I usually get 7 – 8 hours of sleep each night. But sometimes, usually near the end of a big writing project, my normal schedule falls away and I find myself filling gaps of time by writing.
This means sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and write.
A [Not So] Good Night’s Sleep
I went to bed at 9:30 p.m. last night.
I woke up a little before 1:00 a.m.
As I started falling back to sleep, my subconscious decided to say:
You know that problem you’ve had me working out in the background? I’ve got it!
And so…I got up and wrote in the middle of the night.
I Could Have Slept
It would have been easy to jot down a note of what I thought about and leave it for the morning.
But the past several nights my mind has been buzzing, despite getting to bed at a decent time. (It’s 2:44 a.m. as I write this sentence.)
I can only say that because I got up, so much more came spilling from my mind, resulting in one of those rare writing sessions where not just the last few sticking points of a story seem clear — but the whole world and your place in it seems a bit brighter.
(I know, I know…that’s a bit much, so let’s chalk it up to not having much sleep.)
And speaking of sleep…with all that out of my head, it’s time to get 3 1/2 to 4 hours more before the workday begins…
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Photo: Matheus Kohler.
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