There are times it has been great to be able to wake up easily in the middle of the night. There was that one time in high school when I woke out of a sound sleep to the smell of melting latex, and came downstairs to find that a rug had defeated its non-skid backing, and had been pushed over the top of a floor furnace, where it was starting to smolder. (The joys of living in an early 20th-century house... Floor furnaces were great in the winter when you were wearing nightgowns or robes to catch the warmth as you stood over them, but the downside was that they could pose a clear and present danger to an old wooden structure.) I've gotten up many times over the years to investigate sounds and smells that sometimes needed attention, and sometimes needed to be ignored if possible (like the farty smell that fills the house when you put a pork shoulder and apple cider vinegar in a crock pot over night). Last night sure seemed like there was something important worth waking for. I dreamed that there was something tearing apart my belly button, either an alien trying to escape or subconscious memories or surgery maybe. I felt like it was trying to wake me up, but I steadfastly refused to rise. Moments later, I swear there were flashing red lights that I could see through my closed eyes. It dug into my sleeping mind enough to make me think there was some really good reason to wake up. I looked around. There were no flashing lights anywhere. No police stop outside on the street, no fire in the bedroom, nothing. No smells to indicate a crock pot or oil warmer left on. No sounds of a cat puking or intruder at the window. Absolutely nothing inside the house was wrong. So I picked up my phone and checked for messages. Once my eyes adjusted to the light of a thousand suns from the screen, I looked on Facebook a minute. Again, nothing of importance at a local or international level that I had to deal with right then and there. False alarms all around, but then I was stuck being wide awake for nothing.
Maybe it's the product of having too active of an imagination. To be a writer this consistently prolific, I have to be able to get inside my head easily. I keep waiting for this discipline to turn toward writing the things I want to be producing, rather than just an endless series of etudes. I have that great story I outlined for myself that is set this week, starting today. I need to devote a few hours to fleshing out the actual story, not just the backstories of the characters which may or may not get used. The story ends on New Year's Day, and I'd like to have it complete and released into the wild before then.
My daughter has been putting her own running story down on paper, and she's showing me up. She has been filling a journal with small, precisely spaced but messy as crap handwriting, filling the entire page, margins and all, with a story she has been turning over in her mind for years. She bragged to me a few times about the progress she's making, and I'm not going to lie, I am jealous of it. Just this afternoon she sent a picture of how far into the notebook she is. I am proud of her, to be sure. I just wish I was setting a better example for her by pouring my own fiction out in such quantity. It's in there, if I could just force myself to extract it.
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