I've got to admit ...

... it's getting better. After whining yesterday about how it was Monday and I had had no ideas whatsoever for 48 hours, I went home, made a quick small dinner, and thought about going to sleep. I proceeded to spend 2 1/2 hours revising 73pp of Quarryville. The book seems to be in good shape, and I almost wonder if my brain was just resting for a couple of days in anticipation of being creatively productive. I put my MS aside--I can tell when pushing is not going to make anything more happen--and tried to sleep. I imagined I would fall asleep quickly and get up at 5 or so to type in my handwritten changes so I could print out fresh pages on Tuesday. Hah!

I have an eight-cassette set of Dylan Thomas reading his own work that I am listening to these days when I fall asleep. I haven't made it to cassette 2 yet; I keep listening to cassette 1 over and over (it's the one that has "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Fern Hill" on it). Dylan Thomas put sound over sense at times, and his language is startling, fresh, vigorous, dense, sonorous--it's going to be a while before I absorb sides 1A and 1B and move on. I did nod off and wake up at around 1 a.m. and turn off my tape player. But then I was wide awake all over again.

Toss and turn for an hour. At 2 a.m. I put on Elvis Costello's first album--by then I wasn't expecting to sleep and I wasn't expecting to write either. As I half nodded off, finally, I grabbed what I thought was the edge of my comforter--but it was my cat's foot, which she did not appreciate having grabbed in her sleep; 45 minutes later she came back to bed, pouncing on the side of the pillow my head was not on, thoroughly waking me up--turnabout is fair play. She then snuggled up next to me and promptly fell asleep. I hadn't quite fallen asleep anyway--the deep look into the troublesome section of my novel, the music in Dylan Thomas's masterly use of English, "Watching The Detectives" ("She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake" etc.) had my brain too hyped to want to call it a day. I put on my Paul McCartney's greatest hits CD and at 4 a.m. I thought I should turn it off and at least pretend to try to sleep. Jenny got me up at 7:30--I was sleeping through my alarm. Fortunately my cat's insistence on breakfast spared me from sleeping till noon and having to explain that to my boss.

So, my goal for the remainder of this week is to revise/re-revise 50pp of Quarryville and write/co-write two comedy sketches. I have not written word 1 for my sketch class.