and the stars, and I basically said that. It's a large amount of money, and if I won it, it would change my life. Here's hoping the passion I expressed in my essay is convincing to the grant panel. I've put aside my book edits to work on this for now, which is totally worth it - it won't take me too much longer, and it's due by the end of the month. I needed a break from editing, anyway, which is why I've been reading the color and theology book. I think I needed that break to clear my mind for the grant application, and focusing on it will clear my mind enough to get back to editing after it's done. See how neatly it all works?

The Temptation of Faust

The color and theology book I've been reading (see the post below) included a lot of Goethe, whom I love. I had not read Faust in years, though it was a big influence on me at one time, and it was very pleasant to read its poetry again. I looked it up online today to divert myself from the current financial and political maelstrom, and discovered that instead of being a distraction, it instead fits the times perfectly, and puts them into some perspective. One related article I found concerns alchemical themes in the work:

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/faust.html

I just Twittered about the plot point where Mephisto artificially manipulates the economy of a kingdom by convincing its court to indebt themselves to him based on his issuance of paper currency against their territory's gold futures. The empire has been ruined by out-of-control spending, and he offers the courtiers a short-term solution that will cost them their souls in the long run - soul's gold traded for worthless paper. Does this sound familiar? Amazing how the classics can reflect on social situations centuries later - if you write on universal themes, your work will stand the test of time. Mephisto finds men to be so self-destructive that they eagerly embrace his treacheries. Sometimes, he does not even have to get involved - he just watches them ruin themselves: I find, as always, it couldn’t be worse./I’m so impressed with Man’s wretched ways,/I’ve even stopped plaguing them, myself, these days.

The alchemical article also elegantly analyzes the roots of Faust's problems with Mephisto and finds them in patriarchal culture, always one of my favorite targets and very much a part of what's to blame for today's social issues. The dualistic god of patriarchy splits the psyche and sends Faust's vital nature and his anima into his unconscious. He lurches through life listening to his own lowest nature, unable to truly value women because he projects his own inner feminine onto them in a broken fashion. Only in death can he become whole, as he is trapped in the prison of dualistic thought all his life long and requires a transcendent experience to overcome it. The very woman whom he corrupted and whose untimely death he caused comes to his rescue in the afterlife, interceding with the feminine divinity on his behalf: All that shall pass away is but reflection./All insufficiency here finds perfection./All that's mysterious here finds the day./Woman in all of us show us our way.

The author of the article, Adam McLean, neatly comes to the conclusion that all of the characters in Faust together represent the integrated aspects of the Self. Faust requires death to unite them; hopefully, the rest of us can do so in life, while we can still make an impact on this sphere. Early in the work, when Mephisto is talking to God, the devil comments on the way Man uses his reason in a manner divorced from his inner being. This is a classic failing of patriarchy, a worship of rational intellect that fails to take other aspects of consciousness (such as emotion or intuition) into consideration. I will leave you with this last quote to ponder on - ask yourself, how do you apply your faculties of consciousness and reason? Do you use them humbly and compassionately, like Gretchen, the Sophia figure who is willing to aid her former oppressor? - or arrogantly and egotistically, like the financiers who thought they could outsmart and exploit their fellow humans by selling common dirt as diamonds?: Man might appreciate life a little more: he might,/If you hadn’t lent him a gleam of Heavenly light:/He calls it Reason, but only uses it/To be more a beast than any beast as yet.

Here is a free online translation of the Faust text if anyone is inspired to read it: http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/German/Fausthome.htm

Archetypal Psychology

“Most people find it quite beyond them to live on close terms with the unconscious.” – Carl Jung

Where Imagination Meets Sustainability

We get some highly interesting visitors at the artist's community where I live. My housemate Dave Hippchen is an actor, and he lived in Florida before he came out to Los Angeles last year. He has friends from there who have formed their own production company, Cinemap. Their names are Josh Horn and Dan Maninna and they are Emmy-nominated producers who worked for PBS prior to forming their own company, where they work on projects combining art, culture and environmental sustainability. Here is their website:

http://explorecinemap.com/

They are currently traveling around the country and were in California to pitch a new show they are developing called Canvas Earth. The tagline for it is "Where Imagination Meets Sustainability," a good description of their whole ethos. The pilot episode features a community in East Africa that is totally self-sufficient and produces amazing artworks from reclaimed glass refuse.

Here is the site for that show - it gives a really good idea of their general focus:

http://www.canvasearth.tv/

The Sugar Shack, where I live, is a community whose primary purpose is to foster creativity, but which also has a big focus on becoming more self-sustaining and environmentally sound. We have housemates past and present whose professional work involves environmental concerns (scientist Ryan Wartena, architect Elizabeth Marley and green entrepreneur Jedi Wright among them) and they want to get us off the local electrical grid and into solar energy, and move our water usage into a system that recycles our runoff for further distribution (conserving a precious resource in an area prone to prolonged dry spells and shortages). We are also planting a drought-resistant garden to replace a more conventional one, and several housemates are pushing for a compost bin to reduce our waste impact. We were all happy to learn about this show. It covers an area of overlap that could use more exploration, namely the connection between the creative impulse and that of preservation of the planet. I am schooled in the arts and not so much in environmental studies, but I am learning a lot living here, and it makes sense to me that artists would be among the first to commit to going radically green. The vanguard of thought includes both elements, and combining them seems like a very attractive way to make progress with global environmental concerns. The Cinemap guys have committed considerable energy and resources to their project, and it's very cool. Check the show out - hopefully it will be coming to television soon.

The Theology of Color

I am up to page 431 in edits for Parsifal. I took a side-trip the last few days into some esoteric reading and it has slowed me down, but is well worth the slight delay. The book I have been reading is called Color Symbolism and is a collection of essays on the meaning of color in spirituality and religion. It was published in 1977 by Spring Publications, a Jungian publisher, and it is a record of some of the presentations from a conference at Eranos which was held in 1972. The interesting thing is that I have had this book for years. My friend in Austin, TX bought it for me, at my request, for my birthday sometime back in the nineties. For some reason, I never read it, until in 2004 or 2005 when I was doing a lot of spiritual work, I picked it up and looked briefly at one essay, "Color in Christian Visionary Experience," which tied in to what was going on in my life. I picked it up again about two weeks ago, and, again, it is synchronistically connected to both the section of Parsifal I have reached in my edits and some other things that have happened lately. I read an essay about color symbolism in Africa that dovetailed with alchemical stuff I have been studying and, strangely, with the Persian Sufism expressed in the other book I've also blogged about lately, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, by Henry Corbin. I somehow knew way back when I asked for it that this book would be significant someday, but am amazed at how prophetic that has turned out to be. As Dionysius the Areopagite says in the paper about Christian visionary experience, God is primordial light. Colors manifest from that light as veils of its descent and radiation into lower worlds, including our own; therefore, their presence represents the presence of divinity throughout all of creation. Color is extremely important in both of my King Arthur books, for exactly that reason - it indicates the principle of divine action. I've read extensively in the past about the meaning of color and light, but this book has taken me to a new level of understanding. I have just reached a section in my book edits where Parsifal undertakes the initation of a solar hero, and with each level he reaches, another color appears until the entire spectrum is represented. In work derived from that of Jakob Boehme, also referenced in the same paper, each color is associated with an archangel and a major note of the Western musical scale. Without having been familiar with his work at all prior to writing my book, that is a major component of the iniation process that I created for Parsifal. It's an archetypal construct, an element of the psyche, and occurs in many religious traditions.

