Family History

My ancestry has everything in the world to do with my personal and creative interests and I've been researching my family's origins in the U.K. and Europe. I know I have ancestors from the area of Aberdeen and Fife, Scotland, my Leslie family on my maternal grandmother's side. My Brooks family is Anglo-Norman, originally from Broc in the Loire region of France, and an ancestor named Ralph Broc went to Essex County outside of London after William the Conqueror took England. The Broc family had supported him in his bid and were given some lands as a reward. Over time the name Anglicised to Brooks. I know I have Irish, German and Dutch ancestry but I don't know anything about exactly what town or region those people came from. My Swedish ancestors were named Sickles, and came from somewhere in southern Sweden, but that is all I know about that branch of the family. I want to visit the places I know I have family connections to. I found some really lovely pictures online of Broc, Essex and Aberdeenshire and put them up in my workspace, along with a copy of the bookcover design my friend Osvaldo Valle is working on for The Flower of Knighthood. I can already tell they are inspiring me. I can't travel anywhere abroad this year because I have a lot of family stuff to wrap up, but I hope to go back to France or the U.K. in 2012.

Flowering of Film

My roommate Brent is starting an effects shop/media production company, and he has talked to me in the past about doing something someday with The Flower of Knighthood. We carpooled this morning, and he was asking me if I have any ideas of how it would be adapted for film. That's a hard question for me, because I am not a screenwriter or filmmaker and if it ever was made into a show, the only things I'd insist on would be that the filmmaker retain some of the book's poetic element and stay true to its spiritual message, including the message of equality between the sexes as a reflection of the relationship between the male and female aspects of the divine nature, and the message of the cultural interaction of the old pagan religion in Europe with Christianity and the validity of each. There's no point in making the book into a film if you don't keep those, they are the absolute heart of it. Other than that, I think it would be up to the filmmaker, because it's my book, but it would be his or her film. I think a book takes on a life of its own once it's adapted into another form and I would not want to interfere with the filmmaker's creative process. I absorbed ancient European goddess mythology and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in order to write the book, and a director/screenwriter would need to absorb and process me in their own way. Brent has some interesting creative ideas, mostly visual ways to carry the audience into the story. I'd love it if someone would make a film of my book, and I respect Brent's creative ingenuity. I'm printing him a copy of the manuscript right now so he can read the whole thing at his leisure. We'll keep talking and see what happens.

Indie Pub Addendum

OK, I went ahead and opened an account at CreateSpace, too, figured why not. I'll play around with all of them to see which format I like best. I did that with WordPress and Blogger to decide which I preferred, and Blogger won hands down, as you can see. I also dug around a bit and got the name of the submissions editor at the U.K. publishing house that I want to approach. I'll start writing a letter to her in the next few days. I got rejected from a publisher recently, but I expected it. I met them at a conference and took a chance approaching them. They are a very small house, and they don't usually publish anything like my books, but there is a small area of overlap in subject matter, so one of the owners agreed to look at my first book. I submitted it over a year ago, and just heard back last week that they don't have a place for it, but after this long I was surprised to hear from them at all. I just looked at my manuscript file to see how much work I need to do to both submit it to the U.K. house and also to get it ready to upload if I do decide to e-pub, and I discovered I have two versions, one 151 pages long, the other 152 pages. I printed both to compare them. Both are versions of a master file, and I can't remember the difference. I need a clean copy to do some manual edits anyway, so that's one more thing crossed off the to do list.

Indie Publishing

I just set up an account for myself on Blurb, a new on-demand print publishing company. I heard good things about them, so I chose them to experiment with to see what my books will look like. I also signed up with Smashwords to publish on-demand e-books, also as an experiment, and with Lulu, one of the most established on-demand print houses. I still plan to contact a publisher in the U.K. that I think might like my work, but in the meantime I want to learn more about the process of indie publishing. I will probably sign up with Createspace, too, just to get the Amazon exposure, but Blurb actually had a promotion offer right now for 20% off all future orders I place with them, so it seemed like the time to try it, and I've meant to sign up with Lulu for months and have just been dragging my feet. I also wanted to grab the account name 'Fleurdamour' as many places as possible while it's still available, since that is my preferred name online. Blurb: http://www.blurb.com/ Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/ Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/ CreateSpace: http://www.createspace.com/

