I was painting my toenails this morning and thinking how exasperating it is that I can find time to write something every day, yet I can’t manage to do something as simple and quick as paint my toenails more than like twice a month.

My priorities are all fucked up, I told myself. Today’s the day. I’m gonna get to work, make a hair appointment (two months since my last cut and probably four since I last dyed it…it’s looking a wee bit shaggy) and even make a nail appointment. Ooh, I felt really proud of myself for the nail appointment idea. I haven’t had a manicure since…um…

Junior high school.

Really? That long? Well, yeah. I file and paint my fingernails about as often as my toenails, with even shoddier results. Honestly, I have no idea how anybody who’s ever looked at me can take me seriously.

And yet I am. I am dead serious. (See? There was a point to all this.) I make time for the things I care about, the things that are important to me. Special quality time with my daughter. Good, healthy meals for my family. Reading books about things that I believe are important for me to know. And writing.

There’s a difference, I’ve found, between wanting to be a writer and wanting to write. I write. It’s like I was saying to a friend the other day: if you write, you don’t wait for inspiration to hit, then struggle for the phrases, the forms, the narrative voices. It’s like any art in that you need to practice. If you’re an artist, you sketch or sculpt every day. A pianist practices every day. Those who wish to write, write every day, even if what they write has no ending, no plot, or is just a series of phrases. Then, when the inspiration does hit — and believe me, it does — you don’t have to go scrounging for the right words and agonizing over how to portray your idea. Your toolbox is open. It’s all right there at your fingertips.

What am I going to do today? I’ll tell you. In a couple of minuites, I’m going into the bathroom to finish getting ready for work. I’m going to get to work, completely forget everything I resolved to do today, not remember about the hair appointment or the manicure until I get home tonight and read my LJ replies, and then I’m going to smack myself in the forehead for having forgotten, forget again, and not even think about my hair and nails again for another week or two. This is my M.O. I never remember this type of thing.

What I am going to remember to do today is write. It’s not just a habit, it’s a pleasure. Even more, it’s an investment in my chosen art. I’m going to come home tonight, fix dinner, do some stuff around the house, and then I’m going to sit down and write whatever I want.

What are you going to do?

xo, Amy

(Cross-posted to LiveJournal)

I attended a meeting of the Democracy for America – Long Island group in Mineola on Wednesday night. Afterwards, a few of us went out to a diner, and the conversation digressed to personal stuff. One woman mentioned that she’d written a romance novel a few years back, but it was so long ago that she couldn’t remember what it was called. I felt a lot of sympathy for her—not only because she’d put all that effort into a book that had never been published (I know how that feels), but also because occasionally in the course of creativity, things get forgotten. Stuff was that incredibly important a few months or years back doesn’t seem so important now. And it’s a little sad to realize that. I could tell she felt kind of weird about it. Maybe not depressed, but wistful. I hadn’t liked her much before that, but I really empathized with her then (and she turned out to be a pretty nice person, too, so I’m glad I listened).

I encounter the same thing a lot in my own work, which has become somewhat voluminous and unwieldy. Every once in a while, I’ll pull out a notebook and find a poem I’d completely forgotten about, or a character sketch that seems totally new. Naturally, I’m not going to remember every single thing I’ve scribbled on a Post-It. Heck, just going through my wallet, I generally come across a dozen notes I’ve scrawled out and stuck in there so I didn’t forget (and instantly forgotten). Oh, and don’t ever ask me to list all the SPASMS I’ve done. I doubt I could come up with the titles of twenty, off the top of my head. They’ve never made the cut for inclusion in my long-term memory.

See, I’m not really a nostalgic person. Not that I can’t look at the past fondly, but I’m pretty firmly entrenched in whatever I’m doing at present, and when I’m not busy with that, I’m brainstorming on future stuff. The practical upshot of this is twofold: 1) I get a lot of stuff done and 2) I forget a lot. Not on purpose, it just sort of happens. I don’t discount the past, though. If it wasn’t for yesterday, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

The thing is, just because old creative stuff doesn’t seem that important anymore, or because it didn’t lodge in your head, doesn’t mean it didn’t—or doesn’t still—serve a purpose. Even if it’s total shit.

