Heartbreak in the Garden

Yes, emotions are the meat of the human experience, but still,  so many of them are unpleasant! Sorrow and grief certainly suck. Jealousy, anger, fear, dread, shame... 

And as if sloshing through the mandatory emotional stew isn't enough, there are those days of extra helpings. It could be blood sugar level, PMS, jet lag, the result of a sleepless night... and BAM! Suddenly feelings are dialed up to super-hyper-excruciating. Everything seems unbearably poignant, unutterably sad, overwhelmingly touching.  

I’d been out of town for a week. (long story) So this morning, I took my coffee into the sunshine, to survey the empire, and see how all fared in my absence.  

Someone had shred toilet paper in the azaleas. It had to be either my husband or my dog since they were the only ones uncaged. And neither of them had watered.  But in spite of the abuse and neglect, my carrot patch had flourished.  In fact, it had grown so crowded it needed to be thinned.

I’ve never had luck transplanting carrots. Instead of re-rooting they'd always faint and wither.  Thinning therefore means putting some plants to death so the ones around them can grow.  

You see where this is going.

Luckily, I have a bunny and a Guinea pig who are happy to eat the delicate tops and tiny pale pre-carrots, so it isn’t exactly a waste. 


But still, how do I pick? Just reach in blindly and pull? Comb through looking for the smallest?


I choked up over the jumble of hopeful green -- the magic combo of water, sunlight, and dirt, growing exactly where I'd once cavalierly scattered their seeds.   

The arbitrariness of life and death was suddenly breath taking. 

The inequality of power between myself -- large, and mammalian and determined -- and the baby carrot plants --  innocent and entirely defenseless.  

Wally Dog watched me get weepy and offered to shred another roll of toilet paper to snap me back to the business at hand.

Thank goodness for dogness.   

xo

Amy

P.S. Dear Dears, Three months have passed & it is now time to harvesrt those un-thinned carrots. They are a bit motley, some knobby & misshapen, some teenie-tiny, but there are lts of them & they are all sweet. No regrets. 
xo
Amy

Amy's Believe it or Not!

Dearest Dears,

Starting tomorrow, Monday, February 6th, I, Amy Goldman Koss, am off for six days to grade THE NATION'S REPORT CARD! Yes, me and 59 other volunteers (read unpaid) shall be sequestered by the United States Department of Education to do whatever it is people like us do under the circumstances, for the NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress to evaluate the writing skills of American students. (Training on site.)

There is an unofficial pool afloat re. how long I will last before either being drummed out by the government project leaders when they discover that I am a high school drop out who cannot spell,  who harbors an intense hatred and distrust of authority, as well as a bone-deep skepticism regarding formulaic evaluation of creative skills.

OR I bolt for the airport in screaming boredom and/or horror.

Love and Kisses  

Your,

Amy

PS. I have indeed signed a confidentiality agreement, so will report back in full upon my return.
     In the interim, please feel free to weigh in with your feelings about The Nation's Report Card, our current system of evaluating student writing, or my likelihood of completing this six day, 8:30am -5:30 pm project, intact.

A Morbid Little Blog

Once Upon a Time I was pretty sure I’d live forever and have all the time and energy in the world to write whatever I wanted.

Then time sped up. Decades passed in a blur. The rate of death around me rose from the rare, hideously tragic, premature death, to the more mundane sad but not entirely unexpected. Now I find myself able to discuss the relative merits of various funeral/memorial styles with aplomb, and have opinions on how I'd like my own "celebration" managed.

Which makes a woman start asking herself this: If it takes a year or two to write a book, and a year or so to find the right home for it, then a year or two for that home to kill all the necessary trees or whatever it is they do that takes them so long to get the damn thing printed... Well, she begins to wonder how many more of those cycles of waiting, and rejection, and waiting, and hope, and waiting, does she have left in her? How many more can she stand?

And she asks herself this, too: Remember that guy* with locked-in-syndrome who had to blink out his exquisite little novel The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?  letter by letter with his one good eye? 

Shouldn’t we, (and by “we” I mean “I”) concentrate on writing only the stories that are so dear and important to us that if we had to, we’d blink them out?

