Breathe (2AM)
Currently reading:
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy
Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror, edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto
Sunset Gun by Dorothy Parker
Books finished this week: 0
Library updates:
I came up with the title for this missive at just about 2am. The lyrics of the Anna Nalick song have absolutely nothing to do with anything I want to write about this week, but it made me laugh both in the moment and then again in the cold light of full morning, so I’ve decided to stick with it.
Work is getting busier, life is getting busier, and the world is still a mess. It felt like fall for a few days this week, which was glorious, and then it immediately got hot and humid again for the weekend. I know New York is officially a subtropical climate now (and has been for some time), and I hate it. I curled up with a cup of tea and some books on Friday night before bed and it was genuinely the calmest and most content I’ve been in a while.
Anyhow, 2am. My sleep hasn’t been awful recently, but it hasn’t always been smooth. Without going too deep into TMI territory, I keep drinking way too much water during the day, right up until bedtime, so I inevitably end up having to get up. Sometimes, I also eat dinner too late, and that just makes it tough to settle in. A week or so ago, the Command strips failed on a framed poster and it fell and scared the shit out of me before dawn.
This week, somewhere between Friday and Saturday, I woke up in the middle of the night. After going to the bathroom and snuggling back into bed, a story beat hit me square in the noggin, when I least expected it. I’ve been working on an as-yet-untitled spooky-ish rom-com——the idea I started working on back at the Big Weekend at Labor Day——and really taking it page by page. I have a light plot sketch (not a full outline, but not a total question mark) and still need to come up with a lot of specific settings, events, and plot beats.
But I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the story this past week and I think it’s safe to say it was literally the last thing on my mind at two in the morning, when an actually surprisingly elegant solution to a plot tangle popped into my head, unbidden. I fumbled for my phone and squinted into the bright screen, struggling to put words to the thoughts in my head and struggling to spell anything right while half asleep and without opening my eyes too much. I knew I’d forget by morning if I just went back to sleep, though, so I decided to breathe and grab the muse while it was there.
And then I conked out again.
Also, for those keeping score, no updates on the querying front. But I’m hoping to send a few more emails in the next couple weeks, so keep your fingers crossed for me!
Closing thoughts:
Take inspiration as it comes. (And write down your ideas before you lose them forever!!)
Total books read from the Moratorium Library: 178
(Total books added to the Moratorium Library: 357)
How to Talk to Yourself pre-ordered from B&N, There Lives a Young GIrl and The Starving Saints purchased last Sunday at the Center for Fiction, and Night at the Vampire Castle was another agent present (#spoiled).
