the non-writing life

I've just decided the day is a total loss. It's so lovely, sunny, fresh and warm! Who can work on a day like today when half the population is off with pay. I woke around 9:30 instead of my usual 6:30 because ever since the end of the James River Writer's Conference I haven't been able to sleep through the night.

I woke up around 1:30 AM Sunday morning from a repeating dream of a page that listed 40 links surrounded by the heads of panelists from the conference. They eyed me expectantly waiting for me to learn everything in the 40 links and report back to them while they waited. Was it guilt that I hadn't consolidated my notes from the two day's conference before going to bed as I had promised myself? Was it a repressed frenzy of excitement? I don't know. I do know that for the first time in my life I couldn't even concentrate enough to read one in a long line of distracting novels I use to go back to sleep. I broke a major sleeping rule and got out of bed to find entertainment. This was followed by two nights of waking up during the night for no reason (although I think last night the dream was about how I destroyed a laptop by shaking it while the hard drive was running).

At this point, it hardly matters what time I got up this morning or what I've done since then. My activity has been mostly eating breakfast and taking a really long look at the new feeds in Safari and Google News. I've tried strong tea and mildly sweetened cocoa. Nothing will get me going.

While I feel the one thing I can realistically look forward to accomplishing is sitting out in the sun in an adirondack chair reading said distracting novel (and maybe drinking a cup of creamy cocoa), I hope that at minimum I write that "rain check" email to Adriana Trigiani. At most, I hope to walk the dog down to the river and, maybe, consolidate those notes into however many links it turns out to be.

In the meantime, I will console myself with Adriana's writer's block definition: It just means the idea/concept hasn't developed yet. Go out and do something distracting. I think I can handle that.