Etsy Update

I posted more vintage clothes for sale on Etsy, about fifteen items, and I sold one within an hour of finishing. Awesome. I noticed my shop has more fans, now, too, a total of fourteen. I spent some time this weekend starting to make some things, too, some jewelry and other little trinkets made out of fabric which I will post soon. My designer/artist friend Oz started a shop last week, also, to sell his paintings and drawings. As soon as he gets it going I am going to form an Etsy team with him to have cross-promotional events. His shop is named Forestgod, and mine is Fleur D'Amour, the flower goddess. Perfect for joining forces.

Shop updates are here (also in the sidebar to the right):

http://fleurdamour.etsy.com/

World Traveler

I just pitched an in-flight magazine with a story based on my France trip. I think they would be a good fit, and they have a huge circulation, so I hope they go for it. If not, I have researched six other places to send it, and there are always more.

I've decided the safest way for me to blog about my trip without giving up too much of the material I may need to reserve for first rights in a magazine is to write here for now only about the conference itself and the measures I took there in support of my book and to leave details of the sightseeing for later. It was my first academic conference, and I learned a great deal and met a lot of people. I want to write about it here in case it can help anyone else evaluate whether that kind of event would help their own project or career. I also just had a blast in general in France, and want to preserve all of my memories in writing. As you can see from my photos, it's so, so pretty, and I went at probably the best time of the year, with perfect weather.

More Pictures and More Words

I posted my month's allotment of photos on Flickr, and all of them are from France. The ones above are but a few samples - you can see more of them at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fleurdamour/

I am also adding this link to the sidebar at the right for future reference. If you are interested, check back, because I took hundreds of pictures on this trip and will post a lot more in the future.

The Holy Fool

My manuscript for Parsifal is 600 pages long at this point. I have finished an editing pass through the first section, which ends at page 147, and have gotten as far as page 184 in the second section. I remember when I was writing it last year, sitting on my bed one evening and it suddenly broke into the two sections. I was surprised, but it made sense. The first part of Parsifal's story is his upbringing in the forest, his first home, the backstory of why he ended up there, and the events that carry him to Camelot, his second home. The second part is his leaving of that second home on his epic quest for the Holy Grail. The place where my text divided is right as he is knighted - it gives a clean demarcation between his boyhood and the mature manhood that follows after he leaves his education and enters his career. A lot of what these stories mean to me personally and why I was motivated to write them is the coming of age motif for a knight, an icon of masculinity, in an era that is timeless and mythological - I have been working for years on animus development, the advance of my archetypal inner masculine psychological components, and these knights and their growth into heroic manhood both stimulate and reflect that process. Camelot and legendary Britain are also an excellent metaphor for the unconscious mind, the place where these processes occur. I saw a quote on the wall at the King Arthur exhibit I attended in Rennes, France, at the conference that I felt expressed something of this concept very well. It said, “Pour sa dame, le chevalier dans le secret de son coeur décide de faire des prouesses…” My command of French is imperfect, so I am unsure of the tenses, but it basically says, "For his lady, the knight in his secret heart decided to undertake heroic feats..."

As far as the manuscript goes, I also need to finish writing a notes section in the back explaining some things about the book and my sources and creative ideas. I have written some entries but I have a lot of scattered material that still needs to be distilled. I had some very unorthodox sources of inspiration for this book, not all of which are Arthurian but are rather from a range of spiritual traditions because the Grail unites all of mankind within itself. There is also still the same Jungian vibe as in my first book, an aspect which will never leave my writing as archetypal psychology is intrinsic to my own creative process. There is a process of participation mystique that occurs in the writing of these books that is part of the animus development that I outlined above. These characters are elements of my own experience of the archetypes and by expressing them, I explore myself. Parsifal is a Holy Fool, an innocent who is untouched by worldly ways until he is near to manhood, and he carries that purity of spirit with him on his quest. His innocence is the very core of his heroism. I was glad to discover that element in my own nature, and to allow it its full expression in this work.

Moving Forward

I have spent the last few weeks working on organizing myself for the rest of 2008 so I can make progress on all of my projects. I toiled for several days to create a useful list of everything I need to accomplish and put all of the items both in categories and in chronological order of when they should happen. I also color-coded everything according to its importance, and according to whether or not it involved an immediate cash outlay, so I can just glance at the thing and see what's a priority. Lastly, I made a budget for all of the listed items that do require an expense, so I now know exactly how much I need to allocate to meet my goals. I've also been moving forward with editing my Parsifal manuscript, researching publishers for it, looking for grants and writing contests, following up with contacts from the conference in July, joining more social networking groups, looking into taking some more UCLA classes, and putting aside money for a new computer. I've also been working on pitches for my France experience, which is part of the reason I have not yet written much about it. I don't want to publish too much here about it until I know what, if anything, will be going into articles elsewhere. I don't yet have a track record as a travel writer, this will be my first foray into that arena, but since this also falls into the area of arts and culture, I am comfortable enough to try it. I love to travel and that market is a lucrative and dependable one, at least more so than fine arts. It's also a happy marriage with my artistic interests, since almost all of my travel is planned around arts events of one kind of another. More predictable income from writing assignments would help me cross things off of my list much more quickly. I've also made some more sales on Etsy, and I plan to focus a little more on it going into the holiday season. I need to sit down and make some things for it, something I am looking forward to. I have a lot on my plate, but I feel good about getting so much done thus far in 2008, and if I can close out the year by knocking things off of that list, I'll be really happy.

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.

Back from France

I returned from France on Tuesday the 22nd, but have been too tired to blog about my trip yet. I have never been so jet-lagged. It's so bad that I've gone to bed between 8:30 and 9:30 every night this week, which felt amazing, but I've gotten exhausted every afternoon around 4 pm because my body thinks it's past midnight. Bear with me, I certainly have more interesting things to say about the trip than that I am tired; it really was great, so good that I am already planning another visit for next year.