Hello 2009

The holidays were awesome this year, but I'm glad to get back down to business. I actually spent a lot of my time off productively - I ran a lot of errands, did some book edits, and read a lot. I've been researching several topics for writing material and just general personal interest, among them Nordic/Germanic mythology, and especially stories concerning Yggdrasil, the World Tree (cosmic axis mundi and world pillar). I read a useful book from the Los Angeles Jung Institute Library called Gods of the North by a British writer, Brian Branston. He gave a good overview of the Northern cosmogony up to and including Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. Anyone who has been following my Twitter posts lately knows I am kind of obsessed with the axis mundi. It's turning up over and over again synchronistically in my work and has been for some time, explicitly so at least a year now and more subtly for much longer. A related and dormant project I've been working on for a very long time suddenly flowered again a few weeks ago and I wrote 120 handwritten pages over the course of 24 hours. I woke up writing and wrote all day and into the night, and woke up again writing the next day. The story takes place on the world tree and is highly alchemical in nature. It started as dialogue in poetry with music, and I thought it would be something geared more to performance, like an opera or musical play, but it suddenly turned into a book with related songs, which I think is really interesting. I have not touched it since that day when I poured out so much in an unbroken stream, but I read the Northern gods book to prime the pump again. Creativity is weird - you can't predict when it will flower, but you can court it. You have to woo it with pretty images and words, and give it interesting material to think about that stimulates the unconscious mind. I'm very happy with what I did in fact produce lately, ecstatic in fact - it was of very high quality, and was also inspired by a book called Prospero's Island by Noel Cobb, about alchemy in Shakespeare's The Tempest. That work influenced mine, as well. My project is kind of a stew of different cultural elements, all of which are traceable to common Indo-European mythological roots.

I am also researching buying a new computer. I want an Apple Mac Book Pro and am looking all over the web for a deal. I need one to develop my music and multi-media project ideas, and I put off getting one last year so I could attend the three conferences I went to in California and France, but it's time to invest in the equipment I need. The only thing I've bought lately is some Amazon penny books for my research (the Rig Veda, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, The Niebelungenlied) but I've been pretty good with my funds otherwise because I want the computer really badly.

I'm one step closer to publishing the first book, too - my friend is almost done with the original cover painting. He worked hard on it over the holidays and said he just needs to clean up a smudge and will scan it for my approval this week. I met a writer at my housemate's holiday salon, and got some leads on publishers from him, too. I plan to research them and follow up with him this week. I also want to follow up with Charles Upton, a writer who contacted me about his book, a Sufi work entitled Shadow of the Rose. I've been reading it, I love it, and it has a lot in common with some of the conclusions I have drawn in my own work about Sufi influences on medieval European aesthetics and ideas. His publisher sounds very promising and I want to ask him for information. Another lady who also visited a housemate and who works on multimedia projects of her own expressed enthusiastic interest in reading my book, so I plan to follow up with her.

I also just made a sale on Etsy, too, my first of the year. A lady in Paris bought a little black dress; it will go out tomorrow via international post. I've been surprised how many sales I have made to overseas clients - Italy, France and Australia so far. One thing I worked on some over the holidays and need to devote more effort to in the coming weeks is my shop. I bought some closet organizing materials with a gift card I got as a present, and re-ordered a lot of my vintage merchandise. I need to photograph some things and make some more craft items, too. The shop only trickles in money, and less so the last few months due to the dire economy, but it's still fun. I've always loved vintage and I always wanted to be an entrepreneur in that regard, so it gives me an artistic outlet besides the writing.