Book Stuff

I deployed my new Acer netbook computer this past week so I can get more book editing done during the day. I am averaging three pages of edits every morning when I use the netbook on my commute, which is not bad, and it's making it much easier for me to reach my goal of at least ten pages a day. I work on it over my lunch hour and in the evenings, too, as much as I can stand. Some days I really enjoy getting into it, re-reading what I wrote and polishing it to make it as beautiful and perfect as I can, and some days, when I am tired, it feels like climbing Mt. Everest over and over again while small rocks continually slip out from underneath my feet. That's when I know I need a break for a day or two, and just give up and read someone else's book rather than making my own.

I read something a little depressing the other day in media news, regarding self publishing. In addition to the terrible economy and the challenging media landscape, there are simply far more books now than potential customers for them, because print-on-demand has made it so much easier for anyone to create and sell a book. You really have to do a lot now to make your book stand out in order to attract customers for it. Publishing success seems to get exponentially harder every day. On one hand, it's awesome that creating things is no longer such an elite activity. On the other hand, the very accessibility that makes it easier to craft and release work has led to a media glut of untold proportions. I don't know about anyone else, but some days I feel so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data I am expected to process that I just shut down. I have never had much luck getting past the gatekeepers of traditional media, and I know that many worthy artists have had the same experience. Even Harry Potter and Star Trek almost never got content deals, which tells you indisputably that the old model was just ridiculous. Imagine how much money would have been missed out on if those had never gotten distribution, let alone the enjoyment they've provided, and who knows what awesome stuff is out there that never did get disseminated? A lot of what is in the public sphere now isn't very good, it has to be said, but I say yea to anyone who wants to make art and show it to people. It's just a little daunting to contemplate the effort it's going to take to get attention for my own worthy project. That's why I am writing this blog and Twittering and undertaking all of my social networking activities - like anyone else with something to say, I want to raise my profile because I want people to find me, and read what I have written and to take something useful away from it. Like any artist, I want people to know that I am alive, and to learn what I am about. I know I am taking the right steps, and I am glad to do the work - I love to write, I love to make things and design things, and to put all of that energy in service to my own art is my dream, so I am truly living it right now, by writing this account of my own creative process. That's the whole point of life, no matter how much attention you get, and you should never write for acclaim, anyway. The only way to go about this art thing is to write the best and most honest thing that you can, do what you can to shepherd it and hope for the best.

Arts and Crafts Movement

I buckled down this weekend and took photographs of all of the new merchandise I have for my vintage and crafts shop on Etsy. I got behind on that project because of my near-move and subsequent residential space re-design late last year and then due to the holidays. I wanted to get the new stuff up online for Christmas, but I was just too tired and busy. I've also been demoralized by this wretched economy. Honestly, I've only sold a handful of items from Etsy since Thanksgiving and I lost my will around it. I've got some really pretty stuff, though, and I think if I price it low enough, it might move. I had a lot of fun taking the pictures. I used the warehouse art space where I live, and I set up the portable closet storage that I got as a gift over the holidays, so organizing the stuff to shoot and ship it is much easier now. My housemate Robb, the video artist, was working out there, too, and played some chill ambient music the whole time, which made it more like play than work. I'm going to discount some of my older stuff into a clearance section, too, and I am rethinking ways to package some of my craft projects. I plan to make some toys and jewelry soon, too, which will also be fun. I've been working for so long and so hard on my books that I think I do need to mix it up a little more with other creative outlets. I cannot WAIT to get my Apple laptop and MIDI; I think this year is going to be fun no matter what.

The Holy Grail of Book Editing

My new little Acer netbook is a gem (literally, it's sapphire blue). I used it on my commute for the first time this morning and got six pages of edits done. I finished my first edit draft of Parsifal last night (via hard copy markup - that's by hand on a printed manuscript, which is why this whole process is taking me so long) and now I'm going back and transcribing the changes I made into the master file. I still need to print it out after every draft and read it as it appears on the printed page because sometimes you catch things that you miss on a computer screen, but this is still going to be a lot better with the netbook. I'll save on paper and printing and I'll save time and energy.

Higher Education

I've been looking at some educational programs to fulfill professional and creative aspirations that I have for the future. I found a publishing arts certificate program at Antioch College near Los Angeles that sounds interesting, but I just discovered that it is prohibitively expensive - $12,000 total. That's more than I want to invest in an industry that is undergoing what may well be the death throes of its prior business model. Honestly, I just want to gain the skills to release my own content, books and music, and at this point I think I will be better off for the most part investing in equipment and training myself to use it. I do think I want to pursue the music production certificate at ULCA - that fits well with what I actually hope to accomplish and it's only $6,000 total, payable a few hundred bucks at a time as you register for each short-term class. I had looked at a similar program at Musician's Institute a few years ago, but it was over $20,000 and they had no night school program, so if you were a grown-up and had a day job, you were out of luck. This UCLA one is much better in that regard, and I think it's just a better program overall. It's more geared toward the real world, and teaches all the Logic Pro applications and also music business material. I've learned some of that stuff piecemeal over my time in and out of the music industry but I'd appreciate a refresher course on some of it, and an intro to everything I don't know. My first priority at this point is to get the MacBook Pro and an upgraded MIDI set up, and then I'll register for the program, hopefully in the fall. That sounds doable.