There are additional essays which cover color sense and the meaning of color in biology, concepts of color in the ancient world, color and the expression of interior time in Western art, and the elimination of color in Far Eastern art and philosophy. This is the more comprehensive Eranos yearbook from which these essays were taken in case anyone is interested:

The Realms of Colour – Die Welt der Farben – Le monde des couleursLectures given at the Eranos Conference in Ascona from August 23rd to 31st, 1972 – Vorträge gehalten auf der Eranos Tagung in Ascona vom 23. bis 31. August 1972 – Conférences données à la session d'Eranos à Ascona du 23 au 31 Août 1972
Eranos-Yearbook/Jahrbuch/Annales 41/1972E.J. Brill, Leiden 1974

The condensed book I am reading is not available on Amazon right now, I'm sure it is long out of print, but here is its info in the event anyone wants to track it down:
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Symbolism-Eranos-Excerpts/dp/B000K1UJQE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222982156&sr=8-1

More on Spring Publications:
http://www.springpublications.com/aboutspring.html

More on Eranos:
http://www.eranosfoundation.org/index.php?node=76&rif=bd80812e4c

More on Dionysius the Areopagite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_the_Areopagite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Dionysius_the_Areopagite

More on Jakob Boehme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Boehme

West Hollywood Book Fair and Editing Progress

I attended the West Hollywood Book Fair for a little while on Sunday afternoon in order to try to research more publishers and writer's resources. The size of the fair was a lot more manageable than the annual L.A Times Book Fair at UCLA and there was the added benefit of free parking at the Pacific Design Center across San Vicente Blvd. I walked around and while I did not find any likely publishers, which didn't surprise me, I did find a little cove of writer's groups that offer workshops, networking opportunities, etc. I signed up to receive email info from all of them and I took literature so I can see if I think they would benefit me to join. I also joined up for the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society e-newsletter.

I am up to page 420 in my Parsifal book edits as of this morning, making slow and steady progress. I've been glued to the news today reading about the European bank nationalizations and the failure of the U.S. bailout bill, but I hope to work more on the book tonight. My pretty fantasy book is more than a little happier than the current global reality and I'm looking forward to getting back to it for a while tonight.

Self-Editing

I reached a milestone in my current book edit of Parsifal - I'm up to page 400, two-thirds of the way through. This edit cycle is excrutiatingly slow, because it's the very first one. I forgot how much work there is to do on the first run-through after completing the manuscript draft. I finished writing my previous book back in 2004, and edited it over the next two years, in fits and starts between moving and dealing with Hurricane Katrina and life in general. Then I put it down and wrote this one. It was more than a year before I picked The Flower of Knighthood back up, and I had done several drafts of it to that point, so it was fairly refined before I looked at it again earlier this year, and it STILL took a huge amount of effort to polish it to my satisfaction. So, I am sure I have a lot of work ahead of me, but as I always say, it's worth it to me. What else would I be doing if not this? I like to write more than anything except making and enjoying music, and I'd rather spend my time refining my own work than doing anything else, except maybe making more artwork. I want to live the life of a productive artist more than anything in the world - it's the only way of life that makes me happy and it's worth any amount of hard work.

Speaking of music and productivity, I posted a review of the show I went to last week - it's up now on my music blog, at:

http://fleurdamourmusic.blogspot.com/2008/09/one-trick-ponymarvelous-toydivisadero.html

Places to Go and Things to Do

I'm very glad we have reached the weekend. I am going to go see a band tonight, Marvelous Toy (http://www.marveloustoy.net/), at Pehrspace in Echo Park. I reviewed them a while back for Performer Magazine, and they have a CD release party this evening. After that, I plan to kick back for the weekend. I want to work on setting some laptop stuff up and editing my book (I'm past page 350 in Parsifal) and just general clean up and catch up. I also need to work on my next pitch letter for my travel article - the inflight magazine has not bitten yet on the France trip, but I have several more places to contact. I am behind schedule on that, but I went on another short trip last week and I've been really overwhelmed with details since I got back. The artist grant I am interested in applying for needs my attention, too. I printed out the application form and plan to look at it tomorrow to start formulating ideas of how to frame my pitch for the award.

I just want to say, too, that I have been looking at one small press after another for The Flower of Knighthood, and one small press after another says that they are not currently looking at manuscripts because their slates are full. Just another nudge toward putting it out myself.

Mid-September Check In

I've been Twittering much more than blogging lately because I've been busy since I got back from France, but I wanted to make an effort at an update post. I've been working on edits for Parsifal and am more than 300 pages into the manuscript. I've been writing a little on The Engagement of Sir Gawain, too, and I'm researching some artist grants that are coming up. I'm still struggling to write the description of my trip - I did so much that I've just been taking it one activity at a time. I made a couple of other brief trips lately and I've been doing a lot for the artist's community where I live. I've also been re-reading a favorite book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism by Henry Corbin. It's really speaking to me, and it seems important at the moment. There are some incredible parallels between a climactic scene I wrote for Parsifal and a mythological thread described in that book. Again, it's all archetypal, coming from a common layer in the human psyche, and again, Parsifal may have a Persian origin. Persia = Iran, so the connection is clear to me. I'm still finding interesting cross-pollinization between Islamic mysticism and medieval culture, and I'll be following that vein for a very long time. I'm still freaking out a little, too, on what a medieval studies professor from Toulouse in southern France told me - she said that the French universities have discontinued a lot of their medieval studies programs. The period has apparently fallen out of favor, pushed aside by more modern concerns. Also, it's not just France that's lost interest in the Middle Ages - other countries in Europe have followed suit. This is why I never was tempted to become an academician. The field has become too trendy, focusing on intellectual fads rather than substantive work. Giving up on one of the most important and formative periods in history is inexcusable. It would almost be more understandable if American universities were guilty of that, it's the new world after all and we have our own history and culture, but for Europe to give up on European history is mystifying to me. Not only is it a renunciation of their own heritage, studies of that period could help understand the current realities with the strained relations between the Islamic and western worlds. The seeds of present conflict were planted back then, and we need to understand that in order the resolve our differences.

