Welcome to my blog Toby. I loved your post about insomnia, and must say I have experienced it quite often myself. Mind you, I don’t recall having to terrorize one of my poor characters into making them even crazier, but then again, maybe I should. It could add a new element to my one of my angel stories!!
How lucky can you get living in Hawaii!!??
I wanna be you…
Last night I had insomnia. This is not all
that unusual; as a ‘thinker’ I am unduly burdened by brain processing, and I’d
been knocked out all last week by a cold and resulting cold medicine, and last
night was the first time I went to bed without chemical help. Even so I did an
afternoon workout hoping to be too tired for the ol’ sleeplessness to come
back.
(unable to see clock without my glasses, and putting them on is admitting the
insomnia is really bad, so the time remains a fuzzy red figment in the dark)
and was plagued by the sense that the bad guy in my sequel is just not scary
enough.
a great deal of gore is also there, which I’ve handled with buckets, tarps and
scene cutaways (I tend to be of the suggestive rather than explicit school when
it comes to violence) and he’s nicely crazed with a well developed pathology.
Even so, he’s just not ‘popping’ for me… and if it’s not working for me it’s
definitely not going to be working for readers.
standby suspense technique—the ticking clock. I had it in there, but an early
death of the victim sort of killed it (ha! Pun!) and so today I did what I have
to do to keep track of time—printed out a calendar of the month, stretched out
the timeline and extended hope for the hopeless. I gave the victim a clear
expiration date that the reader knows and Detective Leilani Texeira doesn’t,
and had the guy who, in the original, lay in a coma and was peacefully
slaughtered, wake up and demand to know what the hell was going on.
date at the top of each chapter begins a new day and reminds you the dude in
the cave is going to buy it if Lei doesn’t get off her toned ass and out of the
pool with the hot developer and track
down the madman.
feel a heady power— I can manipulate time! I can bring back the dead, and
invent entire bureaucracies! I can just freakin’ make stuff up, and when it
doesn’t work, I can completely change it!
love being a writer. Even the insomnia—when it amounts to something useful.
Unfortunately sometimes I forget the brilliant ideas I have in that effortless
gray between sleeping and awake.
and what usually brings it on?