That leads to the other question: Which of my books would I have written if I’d had to blink them?

Oy!

Laziness being as it is, I know I’d sooner eat whatever they served me in the home than blink even my menu selection. 

None the less, a new book must be started. Never mind that beginnings are not what they used to be. Never mind that if I swam, which I don't, I'd have to enter the pool from the ladder now, rather than the high board.

Never mind that I can no longer just jump in, tra-la-la, and start banging away at any old book. I can't pretend not to know how l-o-n-g and hard the process is. Can't trick myself into thinking it will be easy.


So, it has to be a book worthy of the countless future hours and months of straining to get it right, of the sore back and stiff fingers and furrowed brow, and eye strain. Worthy of self-inflicted misery, insecurity, pacing and re-writing and sleeplessness and self doubt. 

Because even if it’s not “blinking” it’s still blinking.  

And even if we're feeling fine, we never know which book will be our last.

xo

Amy  

*Jean-Dominique Bauby

Recycled Birthday!

(Dear Dears, can't write right now, so am running a b'day op-ed from the LA Times (with a few tiny edits) from last year. If you feel that's cheating, feel free to skip it and just send CASH!)

Every year about this time I start to squirm, watching my birthday lumber forth. I'm glad not to be dead. And even though my birthdays come way more often than they used to, and their numbers are surreal, I'm content to keep aging. That's not the problem.

The dilemma is what to do with the damn thing.

That is, after I've checked my newspaper horoscope, gleaning pertinent wisdom for the year ahead. Then, to my computer, where my b'day alert will have magically appeared on the screens of every one of my nine-hundred and forty-million close, personal Facebook friends. 

But the chore of pressing the refresh button and typing my heartfelt "Thanks!" over and over will only dispatch a fraction of the day. If I'd planned better, I might be able to eat my way across town gorging on free birthday meals, but I've neglected to sign up for any.

It's the puzzling birthday life cycle at work. 

As a little girl, when birthdays seemed eons apart, I'd recover from the disappointment of one less-than-magnificent birthday in time to get giddy in anticipation of the next. But I slowly learned that happiness didn't come in a box, no matter how promising the bow.

The next phase in my birthday evolution was wanting it to be an event. A big, crowded, noisy, inebriated celebration of my fabulousness by classmates, co-workers, strangers in bars…

After that, I just wanted my boyfriend/husband to do something romantic, which led to the next phase — kids.

During the chaos of planning and cleaning up, physically and emotionally, from my children's birthdays (the jumping houses, reptile sleepovers, chicken pox), my own birthday wishes ran from wanting a chance to shower alone in peace to fruitlessly begging the kids not to fight for the entire day, and maybe clean their rooms.

Years later, my wish was that I not have to bail them out or talk them down on my birthday.

My mom, in her 80s, keeps her birthdays quiet so the Evil Eye won't notice she's still alive. The only gift she requests each year is that my dad get rid of something from the basement.

My dad is pleased if the kids call, but I suspect his dearest birthday wishes are to see another birthday — and not to have to part with anything from the basement.

My mother-in-law still wants something sparkly for her birthday to make her friends jealous. My husband likes to hike to the top of things. My brother wants to smoke a cigar indoors. My kids just want money.

I turned 50 a few years back, right in the middle of my daughter's chemotherapy treatments for Hodgkin's lymphoma. Until her diagnosis, I'd been dithering about maybe having a party for myself, since 50 seemed like such a big deal. Ha! Life and its shifting expectations.

And that brings us to now. My babies have grown, survived and flown. I no longer have to feign interest in blowing out candles or hearing the birthday dirge. I don't need or want anything you can wrap; I can shower unmolested whenever I wish; and I already eat plenty of cake.

So, I shrug, and go back to sleep.
xo

Amy

New Years!

As I pack I tell myself, “At home I may pull on the same soggy jeans week after month, and shlump around in my ratty sneaks, but the woman I will be on vacation probably wears outfits and srappy sandals. This floral smock lurking  in the depths of my closet will be perfect!”

Actually, I‘ve slipped this particular dress into many backpacks and suitcases over the millennium, so why are the tags still on it?

