Flowering

I just made the last edit changes to the manuscript and am about to print it for another proofread. Awesome. I am getting tired, but I have to say that this last runthrough was very freeing. I remember when I wrote earlier drafts, and especially the one I sent to the Copyright Office to register it, I was very attached to particular turns of phrase and thought I would never change them. Well, after writing another book and realizing that I could in fact improve on some of my previous writing, I am much more willing to go in fearlessly and be beholden to nothing if I can find a better way to say it. I did not change any of the poetic phrases that I am very proud of, but I learned that it was highly possible to find clearer expressions for some things that I thought were set in stone. I have become much less of a precious writer through this whole process, meaning that I give more to the reader now, I don't make him work as hard to understand me. I think I was a bit of an artiste in the past, which is understandable for an author on their first book, but I see now that I was a bit too impressed with myself a few years ago when I finished the first draft. Again, I consider that that's forgivable, and it's also a very young thing, which I was as an artist. The more I write, the more I will learn. I got really, really frustrated at the poetry conference I went to in March when one of the workshop leaders talked about not being too eager to find your voice as a writer. I don't really agree with that, because you DO need to figure out your creative identity, your voice, on the page, and you can only do that by writing, but maybe he meant a little bit of what I am saying here. He used the example of an established female poet who wrote really spiritual and ethereal poems for a long time, and then suddenly started writing in the voice of an earthy man. He thought she found her voice too early, and had to change it. I don't see that as a change in style so much as a psychological development, personally; it sounds like she hit a certain phase of growth and her animus, her inner masculine, kicked in to correct and balance her conscious attitude. My Arthurian knights are expressions of my own animus. My books are very feminine, but there are these strong, spiritual male figures at the center of them. That's like an axis mundi for me, a pole that provides support for my own female energy. I don't think anyone at the poetry conference, and most people talking about any kind of art, really, fully understand that the important thing about art is not just the aesthetic product, but that it is also about the internal psychological and emotional process that you go through while making the product. You HAVE to find your voice, your identity, in order to develop it, even if that means changing it at some point; you can't just flail around for years not knowing who you are or how you write. But I can understand having to make a course shift in order to break down a kind of expression that might be walling you in or limiting you as an artist. Making these additional passes through The Flower of Knighthood has enabled me to grow more and more, and I am very grateful for that.