Well, given my ever changing waking/sleep cycle, I at least have plenty of reasons to keep stretching myself in my writing. I *hope* I'm getting over the worst of my transition from normal person (or near as I ever come) to phase disordered person. My life the last few days has involved sleeping through most of Sunday and through part of Sunday night, then being wide awake for the rest of Sunday night and all of Monday and until three o'clock this morning, when I slept for five hours, got up to look after my son, and got a bunch of random, short cat naps in the mid afternoon. Now it's nearing midnight, and I can tell I won't be sleeping.
While awake, I sometimes can focus, and sometimes can't. I spend a lot of time with so much noise in my head that all I can really do is go for a walk or lie on the couch, or try to read the news (for some reason I do that when I can't think straight, though I'm sure it's of little use to me.) The challenge, then, is to find the lucid hours I have and put them to good use.
Add to this the fact that I usually write a million drafts of a book or story, and this can make it hard to write anything, though really, this is how it's been most of my writing life. I'm always trying something new, and this time what I'm doing is writing the book all out of order. I've done this before, but never to this extreme. If I sense a boring part coming up, I skip it. I don't want boring parts. What results is a whole bunch of disjointed scenes, and we'll see if I can pull them together, but what I hope will happen is that I'll write the intervening scenes once I get ideas for how to make them interesting, and maybe this'll cut down on rewrites a little. We'll see.
Still, I really wish I could sleep. I don't like just sitting around brain dead in the wee hours of the morning :-(
When I was in college I had to read a book for English class. Unfortunately, every time I picked up the book and read a few pages I fell into a deep sleep. That book is STILL on my shelf and once in a while I put it to good use when I'm unable to sleep. The book is "The Red Badge of Courage" and, who knows, it's worth a try. Take care, Diane B.
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