Happy 2023: No Unicorns
I hope everyone is having a lovely, safe, and healthy 2023. Here at Jewel HQ we’re doing OK. It rained yesterday but no atmospheric rivers. We had some visiting cows from the neighbor but I got that sorted. I am disappointed that the mysterious hoof prints we found were left by cows not unicorns. Normally, you’d be able to tell straight away but the ground is so wet that their feet sink 3-4 inches deep in places so you can’t see the cloven part. I was hoping it was unicorns. Alas.
Reversion?
Nope. I still do not have a reversion for My Forbidden Desire. There’s really nothing I can do but continue to wait and hope my agent can sweet talk them into sending it. The eBook is no longer for sale on Amazon so I keep hoping this means they’ll send the reversion but no luck so far.
The WIP
Bound in Smoke is going really, really well. At long last I don’t feel like I’m fighting the words. It’s such a relief. See below
Sleep and Sleep Deprivation
Many years ago when my son was a toddler, I had a horrific commute that meant–no lie–I went to bed at 11:00PM or 12:00 and was up at 2:30AM. Eventually I moved on to a job without the commute and with a 6 week break between jobs. For that six weeks I did nothing but sleep late, get up, take a nap or two, and go to bed. Then all of a sudden it was like a switch flipped in my head and the world was different. I realized it was because I wasn’t exhausted anymore. Sleep deprivation is pernicious. You think you’re fine, just tired, but you’re not.
Fast forward several years to about 2019ish when I started struggling with the writing. There were a lot of reasons. Stress, caring for ill-family, unexpected and tragic deaths of people who were too young to die but did. No surprise, I was also not sleeping well. For a year after my mom passed away, the slightest sound at night would bring me wide awake in case my my mother had fallen again. She used to wander at night or fall out of bed, or she was having night terrors and needed calming. The sleep troubles continued, waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back to sleep for 2-3 hours. But I thought I was OK. I really did.
About nine-months ago or so, I decided to do something about my sleep issues. Since I get up on my dad’s schedule, I’m up at 5:00 AM every day. I started going to bed at 6:30 or 7:00 PM so I’d have time to read or what have you before I really had to sleep in order to get at least 8 hours, if not 9 hours. But the deal was, the minute my eyes started drooping, all devices went off and it was lights out no matter what time it was.
And I started sleeping through the night. No more waking up in the middle of the night unable to fall back asleep–or only very rarely. After a bit, the writing was less of a struggle. Then two or three months ago, I had that same sensation that a switch had flipped in my head and the world was different. And the writing came back completely. The way I plot and how ideas happen in the writing, all of it back.
I’m sure it was a combination of things, working through grief, recovering from a long period of sleep disturbed by my ill mother, working on stress management, but it was getting 7-9 hours of regular, uninterrupted sleep that was the major breakthrough.
What a relief.