Back in the Saddle

I fell off this Horse so thoroughly the past few months that I had to request a password reset from Blogger - my account had gone into inactive mode because it's been so long since I logged in (October of last year). I honestly haven't had much to say. I've had some misfortune in family and health, and I had to take some time to get past being overwhelmed by it. My sister died in late December, on the same date when my father passed away long ago, and I've been very sad about it. I also have had to pursue obtaining a legal guardianship of my mother, because she's in a nursing home and incapacitated. My sister took care of a lot of things for her, and now it's my turn to do so. I'm just beginning to come out of that wreckage a bit and getting back to writing and editing, which is always my emotional salvation. My sister wrote, too, but never published anything, and it was a huge reality check for me to find some of her notebooks when I was packing up her apartment. They were buried uncompleted in a box. I have been stalled out to some degree the past couple of years for reasons of the economy and some personal things, but I need and want to achieve forward momentum again. I feel very sorry for her that she never managed to get her voice heard in the greater world. I also feel some guilt for not being able to help her more with that objective, but I'm trying to do the same with my own writing, so I know how hard it is to do it for yourself, let alone to try and help someone else. It's a cliche, but life is short and fragile, and I know that I've wasted time that I could have spent more productively in creative pursuits. Like most people, I was guilty in extreme youth of thinking I had all the time in the world, but none of us do. I'd say the biggest part of my holdup the past two years was what I've detailed in earlier posts - I bought a laptop that turned out to be a horrific lemon and spent a year trying to get it to work. You can witness the devastating effect that had on me from the trajectory of my posts here; they drop off to a trickle during that period and have never recovered. It's important to me to get past that. I love my sister, and I miss her, and I want to include her in my writing somehow. I think it might make her happy if I can make her a character in one of my King Arthur books. It won't make up for those poor unfinished projects, testament to the fleeting nature of life, but at least it will be something. Life happens, and death happens, and art is the best way for me to deal with both of them.

Teacher Research

Out of curiosity for a possible career path in the future, I've been researching what it would take to become a college professor. I'd be most interested in either an English or Medieval Studies path, although I've also thought about getting an MFA and teaching creative writing. I'm remembering why I didn't pursue an advanced degree and teaching in the first place - I was burnt out after getting my undergrad degree, and wanted to work on creative endeavors at the time rather than any further academic ones. I also wanted to make money, and couldn't face grad school immediately for that reason.The last thing I wanted in my early twenties was more debt. I'm not sorry I pursued what I did, but I do rather wish I'd been able to go back to school before now. After reading what I would still need to achieve in order to teach at a university, I'm not sure if I have it in me. I'd need to get a Master's and a PhD, and master at least one other language. I've studied three, French, Italian and Latin, but I would need to pick one and intensify my application to it. I'd need at least 5 more years of school and would graduate with a lot of debt. It might be worth it - I love learning, and I can think of worse ways to spend my time than submersing myself in studying the Middle Ages, but I also know how demanding my creative writing is. That's the main reason I never did seriously consider grad school before now - it took all of my spare energy to finish my two books, and I'm still editing them. I've got four more started that I deeply want to finish, and I was afraid that attending school would pull me away from them, which it probably would for a few years unless I could work it so that one of them counts as class product. I've also had a lot of other problems to solve, like helping my family after my mother's stroke, and dealing with 9/11 and Katrina. If I'd wanted to teach, I think I probably should have gone back to school at least ten years ago. I'm going to keep researching it and pondering it, but I'm also just going to go ahead and keep studying on my own, too. I've given myself a curriculum of material that will keep me busy for a while and that's suited to providing structure and inspiration for my books as well as a possible foundation for formal study. I figure if I never go back to school formally, at least I will have studied what I loved, and if I do pursue another degree, I'll be in a lot better shape to approach it. I definitely plan to at least take some courses in digital media, like enhanced e-book production and more electronic music studies. I think I really am fundamentally more of an artist than an academic, which is what I've always come back to in the past, but I want to make sure I explore every avenue in life that holds even the slightest interest for me.