Etsy Update

I posted more vintage clothes for sale on Etsy, about fifteen items, and I sold one within an hour of finishing. Awesome. I noticed my shop has more fans, now, too, a total of fourteen. I spent some time this weekend starting to make some things, too, some jewelry and other little trinkets made out of fabric which I will post soon. My designer/artist friend Oz started a shop last week, also, to sell his paintings and drawings. As soon as he gets it going I am going to form an Etsy team with him to have cross-promotional events. His shop is named Forestgod, and mine is Fleur D'Amour, the flower goddess. Perfect for joining forces.

Shop updates are here (also in the sidebar to the right):

http://fleurdamour.etsy.com/

World Traveler

I just pitched an in-flight magazine with a story based on my France trip. I think they would be a good fit, and they have a huge circulation, so I hope they go for it. If not, I have researched six other places to send it, and there are always more.

I've decided the safest way for me to blog about my trip without giving up too much of the material I may need to reserve for first rights in a magazine is to write here for now only about the conference itself and the measures I took there in support of my book and to leave details of the sightseeing for later. It was my first academic conference, and I learned a great deal and met a lot of people. I want to write about it here in case it can help anyone else evaluate whether that kind of event would help their own project or career. I also just had a blast in general in France, and want to preserve all of my memories in writing. As you can see from my photos, it's so, so pretty, and I went at probably the best time of the year, with perfect weather.

More Pictures and More Words

I posted my month's allotment of photos on Flickr, and all of them are from France. The ones above are but a few samples - you can see more of them at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fleurdamour/

I am also adding this link to the sidebar at the right for future reference. If you are interested, check back, because I took hundreds of pictures on this trip and will post a lot more in the future.

The Holy Fool

My manuscript for Parsifal is 600 pages long at this point. I have finished an editing pass through the first section, which ends at page 147, and have gotten as far as page 184 in the second section. I remember when I was writing it last year, sitting on my bed one evening and it suddenly broke into the two sections. I was surprised, but it made sense. The first part of Parsifal's story is his upbringing in the forest, his first home, the backstory of why he ended up there, and the events that carry him to Camelot, his second home. The second part is his leaving of that second home on his epic quest for the Holy Grail. The place where my text divided is right as he is knighted - it gives a clean demarcation between his boyhood and the mature manhood that follows after he leaves his education and enters his career. A lot of what these stories mean to me personally and why I was motivated to write them is the coming of age motif for a knight, an icon of masculinity, in an era that is timeless and mythological - I have been working for years on animus development, the advance of my archetypal inner masculine psychological components, and these knights and their growth into heroic manhood both stimulate and reflect that process. Camelot and legendary Britain are also an excellent metaphor for the unconscious mind, the place where these processes occur. I saw a quote on the wall at the King Arthur exhibit I attended in Rennes, France, at the conference that I felt expressed something of this concept very well. It said, “Pour sa dame, le chevalier dans le secret de son coeur décide de faire des prouesses…” My command of French is imperfect, so I am unsure of the tenses, but it basically says, "For his lady, the knight in his secret heart decided to undertake heroic feats..."

As far as the manuscript goes, I also need to finish writing a notes section in the back explaining some things about the book and my sources and creative ideas. I have written some entries but I have a lot of scattered material that still needs to be distilled. I had some very unorthodox sources of inspiration for this book, not all of which are Arthurian but are rather from a range of spiritual traditions because the Grail unites all of mankind within itself. There is also still the same Jungian vibe as in my first book, an aspect which will never leave my writing as archetypal psychology is intrinsic to my own creative process. There is a process of participation mystique that occurs in the writing of these books that is part of the animus development that I outlined above. These characters are elements of my own experience of the archetypes and by expressing them, I explore myself. Parsifal is a Holy Fool, an innocent who is untouched by worldly ways until he is near to manhood, and he carries that purity of spirit with him on his quest. His innocence is the very core of his heroism. I was glad to discover that element in my own nature, and to allow it its full expression in this work.

Moving Forward

I have spent the last few weeks working on organizing myself for the rest of 2008 so I can make progress on all of my projects. I toiled for several days to create a useful list of everything I need to accomplish and put all of the items both in categories and in chronological order of when they should happen. I also color-coded everything according to its importance, and according to whether or not it involved an immediate cash outlay, so I can just glance at the thing and see what's a priority. Lastly, I made a budget for all of the listed items that do require an expense, so I now know exactly how much I need to allocate to meet my goals. I've also been moving forward with editing my Parsifal manuscript, researching publishers for it, looking for grants and writing contests, following up with contacts from the conference in July, joining more social networking groups, looking into taking some more UCLA classes, and putting aside money for a new computer. I've also been working on pitches for my France experience, which is part of the reason I have not yet written much about it. I don't want to publish too much here about it until I know what, if anything, will be going into articles elsewhere. I don't yet have a track record as a travel writer, this will be my first foray into that arena, but since this also falls into the area of arts and culture, I am comfortable enough to try it. I love to travel and that market is a lucrative and dependable one, at least more so than fine arts. It's also a happy marriage with my artistic interests, since almost all of my travel is planned around arts events of one kind of another. More predictable income from writing assignments would help me cross things off of my list much more quickly. I've also made some more sales on Etsy, and I plan to focus a little more on it going into the holiday season. I need to sit down and make some things for it, something I am looking forward to. I have a lot on my plate, but I feel good about getting so much done thus far in 2008, and if I can close out the year by knocking things off of that list, I'll be really happy.

