Thanks, That Was....Fun?

I've been thinking a lot about writing, and why I haven't done much of it over the past few years. Part of it is time and the lack of it (we moved back to the Indianapolis area in early 2024 so I could help take care of my Mom, who has Alzheimer's). Another reason is that I've been channeling the creative energy I used to put into writing into making art, mainly painting and mixed media collage. You know what I love about art? It's fun and therapeutic in the way that writing used to be for me, but--unlike with writing--it's something you can show people and they can say things like, "Oh, cool!" Or, "Hmm, interesting." Or, "I don't get it, but okay." 

"Welcome To Whoever You Are"
analog collage 
2025

"Follow the Gleam"
analog collage
2025

"Cosmic Jam" 
analog collage
2025

The feedback is more immediate; it's something folks can look at, touch, and have an honest opinion about pretty quickly. Whereas when you write novels, everyone gets really enthusiastic and says things like, "Wow, you're an author? I can't wait to read your book when it's published!" And then sometimes they buy your work (but maybe don't read it, or at least they never mention it again) or they don't buy it, but still say things like, "You're really talented, keep it up," even though you suspect that they've never actually read anything you've written.   

I'm not complaining, and I don't take it personally, because of course it takes more energy and commitment to sit down and read a book than to, say, look a painting. And seriously? What I've learned about any sort of creative endeavor--writing, painting, et cetera--is that the work is its own reward, and if you're not doing it for yourself, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. As cliched as that sentiment may sound, it's also true.

The one novel I've published (I have five other novels that are mostly written, just unfinished) does okay in terms of sales, especially considering that I'm an indie author. Even though Thanks, That Was Fun has been out in the world since 2011, I still get purchase notifications fairly regularly, and they still make me happy. There is something undeniably thrilling when strangers discover and buy your work, and I can't see myself ever getting blase about that.

Overall, I'm satisfied with Thanks. There are a few parts that make me cringe, and certain portions that I obsess over when I go back and read them, thinking, shit--if only I could revise that now! But for the most part, I'm proud of the novel. 

Lately, for the first time in several years (since the pandemic, anyway), I've started writing again--just here and there, enough to get the old juices flowing. There are two of my WIPs (Works-In-Progress, i.e. the unfinished novels mentioned above) that I have decided to go back to, complete, and probably publish independently. The other ones? We'll see. 

****************************************************************************

Recently I've been going through some of my old journals. Ever do that? WOW. Some of the more entertaining bits--to me, anyway--are the entries I wrote when I was chemically altered. Here is the part where I make the obligatory, "Kids? Don't do drugs," statement, or more accurately: "Do as I say, not as I did." These are a few scribblings from 2008, when I popped an Ambien late one night and thought it would be fun to make myself stay awake and write. (It probably was fun, but of course I don't remember it. I do remember gorging myself on carrots dipped in peanut butter, because Ambien makes you do shit like that, and also having a conversation with an imaginary person sitting next to me on the couch.) Anyway....

A hot mess obviously, but I'll translate my fucked up handwriting......

Better to live in a drunken state than a noodle variation of the oman is rate you know it's all the best when you go to the miller

Yeah, my little experiment with Ambien-induced writing didn't exactly produce anything earth-shattering (and this was by far the most coherent passage of the bunch). But I bet if Taylor Swift dropped one of her surprise albums featuring a track with the same lyrics, the media would eat that shit up with a spoon. I can see the reviews now:

Jezebel.com - "Taylor Swift seems to be channeling Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison, and we are here for it!"

AV Club - "Taylor Swift's dark new release leans into the esoteric."

I could go on, but you get the idea.

An aside: it's funny how dated Ambien references are now. Like, it was such a mid-2000s drug to do, only seeming to exist in a very specific post-MySpace era, when Britney Spears was flashing her minge at the paparazzi, and we all thought Dubya would go down as the worst president in history. 

 Art - 2023

Here are a few of my paintings from this year. It's only a fraction of the work I did, but perhaps by this time next year I'll want to share more.

"Incoming"

acrylic on canvas 

2023

"Spirit/Fractal"

acrylic on canvas

2023

"Year of the Rabbit" 

acrylic on canvas 

Jan. 2023

"The Candyman" 

acrylic on canvas 

2023

This? This goofy pink bastard gave me fits. First of all, that nose was a real bitch. How do you paint a nose that resembles a buttplug that's supposed to look like a nose? 

