March 6, 2008 – Amber Nicole Brooks

Having the life of a professional, full-time writer is my ~~dream~~ ~~long-term goal~~ ~~destined vocation~~. I’m one of many with said inclination, I know. But, what is “full-time” and how much time is optimal for producing good work? I know there are some writers who claim to write for truly six to eight hours a day, but I think anyone that can maintain such a schedule, for more than a couple of weeks, harbors a specific type of mania. I had one of those six hour days yesterday.

It’s euphoric, and depressing, to come to the end of a large project. Yesterday I finished a novel, a novel I’ve been working on, in sometimes misguided directions, for years. Since 2003. So, that makes five years. Of course, this isn’t the first time I finished it. I finished it, as a collection of fifteen short stories, back in, oh I don’t even know. I reworked that material and tried to pass it off as a novel for a workshop in 2006. Then I decided, at the end of 2006, that the entire thing needed a different chronological structure and a new point of view. Profluence. So.

Over the last week or so I was nearing the end of this year-long rewrite; yesterday I rewrote two, glaringly wrong, chapters and did a huge chunk of superficial editing. I can’t believe some of the stuff I wrote in the past. Things like “The girls collapsed ~~to the floor~~.” Duh. For the most part, editing consisted of crossing out phrases. Dumb phrases.

Working though a novel-length manuscript led me to to feel alternatively masterful and idiotic. There is a type of mania that sets in when really nearing the end of something, whether it be a large work or even a short story. (Maybe it’s just the caffeine.) But then, when it’s over, I’m completely drained. It’s a crash, intellectually and physically.

Having years of work wrapped up into one tiny ball of art is also a tenuous reality to carry around. Now what? I don’t know. I felt productive in one sense yesterday, but my accomplishment wasn’t concrete enough. That same day I polished four short stories and sent them off. Submitting stories was a concrete action to take. What of the novel? It’s a computer file. Who knows if it’s any good. Sometimes I know. But you can’t know always about those things, or else what fuels the bursts of mania to make everything more and again and again?

I will be corrected for years to come.

I took Keegan to The Schoolbox this week. It’s a neat school supply store with all sorts of things. We weren’t looking for anything in particular, but ended up picking out three maps: the United States, the World, the constellations. They laminate in-store, while you wait, so that was nice. In the store, he pointed at Antarctica on the world map and said, “This place is ice.” He’s three. He got very upset that Texas, on the US map, was blue. It is red on his map at school. He really wanted it to be red, which would be ironic if he had any idea of politics; the blue was wrong. This discrepancy in state colors continued. He knew where Georgia was. It wasn’t the right color.

In the car, I tried to explain constellations. I talked about stars, how they looked like dots, how people imagined making pictures by connecting the dots. I said people imagined pictures of animals and people doing things. He yelled, “And cups. There’s the cups.” He had to be talking about the Big Dipper and Little Dipper, right? Yes, I had forgotten those. Yes, cups, the cups. Kind of like ladles, or cups with handles. We also picked up Tangrams, which I used to be a complete whiz at in elementary school. Now, I feel like an idiot.

Day: March 6, 2008

Progress, Rise, Crash

I stand corrected