One Hundred Posts and the Holy Grail

This is my one hundredth post on this blog, and I had thought I would save such an anniversary number for a rundown of my conference experience in France, but I still can't get my head around it enough to write about it yet. It was my first visit to France, and it was long, almost two weeks including the two days in transit. A lot happened and I think I just need a little more time to process it before I write about it. So, I will write about my writing again. I took my notebooks with me to France, but ended up being so busy and stimulated that I did not do much writing or editing while I was there, but I could feel my creative well filling, as the Artist's Way says. I worked on my Parsifal edits a little on the plane coming back to Los Angeles, and continued on that over the few days following my arrival back home. I originally picked up where I left off in March when I went back to The Flower of Knighthood for a final polish, but I realized that I was struggling with it because that was in March and I spent so much time and effort on the first book that I didn't connect perfectly back to the Parsifal manuscript when I returned to it in mid-stream. I went back to the beginning of the book and started reading back over it, and finding a few more edits to make, and that is going much better. I'm thirty-seven pages into it now, having originally covered more than two hundred, but it's well worth the backtrack to get my bearings again. I want to read for continuity as well as edit, and that's going perfectly so far. I worked very, very hard on this book during the last months of 2006 and all of 2007, and I'm proud of it. I am also finding another happy outcome of the weird order in which these books have been composed - as I've said before, I wrote the first one and edited it, and thought it was through, then discovered after I wrote the second one that I had learned a lot about writing during the process of creating it and could go back and apply that to the first one. With that new knowledge, I went and re-edited it, and now I am finding that via that undertaking, I have now learned much more about editing, which I can now apply to the second book. Synergy! I'm therefore both a better editor and writer than I was when I started; I am really excited to see what I can bring to the next book, which I mentioned in an earlier post I have also returned to. I like being productive, and the past few years have certainly been so. I now have Parsifal to edit, and two more books in the series to finish writing, a play that I've been incubating for years, lots of songs, and a multimedia project that I've also been conceptualizing for a very long time. And, there are always magazine articles to be written. The thing I like best now is creating; making things makes me feel happy and alive. I have enough material in the pipeline to keep me fulfilled for at least another decade, which gives me a great deal of hope for the future. The Holy Grail is the realized Self, and the best means for self-development that I have found is the practice of creativity. I find the Grail each time I write or sing, which makes every single day a sacred quest. I think that that sentiment is well worth spending my life on, not to mention my hundredth post.

Back from France

I returned from France on Tuesday the 22nd, but have been too tired to blog about my trip yet. I have never been so jet-lagged. It's so bad that I've gone to bed between 8:30 and 9:30 every night this week, which felt amazing, but I've gotten exhausted every afternoon around 4 pm because my body thinks it's past midnight. Bear with me, I certainly have more interesting things to say about the trip than that I am tired; it really was great, so good that I am already planning another visit for next year.

A Bientot Et Merci

I leave for France tomorrow morning at 8:15 am. The Flower of Knighthood is published online as a download payable via Paypal and with the free sample enabled as well. My friend and I worked on it yesterday and today and got it up and running this afternoon. Here is the link if anyone wants to look at it - I've also posted it in the informational sidebar to the right for future reference and book orders:

www.fleurdamour.us/books.html

I have been packed for several days and I am ready to go. I have my current scribblings for The Engagement of Sir Gawain to take with me to work on during downtime, and am printing part of the Parsifal manuscript to take, too. For reading material on the plane, I have Dionysos by Carl Kerenyi (I blogged about it a while back, but did not have a chance to finish it because I was so busy editing my book) and Elements of the Grail Tradition by John Matthews. One of the fun things on this trip is that we will watch The Fisher King at the conference, I think in English with French subtitles. How cool is that? I can't think of a better place to see it. I may try to take a day trip to see Chartres cathedral, too - I did not think I had time, but I am going to see if I can change trains there on the way back from Rennes. Chartres is only one hour outside Paris, and I'd really like to see that cathedral. We'll see if I have the energy left. No matter what, this is going to be great.

Jongleur

I’ve gotten a greater level of insight into my own creative process lately with the work I have been doing on various projects. I’ve been working on my books for a very long time now and I’ve gained some perspective by seeing how they’ve finally started to turn out. I never dreamed they would take this long, but I also didn’t count on things like 9-11 and Katrina impacting me and making me lose a lot of time. No matter - I really do think things eventually turn out the way they are supposed to. I do like writing for magazines to some degree, and I pursued that path aggressively for a long time when I first started writing, but I ran headlong into the massive cultural shifts caused by the first wave of the internet and the terrorist attacks on New York City. I was living there diligently writing and networking when the dot-bomb happened, followed shortly by 9-11, and the bottom dropped out of the media industry for several years. I could not find much paying work in publishing, so I took jobs in finance that paid the bills and applied myself to writing my books rather than pursuing much magazine work. I kept my head down like that for several years, and by the time the dust settled and I looked up, everything had changed drastically, and continues to do so. It’s almost impossible now to find a staff writer position anywhere on a magazine or newspaper, and so many career writers have been let go that the pool for freelance assignments is more competitive than ever. I started writing for outside publications again in 2004 and I’ve done so off and on ever since, but what seemed like a curse around 2001 (not finding much ongoing work in publishing) turned out to my advantage. It almost seems like everyone is starting all over again, no matter how much experience they have, and I was able to utilize time away from the industry to complete larger and more personal projects. I am very proud of my magazine work, but I am ecstatic about my books. It was a profound exercise in self-development (alchemy, as I noted in the post below) to apply myself to something for so long as the sole architect. It took a great deal of research (all of which was enjoyable, since it was on subjects I already loved), near-constant writing and sustained editing to create these works. They are not trifling at all – I tackled some huge topics in them, and they have modern resonance and social commentary delivered in the context of timeless myth. I hope they will find a willing audience – they are not exactly breezy, but they provide substantial rewards to a thoughtful read. I did my best to frame my philosophical and social concepts within lively action and poetic language, but there is a lot of solid material in the books which demands that the reader think. I myself like a good challenging book that teaches me something and that I have to work to understand, and I don’t mind tackling a very long or dense non-fiction work if the information gained is worth the effort to me. I am not really a sound-bite kind of person. When writing magazine articles, the hardest part for me is generating headlines – they have to be short and snappy to grab the reader’s attention, and I don’t always excel at that. I’ve come up with some good ones for some of these blog posts, ones that I am proud of, and it’s good practice for me, but there are some duds here, too. I like writing articles, but I think I tend to be better at long-haul projects like writing books. My sense of time has always been strange, attuned to longer cycles than most people’s seem to be – I think I’m more geared to a lunar pattern of weeks or months than to a solar pattern of hours and days. It’s kind of a spiritual outlook, attuned more to deeper currents of eternity than to the faster pace of daily life, which has always made me great at things like seeing the big picture and having a long-term perspective that lends itself well to big projects, but not always good at little things like always being on time. I am getting more and more practiced at juggling projects from both sides of that temporal spectrum, though. I wrote regularly for a West Coast music magazine the whole year or so that I was writing Parsifal, and I found that taking on smaller projects on a monthly basis helped break up the bigger project in some helpful ways. I decided to see the articles not as any kind of distraction to the book, but as a welcome break for a short period, and that mindset really worked to my advantage. It’s starting to carry over into the larger projects, too. The last few weeks I’ve been working on edits for both The Flower of Knighthood and Parsifal, and suddenly started writing the third book, The Engagement of Sir Gawain, all while planning for this conference trip and handling some other things as well. I’ve always been pretty good at managing the juggling act to some degree, but I seem to have attained some relatively new ability to keep more balls in the air all at once, and that is a very good thing. I think it truly just comes from experience, like having one book completed made it much easier to finish the second one.