My inspiration was the packaging for Cosmic Candy, a discontinued Pop Rocks-type confection from my childhood. To my delight, around the time I was working on this painting, I discovered that there's a trippy foreign film of the same name that centers around a benzo popping neurotic with an obsession for the titular candy. 

I'll write more about that in the near future. Trust me, it's a whole thing.

Hallo, I'm Andie Nash! You may know me from the 20/20 "Bad Romance" story, but did you know I'm also an author? Well, now you do. My novel is called Thanks, That Was Fun and it is chock full of bad romance. There is also a lot of sex--good sex, bad sex, and no sex--something most single women (and men) can relate to, no?

Just so I'm not blowing my own trumpet (um, no pun intended) here's a description from my esteemed publisher:  "(Thanks, That Was Fun is) a humorous look at modern love and the lengths some people go to in order to get and keep it. The witty dialogue, sharply drawn characters and unconventional ending make it a satisfying read for anyone who is single, heartbroken, in love, or in between."


My novel has also been described as "the perfect summer read," (--E. Gedan), "Compelling, whip-smart, and laugh-out-loud funny," (--Sharyn Parker Ross, author of City Zen) and Angela Weldon says it's "like gossiping with your closest girlfriends over a bottomless glass of wine." 


Thanks, That Was Fun is available for $1.99 on Kindle and not-Kindle.


What are you waiting for? Go read it now! Don't worry, my blog will still be here when you come back.


I promise.

Buffy, "aspirin," Mr. Yuk, and Just Say No

Buffy, the little sister on Family Affair, was the first person I'd ever heard of who took drugs and died. I was about four or five and I was fond of watching reruns of Family Affair and The Brady Bunch in the afternoons with my sister when she came home from school. I remember my mother telling me--quite matter-of-factly--that Buffy was actually a teenager and that she had recently died from "taking drugs." This blew my mind because I couldn't quite wrap my head around the notion that a). the pig-tailed little girl on TV who talked to her doll wasn't really a little girl anymore (the concept of "reruns" was a bit advanced for me); b.) that she had taken something called "drugs" (or "pills" I think my mom had said--which in my head translated to "aspirin,"--the only pills I knew of); and c.) she was dead. That last realization was particularly weird: the idea that someone could be alive on TV and dead in real life was freaky! I was confused but morbidly intrigued by the whole thing and enthusiastically repeated this information to my little neighborhood friends, all of whom were familiar with Buffy and Family Affair. They seemed equally fascinated and perplexed by the whole thing as I was.

When I was in first grade, a policeman came to talk to my class about all the dangerous things in our homes; like the bleach under the kitchen sink and the paint thinner in the garage and the polish our mothers used to make the living room furniture shiny. We were sent home with a whole shitload of Mr. Yuk stickers to plaster on anything that could be ingested by ignorant little kids (or curious older ones), like the Windex in the bathroom that resembled blue Kool-Aid.

I never got that far with the Mr. Yuk stickers; my mom neatly affixed one Mr. Yuk sticker to the kitchen phone--it had the number of the national Poison Control Center on it--but confiscated the rest of them after I thought it would be funny to stick Mr. Yuk faces on every toilet in the house. (My mother, who had to scrub off the stickers with lighter fluid, was not amused. I'm sure I got grounded for that one.)

I also remember an anti-drug talk of sorts by my first grade teacher, Mrs. Baker, following some ancient filmstrip about safety in the household. She told us that, although our parents might have bottles of aspirin and other pills around the house that looked like candy, we were never ever ever EVER to eat them, no matter how tasty they appeared. I was like, DUH, everyone knows you'll die if you take medicine when you're not really sick. That's how my parents explained it to me anyway, and it just seemed like common sense. And I was already well aware that aspirin most definitely did NOT taste like candy, because I had to take chewable children's aspirin whenever I got sick, and they tasted like the inside of a dog's butt (or how I imagined one would taste, anyway).

Those ain't Mentos, kids.

