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.