Posts Tagged ‘Sleep’

I guess I owe you one

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Crazy times here at Jewel central. I’m sure you’ll all be happy to know I am hard at work on The Next Historical which is taking the bulk of my time, blogging may be sparse until after the book is turned in, in case you haven’t noticed that already.

Somewhere on the web recently, and I just don’t remember where, someone opined that writers who eventually get published have given up other things in order to pursue their craft and mentioned things like getting up early or staying up late. While these things are undoubtedly true, if you want to write there’s no getting around making time for it, for some reason my reaction to that was mostly this: For gosh sake do not think you can take the time out of your sleeping hours.

So that’s my public service announcement to everyone looking to carve out more time for a creative endeavor.

Yes, something’s got to give, but it shouldn’t be sleep. The creative brain needs sleep and a sleep-deprived brain will make you pay for thinking you can short-change your sleep. My recommendation is to take the time out of TV watching. If this applies to you, what did you give up? Or what would you give up?

There. Go forth and . . . er . . . sleep.

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The world on 3.5 hours of sleep or less

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

Friday I had day job stuff to do that kept me up and working until 2:00 a.m. Oh dear. These things happen, but I learned some time ago that I don’t do sleep deprivation well. My tale of woe gets worse. Not only was I up until 2:00 in the morning, I had to get up at 5:30 a.m. in order to finish up in time to leave for my pre-paid for meeting in Berkeley.

It gets worse.

Weather worse. Last night about midnight, there was thunder and lightening like we here in Northern CA never see. Like ever. People who live where there’s real weather are probably shrugging and saying, so what? But it was freaky and we turned off all the computers except my work laptop which I was willing to let fry in service of the company that employs me.

So, when I went to bed at 2:00 a.m., the storm continued. And while I can say it was lovely to see, it was also annoying to be awakened by flashes of light so bright it was like someone turned on the light in my room and then deafened by, dare I say it (why, yes, I do!) THUNDEROUS long rolling claps of, uh, thunder. and this continued until 4:30 or so.

My alarm went off at 5:25 a.m. and I showered and got to work and for a while I was thinking I might be able to sleep for another couple of hours but the network crapped out in the middle of my file transfer and I had to use another process that added two steps and an hour to my file transfer and it turned out I finished barely in time. Ick. Really.

I was also freakishly awake. This, I knew, could not last. But I rode the wave.

Fortunately, I was carpooling (navigator’s position) to the meeting which meant I could go because, let me tell you, I had no intention of driving by myself in my condition.

The Story gets really good now because There are Doughnuts involved

We got to the meeting with yours truly having already experienced unfortunate sleep-deprivation induced frankness of opinion. I loaded up on four donuts (one plain old fashioned, and three small sugary things) and three cups of tea and got to listen to FBI Agent George Fong talk about his FBI experiences. There was some GREAT stuff there and right now I can only recall his badge (gold and shiny) and gun (holstered, black, scary). I can feel the information paddling around in my brain but I can’t get to it to categorize or analyze it. Hopefully by tomorrow the information will have landed in an accessible part of my brain.

Also got to talk writing. I think. I don’t recall.

I stayed for lunch after, got hit by the sugar crash (no more do-nuts and I could only afford 5$ worth of food…) and when I got home passed out cold for 2 hours.

I’m not sure if I should write today or not. On the one hand, I can’t afford to get behind and on the very same hand, I can’t afford to write crap or accidentally delete stuff that isn’t crap.

But, I ask myself (and you) what are the odds of me writing something brilliant? It could happen.

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Weekends I Need you So Bad!

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

I’ve been running a sleep deficit for too long and I’m having trouble catching up. I’d already run up a deficit prior to RWA, made it worse during RWA then went to ComiCon the following weekend and then just didn’t catch up — because I imagine I’m several hours in the hole. When that happens, I end up skipping the gym because I’m so desperate for just another hour of sleep. Too many times lately I find myself doing some task only to realize with a start that I’ve closed my eyes and nearly– or in fact –fallen asleep for a moment or two. Not a good thing. Too much falling asleep when I’m supposed to be writing at lunchtime.

Today I went to my local RWA meeting which, as ever, was time wonderfully spent with other writers. Ahhhh! But it also meant I had to set the alarm this morning rather than just sleep until I woke up. It should be no surprise, therefore, that I just woke up from a 1.5 hour nap.

Not getting enough sleep makes you stupid in really insidious ways. So I really really need to catch up. I’ll be working on it. Naps ahoy!

In other news, I have a signed ARC for Skin Game by Ava Gray who, as you may or may not know, is Ann Aguirre. Here’s the delicious first line:

Kyra held the guy’s balls in the palm of her hand.

Yeah, that means what you think it means. When I’m done reading it, I will hold a contest to pass the ARC love to someone else so watch this space.

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About Yesterday . . .

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

At 4:30 yesterday afternoon I sat down at my computer, put on the headphones so I could listen to some music and opened up Magellan’s Witch to get cracking. I woke up at 6:00 pm.

Uh-oh.

I tried to write, but yesterday was not a gym day (I’m doing a different workout on Mondays and Wednesdays in which my hands are not free for notebooking) so I had no clear idea what to do. I gave up about 6:30 and worked on the intro to the final project for my Master’s. It went OK, but not great. I went to bed at 8:30 and tried notebooking for about five minutes. I stopped because I was basically brain dead. I went to sleep feeling like my whole story totally sucked and worse, with so much written already, there wasn’t anyway to start over. Rats.

Cue New Day After 8 Hours of Sleep. . .

Smiling Sun

I got to the gym about 5:00 a.m. and was stretching out before the actual sweaty part starts and Bling! The entire solution to my issues of yesterday came into my head. Seriously. Exactly like that. So I notebooked that, and some awesome notions and tonight I’ll be making those adjustments. I have tomorrow off, so hopefully I can get all that done before the weekend.

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