Fideli D'Amore

My creative interests are starting to come together in a way that is blowing my mind. I blogged in my last post below about how my housemate Ryan Wartena wants to set my whole book The Flower of Knighthood to music, and how, as insanely ambitious as that sounds, it has a precedent in the performance of bardic poetry and troubadour music, which are big influences on me. I have long been interested in the troubadours and trouveres (court musicans and poets in southern and northern France, respectively) and in the whole culture of courtly love in medieval Europe for which they provided the artistic expression. I am also completely fascinated with all kinds of mysticism in general and Sufism in Islam in particular, and I've been reading a great deal about the academic theory that Sufis in Moorish Spain greatly influenced the troubadours with their ecstatic hymns to the Beloved, i.e., God. They were not the only influence; there was also the cult of Mary, the older practices of pagan religion in Europe that placed a goddess in a place of high regard and other influences from the East via the Crusades, but I do accept the hypothesis that Sufi practice was likely a powerful component in the creation of that artistic and spiritual movement. I was drawn into the orbit of a Sufi order in New York that is under the direction of a female shayka of French descent, so I am fascinated for personal reasons to explore this meshing of worlds. The more I learn, the more I see that all of my major interests fit together to give a sort of breathtaking big picture of how this world is not composed of separate things but is instead a tapestry of interacting threads. This truly is one world, and there is one God, no matter in what culture He appears or by what name He is worshipped. The highest form of religion is to transcend forms, as mysticism does, and realize the importance of the Object rather than that of the path that reaches Him. My music project, Fleur D'Amour, The Flower of Love, pulls together all of my interests and is highly influenced by troubadour philosophy and aesthetics. The European mystics and artists also had a reverse influence on Islamic thought, as well, in a circuit of social interaction. A book I recently mentioned in this blog, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism by Henry Corbin (a French scholar also enamored of Eastern mysticm), had extensive commentary about Sufic fideli d'amore, the devotion to the path of love as the highest route to spiritual realization. That's an Italian term, and Corbin also used it to refer to the social and artistic milieu of Dante Alighieri, whose life falls into the time period of the height of courtly love. The middle ages are thought by many to be an era of barbarism and backwards thought, but there was a great interchange of cultures occurring in both the East and West that generated awe-inspiring cultural achievements. Alchemy, the spiritual practice of self-development as symbolized by the creation of gold from lead, began life as an Arabic discipline (al-kimiya) and was widely adopted in Europe. Jewish, Muslim and Christian thought interacted particularly in southern Europe to create such treasures as Kabbalah and the writings of Teresa of Avila. We could do a lot worse than to look to our own history for an example of how to communicate well with the Middle East. There have always been those men more interested in power than in wisdom who followed a path of conquest and strife, but there have also always been examples of mystics, scholars and artists who were happy to meet strangers from afar whose different sensibilites breathed new life into their own culture. My art is all the richer for having learned more about this gorgeous interplay and it makes more sense to me now that I have learned why I was drawn to seemingly disparate things. They really aren't disparate - Persia communicated with Paris long ago, and produced a context that generated such glories as Le Conte Du Graal. Those people managed to create that exchange in a time where travel between such farflung regions took years of dangerous effort - what a cultural and spiritual Renaissance we can look forward to now if we fully use this incredible tool, the internet, that connects mankind without boundaries. I put Sufis into the very heart of the Grail fellowship in my Holy Grail book, because they belong there. The Grail account may be descended from a Persian story called The Cup of Jamshid, and even if the stories are not directly related, they are archetypally so, at the level of the universality of human experience. Courtly love is itself an archetypal manifestation of anima and animus, expressed in the devotion of one sex to the opposite one in the ongoing application of unconditional love without expectation of material gain. It's a lovely model for unselfish devotion to the good of another as the path to supreme attainment, another pattern of so-called primitive medieval behavior that the modern world would do well to adopt.

The Day After

It felt amazing to wake up this morning and realize that I am finally completely done with my first book. It felt great when I originally finished writing it in 2004, and then in 2006 when I thought it was done and sent it to the copyright office, but now it feels REALLY done, and I feel whole within myself in a way that is awesome. I skimmed through it again last night just to make sure of the final manuscript, and there is nothing at all that I want to change. As soon as I finished that, I gave a copy to my housemate Ryan Wartena, a scientist, artist and all-around Renaissance Man who has been highly supportive of my books. He told me later that he read some of it out loud, and could tell that I had really strengthened it with my hard work editing it the last few months (he had read part of an earlier version so he had at least a little of a benchmark with which to compare it). He got excited about it originally because he said he could hear music in it, and said we should make that real by composing something around it. I was like, it's 150 pages long, good luck with that and let me know how it turns out, but I was doing research recently on the topic of troubabour poetry and music for my next book, and was reminded that very long epics in the Middle Ages were, in fact, sometimes set to music. They were easier to sing than to recite, and I had Gawain sing a little in this book when he got up to read an epic poem, so it's not as far-fetched as I thought when Ryan first mentioned it. Thinking about it makes me tired, though. I'll ponder it more, but later; for now, I'm just glad it is ready to put out as a stand-alone book. I also told my other housemate Evonne Heyning, an artist, Second Life developer, web guru and non-profit arts foundation officer, that I found absolutely nothing to change in my last two read-throughs of the book, and she said, "Good! It's done then." And it is. It should be live online tonight. The only remaining things will be to promote it and either print copies at some point in order to really self-publish it (complete with cover art commissioned by me from Osvaldo Valle, my amazing artist friend and web developer in New York City), or maybe get a publisher, whatever seems like the best course of action.

There.

I just finished the final draft of The Flower of Knighthood. It's proofread, edited, polished and ready for the conference. I am sending it to my web design friend shortly so he can post everything hopefully tomorrow. He's been working on the download/Paypal page for the last few days and I already sent him the free sample file, and now he will have everything he needs. We wanted to get it all up and running last week, but as usually happens, it took just a little longer. I still have three days until I leave in case of any issues. I am very excited, both about finishing the book and about my trip. I have everything planned down to a science and I fly out on Friday morning. I am packed and have all my travel documents and notes in order, and I printed up a bunch of the book samples to hand out to anyone who is interested. I also ordered special business cards specifically for the book to direct people to the download page, but there was a problem with the order, so I improvised by printing stickers with the same information and putting them on the back of my regular editorial business cards. I would have preferred the custom cards, but these are essentially free, since I already had a few hundred cards and stickers on hand. I will print several copies of the complete manuscript to take, too, to give to several people in the organization that might be interested. I want to make contact with someone at the Rennes Tourism Office in Brittany as well. I set some scenes in my second book in Rennes before I ever heard of this conference, and I think they might find that interesting.