But then Mrs. Baker told us something odd: she said that if any "older kids" ever told us that sniffing glue would make us "feel good" to never do it because--you guessed it--it would also make us get sick and die. This was new information to me. I knew what glue smelled like, we had the real stuff at home--Elmer's Glue--not that weak paste they made you use at school that wouldn't even stick to itself. I was surprised that I'd managed to inadvertently inhale glue dozens of times at home while doing construction paper crafts, and I had yet to get sick and die. I realize now Mrs. Baker was talking about the heavier industrial model airplane type of glue, stuff that I wouldn't have had at home anyway. But--as insane as it sounds--the exaggerated danger of what I assumed was Elmer's Glue may have sown the first seeds of doubt that drugs and other chemicals wouldn't really make me get sick and die. That it was just something people said to scare you.

Not that I had any interest in experimenting at the time. When I was around eight years old, I remember watching a TV documentary about the 1960's with my mom while she braided my hair. They were showing clips of some hippie woman singing in a rough, raspy voice, all bluesy and intense and shaking. "That's Janis Joplin," my mom told me. "She was a famous singer when I was younger." I frowned at the bell-bottomed figure on the screen who was flailing around and contorting her face like she was having some sort of embarrassing fit. "What's wrong with her?" I asked. "Oh, she got into drugs," my mom replied. I tsked, shaking my head. "She looks dumb enough to do them." I'm pretty sure at this time that I still thought "drugs" = "pills", and although I had figured out by then that there were stronger pills around than just aspirin, I still thought you had to be an absolute moron to take them. How could taking "pills" do anything more than make you well when you were sick? And what was so great about them that people--not just kids, I mean, some actual grown-ups--would take them? Seriously, how could you NOT know you weren't supposed to do that, dummies?

Ahh, childhood. When everything is either smart or dumb, good or bad, black or white. If only life really were that simple.

Rainbows, unicorns, butterflies, and sunshine.

Then suddenly it was 1983, and Nancy Reagan did a guest appearance on Diff'rent Strokes to speak to the youth of America about the dangers of drugs and to tell us all to "Just Say No!" Yep, that really happened, and I saw it when it aired. And yeah, it was as lame as it sounds now.

The most fucked up thing about this picture?

The old people are still alive, the young ones are dead.

So in fourth grade a group of high school kids visited my class to perform some anti-drug skits and hand out green "Just Say NO!" stickers for us to put on our book bags and Trapper Keepers. The high school kids--some of whom had actually (holy shit) tried drugs, back when they didn't know any better, of course---told us about marijuana joints, which were like cigarettes only much worse because you'd get addicted to them and die. We learned about a white powder called cocaine that people laid out in lines and snorted up their noses (why would anyone do that? Snorting stuff up your nose hurts! My mom had to pretty much tie me down to get nose drops in me whenever I had a cold). And we learned about this stuff called heroin, which made me almost puke because you did it by tying a belt around your arm to make your veins bulge out (EWWWW!!!) then sticking a needle into your arm and injecting it into your bloodstream. I was appalled. What kind of sick shit was that? You REALLY had to be stupid to want to give yourself shots, as far as I was concerned. But, the high school kids assured us, one day some of us--maybe even someone right there in that classroom--might be tempted through peer pressure into smoking, snorting, or shooting one of the very drugs they talked about that day and we needed to be prepared. That was A-okay: you didn't need to tell me twice not to stick myself with needles. I got it. Just Say NO!

Oh Nancy. You would have been

so proud of the fourth grade Me.

Of course, now it seems ironic. If my childhood self knew what sort of trouble I'd be getting into in my adult years, she'd be appalled. I can imagine her lecturing me:

Smoking? Ewww, cigarettes are nasty! Everyone knows those things kill you.

Drinking? That's icky. Beer tastes gross and wine smells like farts.

And pills? Really? That's the first thing you learn NOT to do. Don't you remember what happened to Buffy?

For those of you who don't know, I've been in recovery for several months. I've given up my two favorite things: pills and booze. I no longer abuse prescription drugs (Xanax and Percocet were my favorites, with an occasional Ambien thrown in for good measure) and I've quit drinking. It's taken me a few tries to get it right, but I can truthfully say now that I am sober for the first time in a long, long time.

I just hope I've made the old me proud. She's a bit naive, but her heart's in the right place.