Quiet Sunday

Sunday was a down-time day.  Saturday had been filled with light, and it was warm enough to be able to edit outside.  Sunday, dawned damp, grey, and cold.  I stayed in my pajamas a very long time.  Instead of writing, I worked on various papercraft designs for the holidays.  One design is for a polyhedra made out of a hexagonal arrangement that I call the "lightning star."  I don't recall the precise source of the lightning bolt shape, but it's borrowed from Moroccan tile design.   The other design is circles with three slots arranged in a triangle with stars and snowflakes cut out of the center.   I should be able to lock those into an icosahedron.  

Some noise--the cat, I think--woke me up 12:30 Monday morning and I realized I was wide awake after only about two hours of sleep.  I tossed and turned a bit, and since I didn't want to wake up Mark, I moved to the couch.  I fretted a little about being awake, and then tried to think about the fairy tale story I'm editing.  About this time I became aware that I'd had a dinner of pepperoni pizza, so I got some milk.  Then I went back to the couch and tried to sing "Center of the Sun" in my head, but then started thinking about work and writing and more work.  About two hours later, I eventually fell alseep.

The cat stirred and I got up at 6:30.  I'm not sure if I'm tired but rested, or simply under-slept.  

When Ideas Come

Thursday morning around 3, a group of men decided to play some loud dance music as they walked past our house, talking and laughing loudly.  I was in that groggy place where I couldn't quite put together the steps needed to throw on a robe and go remind them that some people were sleeping.  I can only assume they are returning students in town early for some reason.  I'd made an effort to go to bed and sleep early, so their timing wasn't so great as they woke me at the five hour mark, which is when I can wake up and then feel like I've had enough sleep, but not really.

In the past I think I would have stared at the ceiling, angrily trying to fall asleep. But I after reading about folks in earlier century who supposedly slept in two parts during the night, I told myself to try to think about characters in a short story I'm trying to write and that it was OK to stay in bed thinking.  This pretty much worked in that I fell back into a kind of half-sleep... but I didn't wake up with any character or setting or plot insights.  

[Oh wax!  That's what the story characters need! It's resistant to sulfuric acid!   (I just realized an important setting detail here in the parking lot)]

Working Out;  Went in Thursday afternoon (a little delayed).  180 cal in 20 minutes on the elliptical.  50 cal in 10 on the rowing machine.  3/10 dips and 2/10 chins on the assist machine.  3/12 50 lbs on the pec fly.  3/12 80 lbs on the lat pulldown.  3/13 curlups on the Power Station.  And then I had to leave...

Raccoon Eyes and Processing Dreams

Sleep:  I've been tired the last few days, and Thursday morning I woke up with raccoon eyes.

Friday morning, the cat wanted out, so I escorted him out around three AM.  The last couple of nights The Child has woken up at hours between 1 AM and 4 AM and has been active.  I don't mind the reading, but the historical podcasts wake me up.

Writing:  I wanted to finish a story I'm working on, and I was awake enough to want to write, but also tired and sleepy enough to want to stay in bed.  So I did some sleep-writing.  The nice thing about it is that I just write, and edit later. The just writing part is refreshing, and it forced me to keep going and not get distracted by editing or research.  The down side is that I sometimes loose focus on what I'm writing if I drift off, and words and sentences can get loopy.  

Dreams:  More processing dreams.  I  though I was over something, but apparently my dreaming self isn't, as I had a pretty direct dream where I uttered short statements about who I was annoyed with and why.  I can't say that I'm proud about my emotional response, as it's kind of petty, in a negative Capricorn kind of way.  Oh well, now that my dreaming self has formulated a succinct statement, I'm hoping I can move beyond this.

In another dream,  which had a lot of Dwyer l relatives in it, I was in some rural Oregon town and they had a gigantic art installation.  Towering shelves of books.   As I wandered through the installation, it suddenly hit me that it was really a library with the walls and ceiling removed and the books left behind on massive, free-standing bookshelves.  I had a "Cry for the Children" Horta moment, as I walked up to the stacks of gigantic Egyptian art coffee-table books and saw blue mold spores growing along their tops.  The library had lost funding and the stacks were left out, exposed to the elements until they decomposed completely.

Café John Logo

Odd sleep last night.  I went to bed around 9PM, had strange waking computer support dreams, woke up wide awake around 4AM, stayed in bed to get more rest, and then couldn't wake up properly at 6AM.

Heaved myself out of bed and managed to edit a short story for a little bit.

But I think I need to make a large copy of this design, stand on it, and drink tea while reciting a charm for wakefulness.

Just Ten More Minutes...

Well, let's see.  First there was a the dying cell phone tone--an electronic plea for recharging that sort of sounds like a quiet but insistent snooze alarm that chimes semi-randomly for a half hour while you lie in bed wondering if you're awake enough to actually get up and plug the phone in assuming that you can find it.

