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.