Nocturnal scufflings

I'm feeling sleepy today.

Lots of things going on in life at the moment; my eldest daughter, a talented swimmer, has been moved up to the next squad at the swimming club and has started training a couple of days a week at 5.30am. Five-thirty-in-the-morning, in other words, and so requires her chariot to be available at about five fifteen and her alarm clock, breakfast-provider, chauffeur and cheerleader to be ready for duty at 5am. This has had knock-on effects on the rest of my life.

Sleepiness. I think this may be the year where I am forced to learn how to push on despite wanting my bed with a longing previously unknown to mankind.

So, here I am taptaptapping with strong coffee.

There's another reason that sleep is at a premium at the moment, and it's rather wonderful. I'm finding that as I settle down to sleep at night, my brain kicks in. While this has never been a positive before, I'm finding that as I let go of rational thought, so to speak, ideas are occurring to me. Little scenes, snatches of dialogue, quirky things to weave into my plot; they're coming to me in the drowsing stages of sleep.

I'm not sure how keen my husband is on this new development, as I am given to sudden lunges for the bedside lamp and then a series of scufflings and rustlings as I find the page in my bedside notebook and scramble for a pen that works (I once wrote down a long and involved dream that somehow seemed vitally important only to find in the morning that the pen I used had no ink in it). No sooner do I empty my brain onto paper and switch out the light than it happens all over again.

So this routine can happen several times in a night until some sleep hormone takes over and washes like a tide over the creative centre in my drowsy brain, sweeping all ideas before it.

This sometimes works in reverse, as well. This is not so good.

The other night I woke up abruptly in the small hours suddenly alarmed that there was a large and ominous plot hole in my book and unless I could find a way to fill it and smooth it over the whole premise of the novel was rendered useless. With this revelation came a rush of adrenalin which meant it was a good half an hour before I started to feel sleepy again, and so for that time I lay there in the wreckage of my embryonic novel trying to work out how to plug the gap.

When I woke up in the morning I realised it was quite straightforward, and a word of explanation early in the story meant it was all alright.

Some night-time moments of inspiration are to be heeded and others are to be disregarded. Unfortunately there's no way to tell which is which until morning comes.

Notebooks and Book books

I am a great fan of notebooks.

The ideal notebook is spiral bound, with enough room to slide a pen down in the spiral, hardback covers, narrow lined, with generous margins and preferably an elastic thingy that means that it stays shut in your handbag. Little flaps for saving notes or photographs is nice to have, but the icing on the cake is when the pages have an inspiring quotation or inscription. This makes it a Very Nice Notebook, but also increases the pressure to make sure that anything I write in it is worthy of its inclusion.

I have several notebooks on the go at any one time - journals, ideas books, handy pads to scribble down To Dos or shopping lists, and now, my Book book.

My Book book is a notebook with roses on the front, which is sort of appropriate given the subject matter of my novel and the fact that roses feature significantly in it. My youngest daughter stuck a sticker on it, which says, 'Excellent', which sounds good to me.

I so want this book to be good. Just getting it finished isn't anywhere near enough for me; I think I would genuinely rather not write one at all than write a bad book. I want it to be worthy of it's 'excellent' sticker.

I've written down every idea I've had with regard to this project in my Book book and regularly transfer all the jottings on the subject from other notebooks that were closer to hand than this one when inspiration struck. I then put them on the computer when I'm working on the scene in which they belong.

There are ideas for scenes, connections that I made while driving, in the shower, reading to the kids or just about to drop off to sleep. Even the odd scrap of dialogue or nugget of information to remember about a character. They're all jumbled up in the Book book, waiting to be scooped up and used appropriately when the story is told in full.

Sometimes it's easier to write things on a page with a pen than it is to taptaptap it out on a keyboard. I'm sure that if I'd had an efficient online filing system and started with all my ideas in virtual folders etc, they would be close at hand for transfer into the story when I wanted them instead of having to transcribe them from my scrawl, but my computer skills are basic to say the least, and my filing system non-existent. There are so many documents on this computer that are lost forever unless someone retrieves them for me.

Hence the notebook. My notes for the book. It's almost full, so it must be time to start turning ideas into scenes and chapters.

It's exciting. I am just loving this.