Then there was the dream where I dreamed I was telling someone an earlier dream.  For the record, I was having a conversation with Lori Carroll and we were touring new Arcosanti construction and I said to her, "Wait... are we in a Paolo Soleri concrete staircase inside a re-purposed chimney? There were also old cruise vessels being salvaged on the edge of the Aqua Freya River.  Which I lived in.  Over a gun shop.

Next, over the weekend I activated my Night Owl Tendencies.  Which makes being a Morning Lark on Monday kind of hard.  Add to that the weather, which can't decide what it wants to do, so I'm feeling it in my joints.  Feeling the rain in my broken right hand wasn't so bad compared to having barometer balls of my feet.

So... um... no.  I didn't spring out of bed at 5:30 to write.

And now, tea.

Early Morning Writing

This morning I managed to arise and write a little. What I'm finding is that it takes me about twenty minutes to be in a state where I can write, so if I want a full hour from 6 AM - 7 AM to write--less when the family wakes earlier--I have to be standing by 5:30. Or earlier.

On the days where I fail to drag myself out of bed, I kick myself for not being able to write. Feeling like an inadequate writer-wanna-be is not the best way to start the day.

Now I have to start keeping word counts....

In other news, the afternoon temperature is rising. It's OK, although it sounds like this Sunday is going to be unpleasantly hot. Alas, the air conditioning in our car has gone out over the winter, so even relatively nice days like we've been having transform the car into a rolling greenhouse oven. Time to surf the net for Toyota air conditioner tune-up tips.

But first, the Day Jobbe.

Sleep and the Blog

The other day I re-formatted the blog. Nothing too big: I merged from three skinny-ish columns to two slightly fatter ones. This was done to accommodate some of the buttons from other social media sites in the side bar and to make the main articles' horizontal width larger for photos. I'll probably fiddle with the sidebar gizmo order a bit, and I might format the article headers to be larger.

On the sleeping front, my sleep-comfort number is negative-ten. That's right, the glorified air mattress I've been sleeping on has a problem staying inflated. The problem is that a flange on the mattress's spigot has cracked and no longer holds a rubber O-ring in place. The O-ring keeps the air in the mattress, but not if it slips.

Usually this isn't a problem. Unless too much force is applied to the mattress--say, if someone steps on it by mistake or if there are amorous activities--in which case it slowly leaks air. In that case I wake up around 2:43AM because I'm sleeping on the bed frame's slats.

This of course makes it difficult to get up early to write. On good mornings, I wake up and realize I'm only awake enough to critique. On bad mornings, I try to write and stare dumbly at Scrivener trying to write new scenes or make old scenes work better.


Oh! Nina just showed me www.homeplans.com, which looks like a fun resource for story settings.

Writing Progress?

The last few days have been both productive and not writing wise. I did manage to get a short story in before a contest deadline, and I've since learned that the story has been short-listed. And I've been having fun with Neil Gaiman's writing prompts. So that's good. What's not so good is that the early morning writing has slacked off.

I think some of the slacking has to do with going back and forth between east- and west-coast time zones. The other day I accidentally slept an hour later than I meant to. But some of it has been me staying up too late and being groggy the next morning. And speaking of which... I should go to sleep now.

Discipline...

The morning writing continues. I remain convinced that I have better writing days when I plan things out by laying out the kettle, teapot, and tea so that I don't have to think too hard to make my morning tea. I also prepped Scrivener with the scene I wanted to work on this morning. This helped me to sit down and get to work. But... as I was writing last night, I felt how I wanted to keep going. Since writing until midnight would have messed up my sleep, I had to stop.

I guess I still want to be a late-night writer. Something about 10:30 PM turns my brain back on.

The other thing I'm finding is that planning out scenes a little the night before is changing my writing style (slowly) from a seat-of-the-pants writer to an outliner.

Finally, this is turning into discipline, discipline, discipline. Getting up early means going to be early. Going to bed early means not drinking tea after 3PM (ideally 2PM).

New Year's Writing

For a while I've been trying to find a good stretch of time to write, and for the New Year, I'm doing something new: getting up at 5:30 (no promises about earlier) to write. I've read about Ken Scholes and (I think) Jay Lake and other writers with consistent high output discovering that the very early hours at the beginning of the day gives them time to both write, spend time with their family, and hold Ye Day Jobbe.

When I get home after work, it is difficult for me to get writing until about 3, at which point I have to stop for Familial Duties. My theory is that my circadian rhythm is at a post-lunch low in the early-afternoon slot I've been using, and I'll use that time for marketing and story critique.

So I'm trying Early Morning Writing. Of course, this morning, I've spent about 20 minutes stumbling around in a dark house admiring the strong moon light, blogging, and making tea.

The challenges are going to be getting to sleep early enough (which means watching my afternoon tea consumption) and remembering to set the kitchen and my desk up the night before.