Sleep

Each night I’m going to bed later and later and my son is waking us up earlier in the morning.  You’d figure once my head hits the pillow I’d be out, but I’m more awake during the midnight hours than ever before.  Its not that I’m not tired or that I don’t want to go to sleep, it’s that I can’t.  I lie down and close my eyes and that should be all it takes, but it doesn’t work.  Instead my mind goes in to overdrive. 

I think TOO much and I think ALL the time.  It’s always been both a good and bad quality about me.  I have to get things planned and organized and then I have to get those things done.  I obsess.  The problem is there’s a never ending list of to-dos, especially as a new parent, so once I think I’m getting to a point where I can relax, a whole new round of worries, issues and to-dos appear.  I’m also an over-achieving perfectionist and I don’t have a shut-off switch, so nothing can be (pardon my French) half-assed or put aside.

With this increased lack of sleep impeding my thought process, I find myself constantly asking “What was I just thinking about?” or “What was it that I needed to remember to do?” out loud, like someone outside my head can remind me what’s on my brain.  I can feel a crash approaching.

The Unnatural series I’m developing is so important to me.  I want it to succeed and I want readers to love it as much as I do.  With my head in a fog and my new office disorganized, it’s been hard to keep my thoughts and notes together the way I’d like them to be.  I had to think of a way to organize the dozens of scenes and multitude of dialogue I’ve written so far.  This is what I came up with:

• The multi-colored cards are for dialogue.  Each character I’ve written random dialogue for gets a color (I’ll be buying more colors soon cause 4 is not enough).
• The white cards are for scenes.  I’ll write the premise of each scene with a list characters involved (along with a color key to match dialogue cards for quicker matching) on them.
• The bulletin boards are for when I’ve got my cards done.  I’ll be using these boards (and probably a full wall space) to lay out my novel, like a visual outline (I’m a very visual person).  This way I can move and rearrange what I have around to fit right.

When all is said and done (and I finally tackle my office and finish it into a functional writing space), I hope to get some sleep, because this has been keeping me up at night.  There’s more to my master plan above, but I don’t want to sound like a total neurotic dork.  ;-) 

I figured I’d show you so you can see how I’m developing the sequel.  I didn’t blog during the first novel’s process step by step and I’ve always been a fan of ‘behind the scenes’ info-it makes me appreciate the finished product that much more.  I hope at least some of you feel the same way. 

One thing’s for sure, this time around I’m doing things much differently; for better or for worse will be determined soon enough by the end result.