Ever since I was a very small child, I could easily eschew
the normalcy of sleeping at night and being active during the day for the
strange wonderment of sleeping in the day and being up – and creative – at
night. There was, and is, for me something comforting about crawling under the
covers of a cool, crisp sheets with an eye-mask on and dozing off to the
peaceful sounds of my fan (I love my white noise. Don’t mess with my fan) and
the distant vibes of life in the city going on around me. Then, in the cool
darkness of night, I love to be up, checking out late night television (it’s
wonderfully awful) and writing away at whatever my current work in progress of
the day is, while my neighbors sleep and everything is still.
Yet, there was always one fly in the ointment of my late
night creativity: the fact that the rest of world always insisted I be awake
somewhere during the day: grade school, high school, college, graduate school,
work – all happen during the day. It’s a big day-lover’s conspiracy or something.
But my desire to write comes at night (and in the middle of work meetings,
formerly in the middle of math classes), so what is a gal to do?
There’s little I can do about it. At least until I win the
lottery and get to write from home full-time.
Many times people have said to me, “But you’d be bored, if you won the
lottery and stayed home.” My answer: “I said that I’d be writing. Writing is
not boring. Writing is life.” Of course, they would retort with, “You only
think you’d like to not work outside the home anymore.” My final reply is
inevitably, “Give me the $300 million and allow me to prove you right.” They
never pay up though.
What I can do is try to set aside some time every evening
after work to spend one or two hours writing in quiet. I don’t watch a lot of
television so this usually works out for me, except on Wednesday nights, when
the gods of television mock me by putting the only two shows I watch
(Supernatural and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit) on opposite each other.
Why? I cry out to the universe. The universe doesn’t care.
So now that I’ve been home from work sick, I have been
indulging my penchant for late-night writing by plugging away on my laptop
until two or three in the morning. This is effectively screwing up my sleep patterns
for weeks to come but I’ve hit a breakthrough in a pivotal scene in my (for
lack of a better explanation) check-lit novel and helped me finally pen the
opening pages of the middle grade reader I’ve been musing over for several
months now.
My sickness has allowed me to have free license to say, at
three in the afternoon, “I’m going to take a nap now” and then to say at one in
the morning, “I’m writing because I don’t feel well enough to sleep.” I’m
milking it while I can and my writing progress is thankful for it.
No, I don’t know why my creativity blossoms this way, but if
I ever find a vampire in my genealogy research, it will make so much sense.
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