From Bad Seed to Summer Isle

I haven't updated in a long time because I kept having terrible problems with my Apple laptop, and lost a lot of motivation while I was dealing with that. It kept having one kernel panic after another, complete with crashing, freezing and screaming, and nothing would fix it. Finally this month, after having reinstalled the OS twice and replaced the RAM, the hard drive and a video card that was a main component of the motherboard, the Apple Genius bar threw in the towel and gave me a brand new machine, in the current model. I was a little surprised they voluntarily did that, but I'm very grateful. Enough is enough. I was about to ask them to, anyway, it's been such a nightmare. My Apple was a lemon. I didn't lose any work except for a few photos because I have never trusted that machine and never used it for much. Hopefully, now I can move on. I've lost so much time to it that I've actually been mired in despair lately, but I soldiered on meanwhile in other areas and hopefully I can make up for some of the lost time. I named the first Apple laptop, the one with so many issues, Adam, thinking that naming it after Adam Kadmon, the primordial man closest to the divine image, would be lucky, but maybe the archetypal energy of the Fall was too much for it. I've chosen to give this one a positive, goddess-oriented name also associated with apples: Avalon.

I'm also no longer writing for the Mid-City Press. I did seven or eight articles for them, including some reporting to bring public attention to the funding problems at the Los Angeles community arts centers. I'm proud of my work there, but I decided that ultimately we weren't a good fit for each other and I resigned. I'm very glad to have had the experience, and leaving actually helped free me up to move on with my other projects. I've given up on pursuing arts journalism in the future as anything but a possible sideline, and I'm okay with that. It never was lucrative at the best of times and it's just nearly impossible to find decently paying jobs in it at this point, and I've got bigger fish to fry. When I first moved out to L.A. in 2006, I was still contemplating studying journalism formally via UCLA extension to supplement the education and experience I already have, but it's just not worth it anymore. I'd do much better to allocate my education dollars to learning e-book publishing, LogicPro, and saving some towards possible future endeavors in medieval studies. I'm still working on book edits for The Flower of Knighthood and Parsifal and those are actually going pretty well. I've taken a short break lately to read some books, Foucault's Pendulum and the Illuminatus! Trilogy. If I can get organized enough, I'd like to write an essay at some point comparing and contrasting those two books. They have amazing similarities of themes and structure - both incorporate outrageous conspiracy theories and use the kabbalistic Tree of Life for their structure, and both have a computer that plays a central role symbolizing consciousness. I requested a hold at the public library on another book by Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, and I'm looking forward to it.

Please Help the William Grant Still Arts Center

Per my last post, the William Grant Still Arts Center in West Adams, Los Angeles, is having funding problems due to the city financial crisis. If you are interested in helping, please go to the Facebook page for their supporters below to get updates and info about their upcoming fundraiser on May 8. The Center is fantastic and offers free and low-cost public arts programs for kids. It fills a gap left from programs that have already been cut in the public schools, and to lose it would be to lose a treasure of Los Angeles culture.

http://www.facebook.com/people/William-Grant-Still-ArtsCenter/1211918846

Mid-City Press

I did land the position as Mid-City Press arts columnist, and just turned in my third piece, a review of the Earth Day show at Eco-Logical Art Gallery. Here is the link - it came out today and made the front page, scroll down for the text:

http://www.midcitypress.com/

And here is my second piece, published a few days ago, about trying to save the William Grant Still Art Center from closing its doors due to funding problems:

http://www.midcitypress.com/?p=381

My first column came down already, but it was about the St. Elmo Village arts community in PicFair, a neighborhood in central LA that used to be the Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks compound. I am loving this writing assignment, I get to meet everyone creative for a ten-mile radius. It's very inspiring.

BP and the Beeb

I have been reading my beloved BBC, purveyor of Doctor Who and Monty Python, a lot lately for their coverage of the Gulf oil disaster. I read them to get a perspective on news events from outside of America. I wanted to see how they would handle news that a British company is dumping oil into the Gulf at a heart-stopping rate. Here's the link for today's piece:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8662573.stm

And here is their archive from the past two weeks:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/bp

I am somewhat biased on this issue because I lived in New Orleans briefly, and in Corpus Christi, TX when I was very little so this situation is really freaking me out. I'm heartbroken for the people who make their living from the Gulf, and worried about the animals and the long-term consequences to that complex ecosystem. I'm also a dyed in the wool Anglophile. A lot of my family is British and my folks even lived in Essex County outside of London for three years early in their marriage. I once tried to get hired at the BBC so maybe I could live in England myself someday. I'm glad they are covering it objectively.