That's because ever since some ancient shopping bout of delusion, it has been lying in state awaiting either my radical personality change, or its own Resurrection to the thrift store. Well traveled, never worn. 

Why? Because when ever I get where I’m going, I invariably find my lazy, comfort loving, ratty sneaks wearing self there waiting for me. 

And yet, there's something so sweet about the packing self. The self awash with unrealistic fantasies, flush with faith in the possibility of change, willing to suspend disbelief and imagine myself as someone who holds her stomach in.

The same part of my mind that allows me to re-pack that silly dress, allows me to make New Years Resolutions, although I know I’ll unpack them next December with the tags intact.  

As a fiction writer I certainly believe we are all entitled to the full range of human emotion and delusion. So -- Come the New Year I will write EVERY DAY! Fingers on the keys, mind on the plot, eyes on the screen. Perhaps cutting off one finger or toe any day I don't write -- allowing me 20 (very bloody) days off.


I will also diet and exercise like a woman who believes she is mortal -- or die trying.


And I'll either wear that damn dress -- or fly it as a symbol of fashion liberation.

And here’s The Who performing I WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zydAs5bRW1U

Happy New Year!

xo

Amy

Out-Of-House-Trifecta!

I am here to report that this is a big country and not all lives are identical!  This I know to be true having recently had three (3) illuminating Out-Of-House-Adventures! 

The 1st was a school visit to a tiny town in southern Illinois which, recently went from being a poor mining town to being an even poorer ex-mining town. 

The shuttered coal mine.

I visited their cemetery and ate at 3 of their (I think) three restaurants. One being Dairy Queen. 
Most of the town consisted of small homes, grassy fields, major woodsy parts with spectacular fall colors, foolishly fearless deer, horses, cows, and a sprawling K-8 school of enthusiastic, mostly blond, white kids whose principal looked like Southern Barbie.

When the school first called to arrange my visit and ask about ordering my books, I suggested they contact their local independent bookstore. HA! HA! HA! Now I know that the closest "bookstore" was the Walmart a few towns over. 

There seemed to be more corner bars then there were corners. 

It must be fun to be a kid there though, tearing around on bikes, tipping cows, racing the train to the unfenced crossing, cooking meth or whatever. 
But what do the grown-ups do? 

My Los Angeles-ness practically broke out in boils. It made me wonder how my books read to kids whose surroundings and experiences are so different from those of my characters. Unlike the kids in my books, when these kids skip school they don't take the subway to China Town for din-sum, or sneak into office buildings and ride elevators to the fifty-eighth floors just to make their ears pop. That would be hard to do in a town with exactly zero (0) buildings over three stories high. 

I'd puzzled over this sort of thing before when my books were translated for sale to kids in foreign lands, but I'd never considered how exotic they could seem in my very own language and country. 
                                                   

Stop #2 was a red brick Catholic middle school for at risk girls in urban St. Louis, Missouri. There I addressed the entire student body (72 mostly African American, uniformed, excessively polite but involved and curious girls) in one smallish room. 

These girls get to school early and stay until 6:00PM year round. They even have class one Saturday a month, unlike the girls in some of my books who are nannied about from piano to dance lessons, to pool parties at each other's houses, and spend a lot of time lolling around bored. 
I was asked (by a plain-clothes-nun, which I think is sneaky right there) why I choose to use foul language in some of my books. 
My auto-reply to this question (and you are free to use it if you are potty-mouthed) is not, “Who gives a shit?" But the smarmier: “As a writer, I love ALL words, just like I love all the characters in my books, including the mean nasty ones.” 

                                              

The 3rd phase of the Amy-Out-Of-House-athon was spent wandering a mostly deserted suburban mall with (according to their website) 215 stores & 45 restaurants. I don't know if that includes the kiosks. 

There I discovered a preponderance of sparkly things for sale, not just for little girls, but for grown woman as well. And not elegant, 1930s evening ware from the black & white movies type glitter, but hysterically screaming, super flashy, giddy, giggly, clothes, shiny bags, belts, hats, wallets, sequined hair sparklies, twinkly make-up, girly outfits for phones and steering wheels, and pink feathered princess stilettos like those once offered exclusively at Fredrick’s of Hollywood. 
What a blinding species we became while I wasn’t looking!

