I’m not sure what sort of a post this will turn out to be. I’m jet-lagged to beat the band, and the trip eastward coming on the heels of lots of stressful nights due to our real estate wars has made me feel…well…pretty discombobulated. You know how sometimes you get so tired that you just can’t sleep? So tired that although your eyes hurt they just won’t stay closed?  Well, it feels like that. I know that the change of scene will eventually calm me down and I’ll start feeling normal again, but for now, the world seems two giant steps off to the left, somehow. I feel, as the Americans would say, disoriented (rather than disorientated — when in Rome…..). But there is one good thing that comes from this feeling. I’ve noticed that I become awfully creative when I feel this way. It also happens when I find myself eating in a restaurant alone, having had a wee glass of wine.  Feeling out-of-it, slightly paranoid, like an observer rather than a participant in life helps me to write.  Maybe that’s not such great news, but it’s true.

Over the past week or so I’ve been stuck in my writing. I had written a scene in novel 3, and although I knew exactly where I wanted to be with the next scene, I couldn’t for the life of me get myself there. Five characters were having dinner in a restaurant. Two of them got up to leave. Another two needed to move onto a bar where the next scene, an important one, would take place. But that last character wouldn’t get lost. She kept wanting to tag along and neither I, nor my other characters, could figure out a way to ditch her.  It was infuriating. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t find an elegant way to do it. I had sat down to write that transition a few days ago but I had to abandon the attempt. I had to get up and walk away from it, and that rarely happens to me. But after a sleepless night followed by a six hour flight crossing five time zones and then dropping onto the back seat of a car for a two-hour drive to the ferry, I was sufficiently out of it to have something click.  I was staring out the window like a zombie and then suddenly the solution came. I figured out how to ditch the unwanted character and approach the transition between the two scenes. Plus, despite my proclivity to car sickness, I took out a piece of paper and wrote it, right there in the car. Presto. And it’s a good thing, too, because I absolutely must get work done on the novel over the next three weeks. I’ve put myself on a tight schedule and although the pressure is coming only from me, I do believe it’s good for me at this stage in my writing career to feel that pressure and learn how to deal with it. And I already know that, from a writing point of view, August will be a wash out.

Now, I’m not urging people towards insomnia or drunkenness in order to write. But that sense of being out of kilter, hazy, unsteady in the world does make you see things differently. There is an unlocking which takes place and that really can make a huge difference.  I’m just saying….