Will the Editing Never Cease?

I am re-re-editing my first book. Even one of my roommates got exasperated with me when I told her I was at it again, wondering if I would ever finish it, but I got a fresh burst of creativity and found a lot of places where I could make it stronger. It's been long enough now since I looked at it that I lost some of my attachment to turns of phrase that can upon reflection be improved. I am readying it for e-publication, and I figured it's been this long, why not make a last push and make it as perfect as I possibly can? I'll know when I am done. Again, I learned so much writing the second one that I have found new avenues of self-expression that I can bring to prior work. It just seems slightly underdeveloped to me now, and I know how to fix that. What's a few more months in the course of a lifetime?

Back in the Saddle

My new hard drive seems to be working fine, knock on wood. I was relieved enough to go out and buy backup drives for the Mac and for my little cheapy PC netbook and laptops. I am now budgeted for May to drop some cash on Logic Pro for the Mac so I can get my music composition off the ground again. It's agonizingly slow to get all of the stuff I need for my projects, but it's an investment that is worth it.

Mid-City Press

I just sent an inquiry to a new community newspaper that is starting in my neighborhood. The editor and founder spoke at the local neighborhood council meeting last week and said she is looking for writers. I told her about my fine art and entertainment background and offered to write about local arts organizations and cultural institutions. I live in an artists' comunity in Mid-City, which is located roughly between between Mid-Wilshire and the Miracle Mile on the west and Koreatown on the east, and is bordered by the 10 freeway on the south and Pico Blvd. on the north. There are some very interesting things going on in the area, from St. Elmo's Village, a longstanding artspace for mainly African American work, to Mid City Arts, a graffiti and urban art collective. There is also the Eco-Logical Art Gallery, just outside of the official Mid-City map, but right down the street from me. One of our neighbors shows his work there and they have some really interesting shows.

Here is the newspaper's website - it looks to be in beta-testing stage still, not finished, but there is some info about the mission and content.

http://www.midcitypress.com/

I definitely approve of their aim to fill some of the vacuum in local coverage left by cuts at the LA Times and other more established media. It's brave to start a newspaper right now, and I hope they make a go of it.

Medieval Studies

I did not make it to the medieval studies conference last week in Arizona. I almost went, but then decided I would rather spend the money on computer things to advance my own projects. There is a Celtic studies conference coming up at the end of the year, at UCLA. I will go to that one - it involves no travel other than driving across town, and it's completely free. I am kind of sorry about missing this recent one - the topic was Man and the Natural World during the Middle Ages, which sounded fascinating, and I would like to visit Scottsdale again (I once went when I was six years old and liked it). I've just only got so much time, money and energy, and I have to allocate all of those resources as I go.

Medieval Europe Lives Again In the American Desert

I am going to try to go to this conference in February:

http://www.acmrs.org/conferences/2010/conferences.html

I had no idea that Arizona was a hotbed of medieval studies. Maybe the dry climate is good for preserving manuscripts? I found out about this conference through the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. I also want to go to one of their upcoming events, a lecture from a manuscript specialist at the Getty Museum:

19th History of the Book Lecture
“Searching for the Origins of Secular Imagery in Thirteenth-Century France”
Friday, January 29, 2010

The mid-thirteenth century in northern France saw an explosion in the production of books in the vernacular. Most art historians have seen the illumination of romances and histories of the period as a rather thoughtless adaptation of sacred painting models. In this lecture, however, Dr. Elizabeth Morrison (Curator, Department of Manuscripts, J. Paul Getty Museum) explores how artists adapted and ultimately broke away from their religiously inspired beginnings in order to create new formats and compositions more suited to their needs and the needs of a new breed of manuscript- the illuminated secular book.

From here:

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/calendar.html#1-29

It's part of this series:

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/history_book.html

It's good to live in a large town where you have access to resources like this. I'd be even happier if I lived somewhere like London, but I always try to use every place I live to its fullest.

