Still Sleepless in Brighton

Being a writer introduces you to many new experiences. I’m having one right now. Excellent Agent (hereinafter EA) wants revisions to novel #1. Good revisions too. Novel #2 has gone off for a bursary read to a literary consultancy. Novel #3 is around 35,000 words. Normally (if anything is normal in my life) I work on several things at once, but one thing is always primary and until last week this, quite naturally, was novel #3.

Now, of course, novel #1 is also primary. Whichever piece of work is primary, that’s the one I usually find inhabits my subconscious and that I get nocturnal messages about and inspirations for.

Last night I had a dream. I was dreaming as one of my characters (this seems to be unusual – people generally dream OF their characters, not AS them) but it was the protagonist of novel #1, in the setting of novel #3. A part of me was trying to argue with the dream, saying that it was wrong, but most of me wasn’t listening. It was all really rather nasty. So I woke up, as one does, slightly panicked and disorientated, put the light on, assured myself I was me, in my bed, in my more-or-less reality and went back to sleep again.

I woke up two hours later, having been told by my subconscious that there was a minor flaw in novel #1 that neither EA nor I had spotted. I wrote down the correction (Alan is part-time shepherd for Tim in February/March – isn’t that gnostic?) and went back to sleep.

And then the alarm went off …


Shepherd courtesy of Nicksarebi at Flickr

This is not what I planned to write about

But this is what happened, and it dovetailed into what I was going to write about which is one of those things that happen and no writer could get away with letting them happen in fiction because it sounds too beautifully coincidental.

Last night, well 2 am actually, my very tall, very intelligent, usually very laid-back seventeen year old son came into my bedroom to ask me to ‘deal’ with the spider on the ceiling in his bedroom. Yes. My rock god son still needs his mum on rare occasions…

I got up, got dressed (yes I sleep naked, too much information?), got the stepladder, got the large and active spider into a plastic cup with a sheet of stiff card over it and threw the spider out of the front door and went back to bed. “I’m an adult,” I thought. “Finally, indubitably, I’m an adult. How very cool.”

And then I woke up an hour and a half later, sitting bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding, my palms slick, my eyes wide open into the darkness because, fucking hell, I had been near a spider and I’m terrified of spiders! And then I woke up another forty minutes later, having another complete panic about a spider being in bed with me. So I put the light on and persuaded the dog to sleep on the bed and didn’t get any more sleep that night.

So this is what I have to share with you. Whenever you think you’ve got there, whether it’s adulthood or career success, your inner child will rise up and remind you that you’re faking it. Oh yes you are!

So yes, I now have an agent, but that doesn’t prove anything. And maybe I’ll feel like a real writer when I get a publishing contract. But probably not. Because my inner child will have something to say about that too.

Spider courtesy of Opo Terser at Flickr and Opo Terser is a braver person than I am!