I have one other note of profoundly happy news: I started the writing process again on the third book in this series, The Engagement of Sir Gawain. That really surprised me. I was planning to just go right into editing Parsifal as soon as possible but three nights ago I was sitting in my bedroom sorting out my bags for the trip, and found that I had packed two spiral notebooks when I only meant to take one. I sat for a while with the extra one on my lap, and suddenly got the urge to write. I wrote part of one scene, then flipped the book around and wrote part of another scene. I wrote the beginning and end of that book already several years ago, put it down to focus on the others that were closer to completion, wrote another scene for it about two years ago, and then put it down again. I knew that that one would be the next one that I work on, and I have been thinking about some ideas for it, but I did not think it would start up so soon. The last few days I have been working on three books at the same time, editing TFOK and getting ready to publish it online, editing Parsifal and now writing TEOSG. That is part of what put me behind schedule with the last edit of TFOK, but I am not complaining. I think this is probably part of the energy of this trip. I am very excited to go to France for the first time, and I think the book is coming from that. It's also going to be a great way to spend some of my free time while traveling. Where better to write a book than in Paris, or on a train rolling through the French countryside, or while looking out at the English Channel from the walls of a medieval city?

I went to the downtown Los Angeles library the other day and did lots of research on travel magazines, so I have a much better idea of the best ones to send pitch letters for a piece about the trip. I also looked over some travel guides for Paris and Brittany and found a few more interesting things to to do. Did you know that there is a museum of Romanticism in Montmartre in Paris, and that it has free admission? I am so there.

Almost There

I just finished this last edit of The Flower of Knighthood, and am going to do one more starting tomorrow to look for any lingering typos and to make sure of the changes I made. My web design friend is still working on building the page to put the book up online, so I still have a little bit of time to look over the manuscript again before he is ready to plug it into the site. I made a few additions to the notes section in the back, not on this pass-through but on the previous one, and I think they really helped get my point across on a few concepts. Amazing that this late in the game that is still happening, which is the reason I have not called this done yet but instead keep working on it. I designed some business cards today exclusively for the book which direct the recipient to the website page. They look sharp. I am going to have them printed this weekend and take them with me to France to pass out along with the ten-page samples I also intend to print shortly. Everything is coming together.

Progress On All Fronts

I made another sale on Etsy yesterday, to someone in Central Texas near where I grew up. I also am two-thirds through this edit draft of my book, and I got my materials to my web designer friend for the books page on my website. I designed the layout and wrote the text and he's going to format the text stuff and link the page to my PayPal account so I can take orders online by the end of this week. I packed most of my things for France, too. I spent some time streamlining exactly which clothes are the best to take with me, the ones that pack well and are versatile enough to mix together so I look good and don't get bored but also don't have to take too much. I have lots of clothes at home but I prefer to travel light. I may be running around Paris some with a wheelie suitcase, so it has to be manageable.

And Yet Another Edit Readthrough Finished

In my endless round of edit drafts on The Flower of Knighthood, I just finished another one on the train this morning. I am going to print out the book for one more onceover to proofread the changes I just made, and then that is it, it goes online next week. I'm taking about fifty samples with me to the conference to hand out to anyone who is interested, and I'm printing business cards, too, to direct people to the "Books" page on my main website so they can download a free sample or the paid complete text.

My Etsy shipment to the Land Down Under arrived, and the purchaser loved the item, so I've now got 100% positive feedback from all of my customers. Sweet. No more sales yet, but I'll work on the shop this weekend. I have an idea how to improve the presentation of some of my arts and crafts items and I'll see if I think it works. I plan to start packing for my trip this weekend, too, and I'm going to the Los Angeles downtown library this Friday or Saturday afternoon to do some travel magazine research. The pitch template I wrote sounds good, and I just need to configure it to some particular publications. I wish I'd been able to send it out sooner, but with the book editing, setting up the online shop and planning the trip itself, I just haven't had the time until now.

Yet Another Progress Report

I'm two thirds done with this edit round on The Flower of Knighthood, and in the last fifty pages I've only made three changes - adding one comma, changing "over" to "above" because it made the line flow a little better and changing "that" to "his" where either would do. So I'd say it's going quite well, if it's down to such trivial changes, and so few of them.

I got my train tickets in the mail yesterday for the round-trip from Paris to Rennes and back, and that made the trip more real to me. I also wrote a really good pitch letter for travel magazines to try to wring some paid work out of this journey, as well. I've had a mental block on that, and yesterday it suddenly just poured out in about an hour. I think I needed to finalize a little bit more of my exact itinerary in Paris and in the area around Rennes and Mont St. Michel in order to be able to write it. I did that this week, narrowing down the sites in Paris that I really want to see (St. Denis, Montmartre, Montparnasse, the Ile de la Cite, the Champs-Elysees, the Louvre, and the Latin Quarter) and the small side trips I am going to try to complete in Brittany and Normandy (Avranches, Saint-Malo and the Forest of Broceliande). I only have three days in Paris and six in Rennes, and a conference to go to, so I have to cram in a lot in limited time, and until I sat down and got online and figured it all out, I was a bit befuddled. I looked at the Metro website and got a sense of the subway system and how to use it, and I looked up the things I want to see and how to get to them and also how close they are to each other so I could come up with a realistic timetable. I want to use every second in Paris to see stuff because I don't know when I will be back, and I definitely feel the same way about northern France, because I may never go there again, if I have no compelling reason. I am going to try to hit the things that interest me the most. Avranches has a museum that houses the manuscripts from Mont St. Michel cathedral and that would truly complement my confirmed visit to the Mont. The forest is in a lot of the Arthurian stories, and I really want to see it. It's also very ancient and beautiful, a true Old World oak forest with Druidic history. Saint-Malo is negotiable for me, I'd rather see the other two, but if I have time, it looks cool. It's a walled medieval city that was a center of coastal pirate activity.

I fulfilled my first two Etsy sales, and got positive feedback, very nice feedback, actually, so I'm golden with that. I was a little worried because each package took longer to arrive than I expected, but they got there. I'm just waiting for the Australia mailing at this point. I have fifty-four items posted and more to list this weekend. I bought a pretty necklace on Etsy, too, a vintage 1970's mother of pearl dove that looks like the Holy Spirit. The Holy Ghost plays a huge role in my Parsifal book, because it's associated with the Grail, and I really wanted the necklace. It was $12.99, who could argue? I love '70's stuff, too, the really elegant things like pretty disco dresses and little suede shoulder bags and some of the boho stuff that's very feminine. The necklace falls into that category. The bird is about three inches long and hangs on a necklace of beads. It's so pretty I can't believe it did not cost more.

Weekend Update

I posted more stuff in my Etsy shop over the weekend, and noticed I now have eleven fans. Yaay, it's gone viral! I don't know how people are finding me because I've done no promotion yet within the Etsy site community, but they are indeed finding me. Once I get everything posted that I have to sell, I will look into promoting the store. I've found Etsy shops in searches I did for one particular kind of item so maybe the same thing is happening with mine. I may just start conversations with all of them and ask. Nothing wrong with doing a little market research.