Rotten to the Core

Well, I thought that my Apple computer was fixed when the Genius tech removed a faulty RAM module before Christmas, but when I took it back into the store to have the replacement installed, it crashed again. They ran a diagnostic, and based on that, they just gave up and replaced my hard drive. The model I had was no longer available, so they gave me a free upgrade to a more powerful drive and sent me home. All of this happened right before the holiday break, so I have not had a chance to fire it up again and re-do all of my settings and make sure it's back on the right track, but I plan to do that this weekend. I have to say, it's really been getting me down. I invested a lot in this computer, and it's a been a huge holdup for me this past year. I hope this solved the problem. The Apple techs were very kind, and have been awesome about addressing my concerns, it's just been awful to have so many things go wrong with what is supposed to be such a good machine.

Book By Its Cover

This year has seemed to be one of delay and disruption. I shared below how my computer has been giving me fits, and so has the economy. There have also been some personal things that have required quite a bit of processing on my part to come to terms with. I've taken some of the slow time to get mundane parts of my life in order, but I feel like the hour is approaching for me to move forward with my creative projects again. My first book is about ready to go as an e-book, but I've had a holdup with the cover artwork, because my artist friend who is doing it for me has recently had a quite serious illness. I am hoping he recovers soon because he's been through a lot the last few years and truly does not deserve this. I think his state has come mostly from stress due to unpleasant stuff he has had to deal with, which amounts to being unfairly punished for being unfairly punished. I can relate to that, it's certainly happened to me in the past, but I feel very sorry for him because he's sick enough to have taken disability time off from his day job and I know he feels physically awful. I am sharing this because I write this blog to share my experiences with developing my writing, and this kind of thing is part of the process. Reality is something that must be dealt with.

More Scribd

I've gotten about one thousand hits on Scribd since I posted a sample of The Flower of Knighthood there, so I'd say it's definitely a success. I want to write some essays and put them up there as well to generate more traffic.

Poisoned Apple

I wrote on here back in February how I finally was able to buy an Apple computer after months of saving. Alas, I have been having problems with it ever since, issues which escalated recently. It's been giving me one kernel panic after another, a state where the operating system is not communicating with the requested application and the machine freezes and shuts down. I took it to the Apple Genius Bar twice over the summer, and they could not find anything wrong with it because, as often happens, it not do exactly its same breakdown for them as it did for me at home. I then went online and researched the failure and its possible causes, and went so far as to erase the OS and reinstall it from scratch. I thought that had fixed the bad seed, but this weekend it failed more spectacularly than ever, so I took it in again. It finally did its screaming, seizing collapse in full glory for the tech, who realized it must have a faulty RAM module. He removed half its brain (one chip) to check, and it instantly worked better. It's still under warranty, so he ordered a replacement at no charge and told me it should be here in a week or so. It's operational even with one good chip, and it's working better than it has in months. I am very pleased, because I thought my Apple was a lemon and feared that I would have to return it. I was so happy to get it, and it's been so frustrating to me to have it be such a problem when it was supposed to solve problems. I've been stalled out on developing my music because of it and the drain on me from trying to fix it has slowed me down on my editing and writing, too, but hopefully now it can live up to its promise. I think my Apple has been expressing a metaphysical problem as well as a technical one - I've also written some about crossing Da'ath, the Abyss, in the Tree of Life over the last few months, and in the very center of the primal waste stands the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a serpent coiled around its base. Maybe I had to get past the poison of the snake in order to be able to apply the wisdom of the Apple. The doorway to the Qliphoth, the reverse Tree of Life, is in the Abyss as well, and makes its influence known through brokenness and corruption, often of a psychological nature. My RAM module, clearly a symbol of thought and memory, was corrupt, but through serious effort towards systems integrity it is in the process of being repaired. It's like a redemption of the Fall enacted in cyberspace, which is not a bad metaphor for the archetypal realm from which this process of spiritual initiation originates.

The Holy Grail

"How at the Castle of Corbin a Maiden Bare in the Sangreal and Foretold the Achievements of Galahad" by Arthur Rackham. From Alfred Pollard's The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (1917).