Sleep Deprivation for Fun & Profit

I’m trying to post consistently but lately it’s been difficult because my sleep schedule is completely wacked. I’m cranking away to finish revising my next novel to get it out to my agent by November.  To do that I’m working at night, going to bed around 5 or 6 a.m., and waking up in the afternoon.

At least, ideally that’s what I’m doing. I thought it would be a good idea because my phone doesn’t ring at 3 a.m., I don’t get dragged down by quotidian distractions.  A pure focused stretch of creative time, just like the old days.

What makes this not at all ideal is that we own parrots. Plural.  A vosmaeri eclectus and a severe macaw. I love them dearly and often want to drown them. (I won’t go on about the birds themselves because whothehell wants to read yet another blog entry about someone’s pet?) You think only roosters crow at dawn, right?  Nossir, all birds just love to celebrate every sunrise like they’re starring in some Cat Stevens ballad.

So an hour or two after I go to bed the birds start their own sunrise serenade. Then Murdoc, the macaw, who is a crazy old broken rescue who has bonded with me, has to preen me. Which means I spend the next several hours trying to sleep while a parrot tries to chew through my arm.

These are things you never thought you’d have to deal with later on in life.

So for about the last month I’ve been a shuffling stumbling holloweyed thing who looks like he wants nothing more than to eat your brain. Other work is piling up. Daily chores are neglected. The rest of my life is piling up.  But something in me insists on doing it this way.

I know what it is, of course:  this book wants to be written at night. It’s unbelievably dark and funny as shit, and I have worked obsessively to make every dark disturbing word of it as beautiful as I can. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written and the hardest. I could write a book about what I went through to write this book (but don’t worry, I won’t). I don’t like to talk about it in any detail because I’ve learned that just because I’m working on a book doesn’t mean that it will ever see the light of day. What I will say about it is that it’s the first thing I’ve ever written that I’ve felt certain that, had it been written by another writer, I would count among my favorite novels. That’s a weird feeling.

With any luck I’ll be talking about it in more detail come November. Meantime it’s shuffle, stumble, type, sleep, repeat as needed.