I'm almost one quarter through another edit of The Flower of Knighthood, too, and aiming for June 30 to go live online with the book. I was telling more people (also writers) last night about my books and they got really interested, which is a good sign.

I also watched four movies this weekend, numbers two, three and four in the Harry Potter series, and The Illusionist, which is one of the best movies I have ever seen. My brain is so fried from reading and from writing shop listings that I am craving visual stimulation and relaxation. I've watched more movies in the last month than I have in the past year and a half, maybe longer, and I feel better for it. I've worked so hard for so long on my books that I severely needed to blow off steam. I'm noticing that I am going back fresher to this latest (last? hopefully) book edit because of the diversion and input of images. The well is collecting rainwater again. It was running a little dry from me pulling up bucket after bucket of creative wellspring. I am refilling it now so I will have inner resources to go back and get to work again on editing Parsifal and on writing the next book, The Engagement of Sir Gawain. I've also got to focus on my music again at some point. I was leafing through my lyric book the other night and flipping out on how many songs I have and how long it has been since I worked on them. That's another part of my life well-deserving of some real attention.

Status Update

I finished another edit readthrough of The Flower of Knighthood this morning. I'm also moving forward with getting it online, and when I ran out of manuscript on the train this morning, finishing it before I reached my destination, I started in again on Parsifal, which I also carry around with me for just such occasions. I don't know how good an idea it is to try to go back and forth on two separate book edits, but I've been wanting badly to get back to Parsifal and it felt good to do so even for just a few minutes. I'm very proud of it, too, and writing it was intensely personal.

I am getting very excited about going to France. It's only three weeks away as of today. I've been planning my two and a half days in Paris to maximize my time, and also the excursions I will be taking in Brittany and, hopefully, Normandy as well. I am staying in Rennes, and I hope to go to Avranches, Saint Malo and the Forest of Broceliande as well as the day trip I have already booked to Mont St. Michel. I have the conference for five days and several events in Rennes, so I have plenty to do. In Paris, it's all about Notre Dame and Saint Chapelles on the Ile de la Cite, the Champs Elysees, Saint Denis and the royal chapel, the Louvre and the Latin Quarter. I am staying three nights near Pere Lachaise so I plan a brief trip there, too. I am pitching the trip to travel magazines, hope someone takes me up on it.

I've now got ten fans on Etsy, though I have not made any further sales. I took some great pictures of new items a few days ago and I will list more this weekend.

Intellectual Property

Here is a really good interlinking chain of intellectual property articles:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-berry/ebooks-copyright-piracy_b_108319.html

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/the-e-book-test-do-electronic-versions-deter-piracy/

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/can-e-publishing-overcome-copyright-concerns/

http://stevenpoole.net/blog/free-your-mind

I am all for the internet and the free dissemination of ideas, but there is the reality that people who spend the bulk of their work time generating content need at some point to get paid if they are to continue to do so. I've spent years of my life working on my books and I hope people find enough of value in them to want to pay to read them. It's not vanity or ego, it's simple reality. I have earned absolutely nothing so far on my books, and I sacrificed the pursuit of moneymaking activities while I wrote them because I felt they had greater value than anything else I could generate. I'd like to earn something material from them to put towards my retirement. Making art is something of a luxury but so is consuming it, and if a content consumer benefits from what he reads, he should be willing to pay for the value. Making art is also not entirely a luxury, it's a driving need for some of us that is as important as air or food or water, and I feel that what it contributes to human culture and development is important enough to pay for.

Another Day, Another Edit Update, and Some Philosophy

I am more than halfway through another edit of The Flower of Knighthood, and am fast approaching the end-of-June deadline I have set for myself of getting the manuscript up online as a paid download and free sample. I am emailing back and forth with my web designer friend to set up a linkpage to Paypal and to set up the space on my existing website for this function. Exciting times. My housemate, scientist/artist/Renaissance man Ryan Wartena, is a tireless promoter of my work, and he sat me next to some interesting people (authors Daniel Pinchbeck http://www.realitysandwich.com/blog/daniel_pinchbeck and Paradox, a many-years alumnus of Burning Man and writer of performance pieces, both of whom are good friends with Ryan) at a dinner party we hosted on Friday night and told them about my forthcoming books, which started a lively conversation. He also told another writer friend who visited on Saturday about my books, and made me go get a draft to show her, demanding to know when I would have copies for him to give to his friends. So, yaay, Ryan! I am very grateful for his support, and for that of everyone at my artist's community. I promised to get him some copies by the end of the month when I get the download up.

The theme of the weekend seemed to be that everyone I talked to is seeking to make more time in their lives for writing. My housemate Brent Heyning (owner of Toyshoppe, http://toyshoppepro.com/) has done film crew and special effects and music road crew for years, and wants to focus more on developing his own projects, most of which involve a lot of writing. We talked some about how I managed to carve out time to finish two books, and I told him I cut out a lot of other activities and also maximized my available time every week by taking public transit as much as possible and using that space to write instead of having to be the one paying attention to the road. In NYC that was a non-issue, since I already took the Staten Island ferry and subway everywhere, but in Los Angeles, committing to public transit is a big deal. I freed up at least ten hours a week to devote to writing by doing that. I also cut out most television and movies and used my evenings to write, because what was happening in my head and on the page was far more entertaining to me than anything anyone else could make. I've been blowing off steam lately by watching movies because I reached a point of real deprivation with over a year of avoiding them, but it was still a sacrifice that was worth it to me. Brent was encouraged, and he asked me if I want to set aside some group writing time at some point. I've never tried that, so I am up for it. I'm kind of a freak when I write; I light incense, play medieval music and stare into space a lot, and occasionally get up to sort clothes or papers just to get a mental break for a few minutes, and then go back to my notebook. It can't be very exciting to watch, but being around anyone creating anything can help jumpstart the process of art so maybe it would be mutually helpful. The dinner party Friday was a fundraiser for a temple to be built at Burning Man this year (I am not a Burner, but many of my housemates are and consequently I meet a lot of people from that social circle) and the organizer Amanda also told me during Saturday cleanup that she wants to write more. I gave her the same advice I gave Brent, and told her to start a blog also. She does a lot of interesting projects for Burning Man and other things, and that would be perfect grist for the blog mill that might help her get writing assignments. She and Brent both said that they tend to overschedule themselves with projects, and that they feel they need to stop doing that and focus inward. I encouraged that in both of them. The way I see it, if you want to pursue something, then you are supposed to do so. There is something in it that you are being drawn to in order to unfold your own potential. I told Brent to focus on his most immortal ambitions. I figure no one will really remember me for the work I've done simply to support myself, or even much for my magazine writing, but they will remember books and music. That's what I am going for, my biggest ideas that really mean something and that will live on after I am gone. That is the only kind of immortality humans can achieve, and the best thing any artist can contribute to the world. Art is for everyone, I firmly believe that anyone can create something, but truly dedicated art really is kind of rarefied. It takes a lot to say no to everything else in order to devote yourself to creation, and that commitment shows. The things I want the most in this world are a family and a thriving career as an artist. I am not married yet, and I don't have children yet, either, and I decided that until I do have those demands upon my time and energy, I will use all of my available resources towards my art. I dearly want to have a family, but can't make that happen until it's ready to materialize, so I am spending the luxury of my time alone on what I value.