Portable Workstation

I bought a little Acer Aspire One netbook from the clearance section at Best Buy, and I love it. I’ve barely started using it, but I can tell it is going to be very helpful for portable writing and edits. I maximize the productivity of my commute time by usually taking the bus and train instead of driving, and I do a lot of writing and editing then to bookend my day. I work from a printed edit copy while in transit, making markups by hand and then entering them to the file later. This is tantamount to creating an illuminated manuscript – it goes very slowly and creates double work for me, but I did not really have a solution until now. I am still saving up to buy an Apple MacBook Pro for music and larger projects, but until I get that, all I have had to work with is a very old IBM Thinkpad. The battery stopped functioning a while back and it’s so old they don’t make replacements anymore, which is why I have had to resort to such old-school tactics for my edits. My housemate has a netbook like the one I ended up buying, and I asked if I could see it. I realized it was a perfect solution for what I need, because it’s really lightweight (less than three pounds), it’s got enough memory for work documents and email, and if it gets lost or stolen, it cost less than $300, so it’s easily replaceable. I bought the sapphire blue one, because that was the only one marked down, and I love it. I named it Computer Jee, in homage to Slumdog Millionaire (I looked it up online, and that really is the way to say "computer" in Hindi), and found an awesome Ganesh painting for my desktop wallpaper. I plan to give it a test run this weekend at home on the edits I’ve already done that need to be entered. This really is a huge step forward for me – I think I can speed things up by 5-10 hours per week working this way instead of by candlelight and quill pen.

Here is the model I bought in case anyone is interested – I really think this is a good, affordable tool for writers: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9163291&st=acer+aspire+one&lp=1&type=product&cp=1&id=1218040477207

And here it is at regular price in different colors:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&id=pcat17071&type=page&st=acer+aspire+one&sc=Global&cp=1&nrp=15&sp=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960

And here is the main product website:
http://www.acer.com/aspireone/

There are several kinds of netbooks on the market right now, but I bought the Acer because it got the highest consumer rankings for its class. My housemate Ryan highly recommended his, too, and he's very tech-y, so I figured if he liked it, it would be good enough for me. You can apparently get a longer life battery for it, too. The one it comes with lasts for about two hours, but the six-cell battery is supposed to be good for up to seven hours of worktime. It’s a little pricey and apparently it weighs a little more, but I want one anyway. I think it is worth the investment.

Re: edit progress, I’m less than twelve pages from finishing my first edit draft of Parsifal. This is also huge – it still needs work, but it’s moved from being a true rough first draft into a workable manuscript. I should have all of the current edits entered by early spring (it’s six hundred pages long, so it’s going to take a while). I’m already on a second read-through at the back end, too. When I get tired of just entering edits I’ve noted by hand, I go back and read through the first section where that process is already complete. I also need to work on refining the notes in the back that explain my inspiration and the spiritual meanings behind some of the concepts. I have not touched that in months and it needs a lot of filling out, but I am very pleased in general with where I am with the book.

Old School Style

I promised a post about why I consider elderly ladies to be style icons, and what it is that I find interesting about the way that they dress. I love vintage clothes for one thing, as I’ve said before, and I like the way that older women mix the vintage pieces they held onto from their youth with newer things. I remember seeing ladies in NYC who had lovely coats they had obviously been wearing since the 1950’s and ‘60’s. One woman I saw on Staten Island walking in my neighborhood near the ferry to Manhattan had on a pretty black wool coat with three-quarter length sleeves that I especially liked and she had paired it with an equally retro black shift dress and contemporary gold sandals. It looked fantastic on her. Another lady I saw on the ferry one day had a perfect solid black ensemble complete with a huge patent leather handbag, a black raincoat, low-heeled black pumps and her hair tied back with a black and white print scarf. She was also hauling a black metal wheelie cart, the kind you use for groceries or laundry – she had dressed up that much just to run errands, which I thought was really cool. A friendly lady in my old neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn stopped me on the street one day, saying “Forty dollars!” and hoisting two plastic bags of groceries. I said, “I beg your pardon?” She replied, “Forty dollars for these! Everything is so expensive around here now.” This was right as Williamsburg was gentrifying into hipster-land from its original incarnation as an old Polish/Jewish neighborhood. We got into a conversation about how much the area had changed, and she told me that the great-looking Jackie O glasses she had on had cost her $300 for the frames alone at an optical shop on Bedford Avenue. She also looked amazing – in addition to the glasses, she wore her hair in a Jackie bouffant and had on an olive green ‘60’s swing coat. I like nice things, but I am naturally thrifty (that’s a survival skill for a writer, and it’s part of why I like vintage) and I value my older clothes. I really loved the fact that these ladies had bought well-made coats forty years ago and took good care of them so they would last. I consider that admirable. They are practical and once they got something good they held onto it, and used their energy and money for better things than shopping frivolously (something I’ve certainly been guilty of). The final style example I will give is a lady I saw walking with her husband in my neighborhood here in Los Angeles a couple of months ago. They were both Indian and about seventy-five years old, and she had on a sari with sandals and an old cardigan sweater, and wore her long silver hair in a single plait down her back. He had on little old man slacks and a plaid shirt, and they looked awesome together, like anyone’s cute grandparents, except for the exotic touch of the pretty sari. I think the fundamental reason I really notice these ladies is that they are old enough to be past dressing to please anyone but themselves. The outfits they were wearing weren’t anyone’s idea of current fashion – they were all dressed simply and in well-preserved but dated pieces, but every one of them looked elegant and comfortable, and their retro things looked perfect on them. They weren’t going for a conscious “look,” they were wearing what was natural to them. That’s what I liked the most about it – their clothes just made them look very true to themselves. That’s what I strive for. If it takes a lifetime to fully achieve it, that’s fine. I've got clothes from the '80's I'll probably be wearing for forty more years, so I've got a start on it already.

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.