Tag Archives: insomnia

Ramblings of an Insomniac Writer

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It’s 5 a.m. and I am unable to get to sleep. I could keep trying, and I’d end up falling asleep around 6 or 7, and accidentally sleeping until 1 p.m., which would pretty much ruin my plans for the day. So I’ve decided that instead, I’ll just not sleep. This might mean I’ll be too tired to be productive this afternoon, or that I’ll crash really early tonight and sleep through until Saturday morning. The only time I’ve ever pulled a true all-nighter (it wasn’t studying, in case you’re wondering), I slept for about fourteen hours the following night.

There are two upsides to my problem: 1. This gives me the chance to get things done much earlier in the day than I usually would. Prime example: I’m getting some of my daily word count in now, instead of starting in the evening like I usually do. 2. At least I don’t HAVE to be up right now, getting ready for work, or anything like that. I am convinced that it would make the situation far worse if that were the case.

I had a few days so far where I wrote nothing at all, and I was unhappy about it, but there’s no sense dwelling on that kind of thing. More recently I have been doing very well with keeping up with the word count, although I am about 1500 words behind. I’ve been writing all sorts of things. Stories, blog posts, journal-y rants about whatever’s on my mind. I’ve started to get a little farther on the first project I started to work on this year, a novel based rather loosely on Sleeping Beauty that I started years ago. (Side note: I should do a post about my fairy tale rewrites and why I approached them the way I did.) It’s becoming more and more clear that this is not going to be a good first draft. It will need a hell of a lot of revision in the second draft.

I’ve realized that the part of the story I’ve been working on is, in fact, incredibly boring. It’s sort of a between-plot-points spot that will most definitely have to be rewritten, and may end up being scrapped almost entirely. I think that in order to keep my own interest in the story, I have to move it on to when things are actually happening. When I was first writing it, I was enjoying the beginning of the novel. I happen to like exposition, if it is interesting exposition. But even if that’s the case, there comes a point when there’s just too much introduction and it’s not helping the story, it is killing it. So this will have to be remedied, but seeing as this is the first draft of the story, I’m going to let this be something I worry about later. As the outline I wrote a few days ago indicates, it’s not too long after this part of the story when things actually manage to get interesting!

But revising is going to be a bitch.

Another Life #11

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I haven’t slept for seven months. I work during the day. The rest of the time, between preparing and eating meals and running necessary errands, I write. I’ve written three book-length stories in that time. None of them are finished, of course. They need editing. But the lack of sleep has given me some excellent writing fodder. The hallucinations started in week two. I know they’re hallucinations because I see people who have died. Among other… things. Creatures, horrors, fairies, paradise, forests, valleys, trenches, deep abysses I fall through as I sit at my desk and type furiously.  I write about what I see, and I know I never could have come up with these things on my own. People will be dying to find out where I get my ideas. When they ask, I will say, “I come up with a concept before I can see the image, and as I write it takes form in my mind’s eye.” And of course, they’ll believe me. If I can survive that long on no sleep.

[Note: before you ask, no, this is not even remotely true. I sleep too much. There is a reason this is part of the Another Life series.]

Write About Anything: “Insomnia”

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In the night I lie in bed. Stars, invisible through ceilings and city air, burn through me, through the body of the earth and out the other side, until their light and life-force collides with the light from other stars. I am awake, but dreaming. My mind leads me to places fantastic and mundane, images of what will happen tomorrow and things that will never happen, specters I will never meet. Fairies chuckling and monsters shimmering. I suspect that if I saw such things in real life, I would be unable to look directly at them for fear of them disappearing, or of them being too real. And when at last I drift off, the dreams I have in sleep are fuzzy and unformed. I wake feeling unrefreshed, as if my lucid half-nightmares beckon to me, enticing me back into their world.