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.