StandingWater Creations

So, went to bed last night and fell asleep. Which, for those that profess to know me, is not odd. I can, and do, fall asleep almost anywhere if I need to. Sleeping in my bed, in my house, with my wife, in our room makes the whole sleeping thing that much easier to accomplish.

And then, about two hours later I was awake. There were issues I was mentally dealing with that I didn’t know I was mentally dealing with, and I went to the bathroom, which is a perfectly logical thing to do, and spent some time on the porcelain throne that I learned, a few days ago, takes several days to make, the final process of which is about 24 hours in an oven that causes the glaze and paint to adhere, permanently, to the ceramic.

As a result of that newfound understand of the complexities of toilets, I was sitting on one at 2 a.m. wondering why I was wide awake AND why I was not tired… or, at least, didn’t exactly feel tired.

Eventually I went back to bed not seeing an significance to sitting on a toilet that took days to make and 24 hours in a kiln before it was cooled and shipped… or that I carried a load of toilets in a 53 foot trailer from San Antonio, TX to Los Angeles, CA with a flat tire on my trailer which was, I know now, very illegal and very dangerous and could’ve ended in catastrophe. I also learned, on that trip, that when you hit the Ports of Entry to California, the people in the booths don’t want to hear as many variations on toilet (royal throne, porcelain throne, WC, water closet, etc.) as you can come up with when they ask what you are carrying in your trailer.

None of that had anything to do with what was happening with me last night.

I went back to bed. Erin asked, “Are you okay?”

I said, “Yes.”

She rolled over and went back to sleep.

I continued to lay there. Staring at what I could imagine was the ceiling and trying to go back to sleep. At some point I started thinking about the various writing projects that I have going on and what I need to do to advance in some of my goals (a first draft of Alicia Grey by the end of December… you know, earn the Macbook) and realized that I had an entirely different opening set of scenes for Alicia Grey than I’d written back in the summer – and, I resisted getting up and writing them.

After all, Erin stayed up late the other night to study, I went to bed, it was not fun or nice; and though I realize that, to be healthy, we have to learn to sleep when we need to sleep and that sometimes being married and working and living lives and going to school, etc., means that we will, occasionally, have different sleeping patterns.

My desire, when it comes to writing, is to write during daylight hours. I want to be in the mode of writing when the sun is up and when other people are at work so that when other people are no longer at work I have the same latitude to play as they do, but, at 2:40 a.m. all I could think about was how Alicia Grey woke up the first day she was staring school at a) her first high school; and b) a new school in a new town.

The draft over the summer was similar. The chapters were similar; but, as I lay there resisting the urge to get up and spend who knew how long re-writing everything I’d written before I got married. As I lay there with some very clear imagery in my head and this voice telling me what was happening to this teenage girl, I realized that I’ve not, effectively, done anything with Alicia Grey since our wedding because, honestly, I didn’t know what to do.

The summer draft had a prologue that I might go back over, but, at the same time, outside of some interesting (maybe) background information about a character who I thought would make his entrance almost immediately and is now waiting in the wings for his call to come, that got set aside late last night as I finally succumbed to the need to be awake, in front of my computer, and with lights on and a word processor humming (metaphorically) in front of me.

I am not obsessed with humming electric typewriters; I just come across as though I might like them.

(note: my typewriter, which is currently in Colorado at my parents ranch, is completely manual and I would love to get something like it, but smaller, to play with.)

(note2: I prefer the hum of a laser printer sitting on a desk rather than the hum of an electric typewriter. That is just an aside.)

(note3: As I was writing one of these notes I discovered that Microsoft Word will create a smilie if given half a chance and the right key strokes. That was a weird discovery.)

Anyway, aside from all my asides, I sat down in the front room, pulled out the trusty, rusty Macbook, opened a new instance of Microsoft Word, and placed, at the top of the page, the series, working title, and chapter and proposed (working) title of the first chapter. I then adjusted line spacing. Made some other minor changes, grabbed my jump drive, plugged it in, saved the file, and began typing away.

There were no thoughts of time or sleep or anything else. I was a writing fool. I started off with the titles and moved right into the description of what I could clearly see happening in my mind. I grabbed a notebook Erin had sitting on the sofa and tore out a blank piece of paper. I grabbed her pen (which was sitting there since I didn’t want to go find mine) and sketched a quit diagram of the house. Rooms, bathrooms, closets, living room, kitchen, and garage. I continued to write.

Then I had her out of the house and the flow kept going.

She was on a bike riding to school.

She was at school. I had to draw the school. Granted, I drew a replica of the school I knew best, but I drew the school; made some mental changes, I kept writing. I added the second character (first she interacts with) into the mix. I realized a subplot I was working through, the other day, in my head, might still work and be just the right mix for that character. It was nice. The writing flowed, flows.

And then, a couple or three hours later and about 5000 words, I discovered that two of the characters were cousins. At this point I started to peter. My body began to ache. There was some soreness behind my eyes, which is never pleasant, and I was finding myself staring at a screen and realizing I could keep going, but really, that whole tired thing was catching up with me (finally) and I wanted to go back to bed.

The problem with bed, the last couple of nights, has been that I have been sleeping on my arms in a really weird way, moreover, my joints, all of them, seem to be aching in a way that is not comfortable; so, sleep… not exactly the most comfortable endeavor to find myself in. More, Erin told me today that I’ve been trying to sleep with a hand touching her, which, in her estimation, is a partial cause for the way I’ve been sleeping. Regardless, at 5-something in the morning (actually, it was 5:36 a.m. if you want me to be VERY specific) I was back in the room, Erin woke up long enough for me to say, “I had to rewrite the first part of Alicia Grey.”

She said, “You had to rewrite the first part of Alicia Grey.”

I said, “Yes,” and that ended the conversation.

I added another 1200-ish words this afternoon and plan to do a little more writing this evening in between tickets and phone calls and helping other co-workers with issues they are having.

Yes, in case you missed the diatribe, I’ve restarted my novel and taken it, in less than 24 hours, over halfway to where it was sitting before I stopped working on it the other day.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly