What do you do when insomnia strikes? Walk the house looking for sleep? Check the back closet or the forgotten corners? Sleep must be somewhere, where did I put it? I must have mislaid it somewhere. Too bad sleep isn't like the keys or a Walmart reciept needed to return a poorly planned purchase. Sleep vanishes. Or perhaps Macbeth is right: sleep is murdered. Dead sleep. Not the sleep of the dead but the death of sleep itself, and now the sleeper is doomed to wander the castle in a living nightmare.
Enough on sleep. Recieved a rejection on the YA fantasy, again. I don't know if I have the energy to send it out again, poor thing. I labored over it for quite some time and now it is languishing for lack of a publisher. And I doubt if it is as good as I once had thought. I could rewrite it, but I no longer care for it as I once did. Am I a fickle lover? Or a jaded one? Odd what language is used to describe work of my creation. I'll research new horizions for it and send it out again, although I do question whether or not it has an audience.
Another change of subjects. I am embarking on a rediculous project, one that is spurred on by the desire to find a different space, a space to write. I've been collecting packing crates and tearing them down to build a studio, scavaging the neighbor's trash for discarded windows, and working out the design in my mind. Those who write can understand. Those who don't find it curious (no, weird or disdainful). I've found the process exhilarating for it is much akin to writing. I'm taking the flotsam and jetsam of what surrounds me and attempting to reassemble it into something of value. Isn't this what writers do? Don't we take the words that surround us, the experiences we've gathered (many of which have been unintentially gathered), dived into the dumpsters of our lives and try to pull out a treasure? I want the studio completed before too long because I want the summer to write. And read what I've lost.
I think sleep is trying to return. Good night.
Well, Tom. Many of us are having the same problem, except my sleep is drenched with dreams that wake me, and continue once I fall back to sleep. Sometimes I don't mind such dreaming because some wonderful poetry and stories come from them . . . except when I need to be up in the morning to take care of business. Then, the dreams are worthless. However, those restless nights you are describing are when I let the pen talk away on the paper until my eyes can't stay open, or I find my latest favorite game--usually a word game, and have a go. Lately, it has been suduko (however it is spelled).
ReplyDeleteDamn, how I miss our Thursday nights together in the classroom!
For the last year, I have wared with the night. Night is when my fears become too loud to silence. Night is when questions of my legitimacy as a person, as a woman, as a writer surface. These thoughts boil in my subconscious and then waken me with terrors.
ReplyDeleteI, too, am missing our W462 class times together.
I think, Thom, that you are in a dry spell. This is not to say that the writing is dry, but rather the seeds have no where to fall. Droughts never last. In time (ah, the dread of waiting), the soil will be sufficiently fertile to receive your gathered words; of this I have no doubt.