What my poetry looks like....

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Day 1

Miles covered: 759
States visited: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas
Where I'm spending the night: Amarillo, Texas
State of my cat: Annoyed

How old do I now feel?

Today is my last day of packing before I hit the road tomorrow. The apartment is in chaos, I'm stressed, and the cats are hiding. In my "cool down before I freak out" break I found this online. My post will not do this justice, either in terms of shock or my previous dedication to alternative music, but time and energy dictate that this post must be quick. Meet seventeen year old Spencer Elden. Does he look familiar? Maybe not, after all the last time you saw him was gracing the cover of Nirvana's "Nevermind."

That was 1991 folks, seventeen years ago. I now feel quite old.

Moving!

I'm sorry for my extended blog absence, but I couldn't stand to write on here without making my announcement so I avoided starting a post. But now that everything is officially official I get to let you all know what is going on with me and my mini-family. If you haven't been clued in by the blog title, I'm moving! Here's a picture of my new hometown:

Look there's a lake, some mountains, a lot of trees. I know a lot of people have wondered about my desire to live in a small town. but I just feel more comfortable and relaxed when I'm not fighting traffic and crowds. In fact my new destination looks similar to my actual hometown:


Wait a minute, they look suspiciously similar. Let's do a closer comparison:

Hmmm, I'm just not sure. I mean they do seem to have this in common:

And that is a pretty distinctive monument.... I'm going to go out on a limb and say they just might actually be the same location. Fascinating!

So in an act of contradicting everything that I've ever said about finding a job back home and living there, I'm packing my bags and heading to New York. And by bags I mean some sort of giant moving truck with big strong men and women to pick up and move my things for me (recommendations desperately needed). I'm sure I'll have more details soon, but expect me there in ohhhhh roughly 15 days. Scary!

The Uninhibited Writer

I believe many writers, myself included, would like to think of ourselves as somewhat free-spirited and given to embracing our creative muses. Yet today I was thinking about how many restrictions we internally place on our own productivity. For one, we worry endlessly about writing or not writing. Rather than accepting that sometimes we'll write more than others and take time off to soak in the world and relax, we instead greet those times (be it days or months) with a sense of panic as though somehow in this time we're taking off we are less deserving of the title "writer." Look at my example from last week, a few days of not working on my writing and I was already to throw myself into a full wail of panic. Of course this is after months of not working on my novel...see there I go again.

As writers we tend to also embrace certain rituals. We're just as bad as sports players but instead of wearing the same sweaty shirt for a season we seem to insist that the sun must be at the right angle, our pen the right level of inkiness, and our notebook the right size. Here's the real truth, none of those things really matter they're just a lot easier to cling to than forcing ourselves to embrace that we simply might be in a lull of creativity. We could do two things, embrace that, or force ourselves to sit down and get the work done. I've talked before in this blog that writers, especially beginning ones, flood the conference Q&A sessions with questions about how the famous writer standing up at the podium begins and finishes his/her work. These questions are designed either to make the writer feel better about his or her methods or serve as a blueprint to follow once they return to their own desks. For people who don't want rules inhibiting their work, we certainly embrace them as the path to success.

On a personal level, I've been so caught up thinking of my missing women in a certain way that I've failed to see some of the other ways I can explore the topic. I had extremely strict guidelines that I'd internally set for myself when writing these. The first was that I wanted each to be under 250 words to sort of keep the attention each received relatively the same. I recently found one that forced me to change that approach. I also was convinced I'd complete one section of my series before moving onto the next. This is the actual cause of my lack of work on these. I'm now letting myself swing back and forth between my sections. I already feel inspired again and can't wait to begin working on some this week. Tonight I'm doing the research end of it.

So fellow writers, do you have this same issue? Or if you're not a writer, is there something in your life that you're convinced must be done a certain way that you're incapable of thinking about it from other angles?

Discoveries

Even though it's still 90 out during the day, I'm trying to keep the windows open in the apartment. Thursday is slowly adjusting which is good because if I do move back to New York we certainly will not have air conditioning in the summers. This has led me to discover two things today. The first is that Gil is reacting better to loud noises. She startled as two men dropped something large and metallic on the sidewalk but recovered much more quickly than I would have suspected. Perhaps 3 years of living next to the train tracks in the exact location they couple cars has done her good. Now if only we could get her used to thunder and ASU fireworks.

The next interesting bit is that a guy living in the building adjacent to me plays the piano beautifully. His voice is a bit Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but I'm fascinated by an actual musician living nearby. I've read before that it's difficult for musical artists to live in apartments given the time they need to work on their music. They of course can rent extra space, but sometimes that's cost prohibitive. I've said before that I was annoyed by my neighbors practicing singing, piano, and the violin, but what I'm frustrated by is the repetitiveness of their practice. On those days I'm probably being a cranky pants and want a convenient excuse for my lack of productivity in my writing. But while the practicing piano player plunks out the same five notes over and over for a good hour or so before quitting. This guy across the way plays whole songs and different songs.

And really, that's all that's interesting with my day.