It occurs to me now that the greatest fun would be to mix it all up and as my pal KT says, "Blow the stink off!" 

• Take some of those Dairy Queen country kids I met in Illinois and plunk them down in the massive food court of the Tapanga Canyon Mall. 
• Put those St. Louis city girls on horseback and let them race through the unfenced small town cemetery. 
• Scoop up the sparkly crap from the mall and heave it into the sea. No wait, that would hurt the fishies. Send it to outer space? No, we’ve hurled enough trash at the stars.  Ah Ha! I just so happen to know of a town with an unused coal mine!!!! 

xo

Amy
  

P.S. Apropos of nothing, here's a picture of Wally Dog.  

Writer's Block

There's never a Q&A where someone doesn't ask where the author gets her ideas. Most of us have some semi-snotty, semi-true pat reply like, The idea store up on Sunset, the newspaper, my dreams, whatever...

Or we answer the question with a question: How does anyone get any idea? How do you get the idea to walk across the room? Have some pie? Beat the kids? -- You just think of it. 

I used to say my books initially came like any other ideas, but those that evolved into words on a page were the ones that stuck around, buzzing relentlessly -- like mosquitoes in the night. 

Truth is, I found it a puzzling question. 

What did the asker mean? Isn’t it the nature of the brain to have ideas? Was it possible not to? What about when the askers vacuum the rugs or are forced to endure banquets or jail time or religious ceremonies? Don’t they get the What Ifs? Such as, What if that droning officious twit burst into flames? 

Perhaps the askers just didn't understand the jump between having fantasies and being driven to nail those fantasies (bam! bam! bam!) to the page in an obsessive frenzy?  

BUT (and now we’re spiraling closer to the point of today's blog) what about when those ideas which the author has been taking as her due, suddenly... stop?
                                               ***

Many non-afflicted writers will tell you there’s no such thing as Writer's Block. 

• There is fallow time when one might need to refill the blah, blah blah... 

• There's the reactive flinch caused by encroaching reality and the numbing touch of the outside world; Discouraging words from agents, editors, reviewers, book buyers, an ungrateful public or the bank that holds the mortgage. 
• There is cowardice.
• And there is laziness. 

But Writer's Block (according to those who have never felt its sting) isn't like a cramping intestinal blockage threatening peritonitis, nor a road block in Rwanda manned by jumpy, trigger-fingered teenage rebels armed to the teeth. It is simply the self-doubt any grown up feels when attempting anything new, mixed with an indulgent dose of woe-is-me.

“If I were a miner,” the pre-Writer's Blocked author might say, “would I need inspiration to go daily into the mine?” (smirk) “And does the checker at Ralph's get to tell his boss he doesn't feel the bagging today?" (derisive snort) "Or that his sweeping-up muse had forsaken him? Can a teacher shun the classroom to sulk and wallow in self pity when she doesn’t hear the call to teaching?”

Writing is work. A grown up goes to work. That is all.

Nonetheless roughly nine-zillion books have been written on overcoming this non-existent malady. Written I suspect, by people attempting to explain the unexplainable and make a couple of bucks killing time till their own blockage clears.  (see bloggers)

Their advice reels from forcing yourself to sit down and stare at the screen, to writing gibberish, to whistling past the computer as if you haven’t a care in the world, to changing your diet, schedule and surroundings, to adding vitamin supplements sold here at special discount for YOU!  
... Follow these six, nine, sixteen simple steps! Eat all you want without gaining weight! Bring the pa-zazzle back into the bedroom! Stop acid-reflux, acne, incontinence and hair-loss once and for all! And write the award winning, best seller, blockbuster you know you have inside you! Or your money back!

While in the grip of WB, ideas still waft but they don't resonate or persist or buzz. There is no chemistry, no lust, no urge to obsess. They are merely passing thoughts. Which is to say once we become Writer's Block sufferers, we gain an intimate understanding of the once baffling  question, Where do you get your ideas?

In fact -- we have no clue where they come from. None. 

Suddenly, the askers are not an alien life form devoid of imagination. They are us. A less smug us. Us minus that unknowable thing that makes writers write. 

xo

Amy