I get hit with insomnia now and then. I can go to sleep just fine, but then I wake up around one or two in the morning, and I’m up for hours. I can’t really do anything. I’m too dumb to read anything more serious than a magazine, and I can’t really write. So I just make tea and sit around waiting on it to go away.

It’s usually the sound of my own wheels spinning that wakes me. I’m dreaming, and some part of my mind starts working with the dream, and turns it into an idea or line for my novel.  And, in my sleep, I’m convinced it’s the greatest idea or line ever, and that snaps me awake. So I’ve taken to writing ’em down in my little notebook, in hopes that if I get ’em off my mind I can go back to sleep. It usually doesn’t work, because then I notice how what I wrote is absolutely not the greatest idea or line ever.

This is last night’s line: “They were both look at me and grinning, my wife and this other guy. Not friendly grins, either.  The kind of grin you might get when you pass a guy sitting on the curb, eating his own shit out of a shoebox.”

I have no idea what the dream was, but it cost me two hours of sleep. Obviously worth it.