I also spent some time this weekend working on my Etsy shop and have almost fifty items listed, with more to post this week. I also sold a dress to a lady in Australia and shipped out the first two items I sold, to customers in Chicago and Italy. The web rocks - how else could you reach a worldwide audience with vintage clothes, let alone with books, music, etc?

Happy Day

I am having a really good day so far. I opened my email to discover that I made not only my very first sale ever in my Etsy crafts shop, I made another sale right after that. Both were for small amounts, but that's fine, nothing in my shop is terribly expensive. That's part of my philosophy - I set the shop up to generate funds for my art projects, not to get rich. I know I am probably selling mostly to other artists and the vintage/thrift crowd, so I price things reasonably.

I also finished my edit of The Flower of Knighthood. I have a few changes to make to the manuscript, and will give it another proofread after that. I have to do some yard work in a group effort at the artist's community this weekend, but will spend the rest of my free time on the book and on getting more sale items posted in my shop.

Work VS Entertainment - Work Wins Again

I was so tired last night that I was tempted to watch a movie, but I got home a little earlier than usual, and after resting for a bit, I decided to bite the bullet and work on my book some more. I am very glad that I did. I am now only twenty-three pages away from completing this edit round, and I am very, very happy with the manuscript at this point. I'll finish this review tonight, and print the revised draft for another read-through going into this weekend. I've been working on editing the book non-stop now since March, and I am so tired I am about to fall down, but I love what I have accomplished. I am excited about meeting people at the Arthurian conference and telling them about it, and after a brief rest, I will start up again on my editing process for Parsifal. I was working on it from January through March when I realized I needed to go back to The Flower of Knighthood, and I want to get back to the Holy Grail book. I've also been percolating on the next book, the third one in the series, The Engagement of Sir Gawain, and an unrelated play I've been working on for a long time that is also written in poetry, and some other project ideas, mostly connected to my music. I have not been doing much magazine writing lately because I've been so focused on my books, but I need to get back to that, too. It fills another need I have in my creative life, and I also get to meet interesting people when I do magazine articles. I have been spending some time recently working to find good places for promoting my books, by joining Arthurian discussion boards and researching conferences and conventions. I plan to take at least one more media class in the fall at UCLA to gain some more skills, and after the conference is over, I am going to start seriously saving money to upgrade to a new laptop so I can speed up my progress on all of my projects. I've gotten a lot done the first half of 2008, and have big plans for the second half, too.

Knighthood is Flowering

I am more than two-thirds through the latest edit round of The Flower of Knighthood. I've made a couple of small word changes that really improved the manuscript. I wasn't even looking to do so, they just came to me as I was reading it. It really pays to be so diligent. You never know what you will find that you can make work better. I am hoping to finish this current once-over by this weekend. I gave my web designer friend the deadline that I want this up as a download by the end of this month at the latest, so we can iron out any problems before I go to France. In order for that to happen, I need to finish this round fast and do at least one more in order to check the changes I just made. Do you think I can do it? I think I can!

The Goblet of Fire is the Holy Grail

No wonder I like Harry Potter so much:

http://www.harrypotterforseekers.com/alchemy/alchemy.php

This is awesome. I love alchemical studies, and my second book, Parsifal, is highly alchemical. I am finding out that elements I put into it unconsciously are turning out to be deeply mystical alchemical symbolism. I knew there was a lot of deliberate alchemical symbolism in the Potter books, but I bet some of J.K. Rowling's stuff is also unconscious. The alchemy is an inherent process in the archetypal psyche that is activated by the process of seeking God and one's spiritual destiny. Developing one's creativity is a highly effective means of activating it.

I especially like this quote from the website linked above:

If you read Harry Potter with this symbolism in mind, the story will transform from an exciting battle between good and evil to a method of absolute liberation from death, suffering and evil.

Righteous.

Validation

Five people now list me as one of their favorite shops on Etsy! I posted some more items last night, and plan to put more up tonight. I also got almost halfway through The Flower of Knighthood over the weekend. I will work on it tonight, too.

Update on Crafts, Book, and Conference

I spent some time today listing more items in my little Etsy store, and discovered that three people from the Etsy community have listed me as a favorite shop! That made me feel good. I haven't even really gotten going yet and people are noticing me already. I'm going to spend a lot more time tomorrow working on it, and working on the book edits. I started again Thursday evening with another re-read of The Flower of Knighthood. I also looked over my trip preparation notes for the French conference I will be attending next month, and worked out my next steps and budgeting timeline. I figured out exactly how much I need to spend on the train from Paris up to Rennes ($152 round trip) and am going to pay for that and the balance on my lodgings this month. Then all I will need is money for the trip for food, taxis and activities. Everything else will already be completely paid for so I don't have to worry about it.

Book Review

All right, I finished another edit of The Flower of Knighthood this morning, one day ahead of schedule. I'll make the changes to the manuscript this afternoon and start reading it again for what I hope is the last time. I think I'll take the evening off first, though.

Booking

I am about three quarters done with this Flower of Knighthood edit readthrough, and I am really happy with the results. I worked on it last night instead of posting more stuff on my Etsy store online. I just didn't have it in me to tackle any more of that yet (it's a surprisingly involved process to post things, consisting of five separate steps including writing a detailed product description - I plan to space that project out over the next few weeks so it does not become too tedious), and I wanted to work on the book. This evening will be devoted to it as well, and I plan to be finished with this pass by the weekend if not before. It's going quite fast, so it may in fact be done earlier. My friend is researching the best way to post the download version, and I am going to do some web updates to www.fleurdamour.us this weekend to create a separate page for the books. I need to update the site anyway, I have not touched it at all in quite a while and it needs some attention. I am going to make some pages to promote the book on social networking sites, too. I was just reading a gloom and doom article about the book publishing industry, so maybe it is best in the long run to do the self-publishing route. I see my books as only one part of my creative output, and maybe it's better for me to retain control across the board of all of it and promote it as a whole.