As part of my efforts to get better sleep, I stumbled across Ward’s Wiki‘s Sleeping Well Tips (which would make a great name for a band). I’m trying them out. The advice to avoid food for three hours before bed hasn’t seemed to help thus far, though the suggestion to avoid reading in bed jives with my experiences. Reading tends to excite my mind rather than relax it.
Last Wednesday night, I followed the advice to do some freeform journalling just before bed. I wrote about half a page’s worth, which predictably ranged all over the map. I wrote a bit about Chaos!, and work, and writing.
It was the bit about writing which was particularly worthwhile. As I slipped off into a deep doze, I thought about Seeing Things Invisible, and further worked out the problems I’m having with it. Ironically, I need more characters. I only have six major characters thus far, after all. I’ll need at least four more characters, all of which will have significant roles.
But this excites me. I finally have a grip on this story again, and I want to write the next chapter now.
This is the first time I’ve called a Seeing Things Invisible entry a “chapter.” It feels increasingly like a book, so that seems like a reasonable term. And I dislike using “snippet,” partly because that’s my technical term for a short piece of text that’s part of a larger narrative. These things are pages and pages long, though shorter than average novel chapters.
On the other hand, I’m keeping my options open about STI. I developed a pretty sweet website that would allow me to post STI as a webdrama, and I still may do that and use something like BitPass as an experiment to make a bit of cash. I like the idea of charging a miniscule amount for access to the archives; Saalon argues that people can then just always read the front page. Which is absolutely true, and wonderful. If you get in on the ground floor, you don’t have to pay much of anything to read the archives, which seems to me like a reasonable reward for being an early adopter. If you get in on it later, the archives have a modest cost (a few dollars for the entire thing).