For In That Sleep

Whee! This cactus background is in honor of Rangergirl.

I worked for 11 and a half hours today. Far too much work, but as a result I get to leave work way early tomorrow. The tentative plan is to work until noon tomorrow, then come home and dive into Rangergirl.

I stayed up until 2 a.m. last night. The plan was to force myself back into a reasonable sleep schedule. It didn't work. I woke up at 6:45, cheery and chirpy and quite unable to go back to sleep. Maybe I'll normalize tonight. Maybe I just don't need more than five hours of sleep anymore. That would be a welcome, if somewhat unlikely, development.

I'm reading Dreamcatcher. It's good. King's usual stylistic excesses, but they're familiar and almost beloved, and after long association with his books, it's easy to tell where I can just skim over the prose. This book is deeply creepy in some quite unusual ways, which I appreciate-- I've never read another book where characters passing gas could come across as genuinely sinister, but this book manages the trick.

My only problem with Dreamcatcher so far is that it's big. I mean that in terms of the physical space it occupies, and in terms of its weight. It's not King's longest, but it's over 600 pages, and it's in hardcover. I usually read when I eat lunch, but I can't do that with this one, it's too unwieldy, it gets in the way. I also take a long walk to the mailbox at work every day, and it's my habit to read my book of the moment as I walk along. This novel is too big for that, too. If I hadn't had an issue of Analog with me today, I would have made that walk without anything to read. Oh well. I could have worse problems, hmm?

I went to Pergolesi intending to outline, and instead I wrote several pages of random Rangergirl stuff-- scenes from the middle of the book, bits of dialogue, descriptive passages. I may not write this book in my usual linear fashion-- it might be more of an aggregate process. I don't know. I was tempted to write all the sex scenes tonight, but I decided I'd better space them out. Doing them tonight would've been like eating a week's worth of desserts all at once, maybe too much of a good thing. It's going to be a good book, I think, rich and textured and interesting. I'm looking forward to working on it tomorrow.