Rediscovering the past is interesting and useful. For one thing, looking over past works is a good way to measure how far you’ve come. Re-reading stories, I’m surprised sometimes at the progress I’ve made. Even over the past two years, I notice that my dialogue has improved, the pacing has tightened, and over-usage of certain phrases has decreased. I’m pleased. The work has paid off. I bet if anybody reading this who is actively working at their writing compares a story from three years ago to one they’ve written in the past few months, they’ll notice a significant change. (At least, I hope they do!)

So re-analyze your stories, or poems or music or art or whatever. Try to remember what you were thinking of when you made them, and why you made the choices you did. It’s a useful tool for marking progress, noting change, and hopefully patting yourself on the back for growing as an artist. Don’t concentrate on how awful it was or let it get you down for having been a bad writer/artist/etc., because you’ve almost certainly developed into a better one now.

For me, it’s also a great way to get new ideas, or an opportunity to improve on old ones. My story a while back, “The Too-Much-Noise Wizard,” is from a book I made when I was maybe four years old. I’ve always loved that title, and I finally crystallized it in a readable story, as opposed to a crayon scribbling.

I don’t look at my old stories too often. Nobody should. But every once in a while, it’s good to go back. Yesterday’s gone, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

xo, Amy

The fabulous Scott Bateman animated an anecdote about my brother and me changing high schools as part of Bateman365, his animation-a-day project (which he kindly claims is partially inspired by yours truly).

Would you like to see how I’d look as a Bateman character? Or hear my voice?
Click here to see! And hear!

Got something going on tomorrow. Might not be back for a while.

Wish me luck.

xo, Amy

Did some work on a spanking new project today. As in December, SPASMS will be a little spotty while I get this longer work under control. I think you’re gonna like it.

xo, Amy

So I’ve heard a lot of people talking about this movie called “Brokeback Mountain,” which is apparently about gay cowboys. It doesn’t really sound like my kind of thing, but I guess the movie made an impact on my psyche, because one of the things I dreamed of last night (in addition to a boy in a sleeping bag falling through the ceiling into my living room, a trip to Albany where Rob and I discovered that women aren’t permitted to reproduce in city limits, and a trip to Macarthur Airport) was that I won tickets to watch the movie:

In the dream, two men dressed as cowboys were professional checkers players who traveled around the country playing checkers championships. Checkers was depicted as an intense, very cerebral game on the level of chess or go. When they weren’t on tour, they were walking around in the woods complaining about the trials of constant adulation. But then, while on tour, they accidentally step into a meat locker that resembles a gymnasium locker room, except everything is made of stainless steel and the women from Albany who tried to get pregnant in my previous dream were all sitting there naked, reading magazines and waiting around to have their heads chopped off and boiled in oil as punishment for attempting to have children. There were signs up in the waiting room to the effect of “YOU SHOULD HAVE ADOPTED.”

None of the women seemed too concerned over their fate, which struck me (the dream me, watching the film) as implausible. Then, as if on cue, Ted Raimi came out dressed as a Master of Ceremonies and shook his finger at the women, sternly saying, “Let this be a lesson to you,” and let everybody go, so I realized the women must have been expecting this all along, which was a brilliant device because otherwise, how could they maintain a female population in Albany?

The cowboy checkers player didn’t know that the women were released, though, so they leave the facility and jump into a 1972 Monte Carlo and drive around, General Lee-style, shooting up the male citizenry of Albany and driving up the stairs of the state capital building to gun down Governor Pataki…only to realize that they’ve made a terrible mistake and kill themselves by driving off a mountain which I could only assume was called Brokeback Mountain.

Finis

Also, I dreamt that I could eat coconut if it was mixed in with ice cream. It was pretty good.

xo, Amy

I’m doing research on things people hate for an upcoming story. Please click on this link (the whole paragraph is a link), which will direct you to my five-question research poll.

Thanks!

xo, Amy

Didn’t do a SPASM….

Did finish writing and editing a 10,000-word story for submission to the Misfit Library.

Wish me luck, kids.

xo, Amy

Had an awesome idea for a title tonight. No story, though — I worked 10.5 hours, stopping only to do domestic stuff before heading back out to the coal mines tonight.

xo, Amy

My story “Goulash” is in the new edition of www.mungbeing.com. Check it out!