Sleep

Into

this night I fall

hoping for a landing

somewhere between Aldebaran

and dawn.

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Sleep

The Daily Post prompt is: blank.

Photo©Staffan Ström

When the night is too loud and crowded,

and the air will not be still,

when the heat will not subside or the cold ease,

and even the cats fight among the chimney stacks,

I try to recall the emptiness of some other time that perhaps I knew,

when the world was a blank canvas, an empty screen,

and the humming and shrilling of other people’s problems

did not impinge on the gentle, rolling space inside my head.

Sleep, a river or an ocean, waveless and limpid,

laps behind some wall or cliff, all dark ripples and fizzing foam,

if only I could find it.

If only I could find it,

I would dive, as graceful as a gannet,

and skim the green depths, otter-like,

and forget.

Insomnia and the writing process

This morning I started another project to add to my pile of WIP. It was too hot to sleep with the windows closed last night, and I had closed the window because of the feline activity on the veranda roof. I spend much of my nights awake what with one thing or another, and often get tremendous ideas between two and five in the morning. Usually they don’t bear close scrutiny in the cold light of day, but last night for some reason, whole chunks of a book I wrote about fifteen years ago came back to me.

As a novel it was a typical first novel. Laughable in places, full of clichés and plot holes, and with just a few lovely lines. What hit me though was that it would make a tremendous NA story. NA hadn’t been invented fifteen years ago so it’s a good thing I abandoned it before ever approaching a publisher. Now, thanks to fashion and literary trends, I might be able to turn it into something.

I need another literary project like a hole in the head but it seems such a shame not to dust it off and try and knock a proper story out of it. It should be completely contemporary and romantic enough to have me weeping like a fountain. But thinking about it, I can see a lovely fantasy twist that would take it in an entirely different direction…