Eccentric Flower:199901/a sleepless night in the closed loop

twenty-eight january (daytime)

a sleepless night in the closed loop

The previous postcard said "twenty-eight january (late)" and what it really should have said was "(early)" - it was written shortly after midnight this morning. I stopped recording time of day on these because it didn't seem crucial.

If I'd written in the middle of the night last night, as I thought about doing, I don't know what I'd have labelled it. Is it "late" or "early" at four o'clock in the morning? I guess it depends on whether you're just getting up or haven't gone to bed yet, but what is it when you've been to bed but can't sleep well?

Yes, I've been having a fresh bout with my lifelong Nemesis, insomnia. The new wrinkle is that I sleep well for about three hours when I go to bed. Then I wake up, somewhere between three and five a.m, and can't sleep again for a while. Usually a short change of pace is enough - go to the computer and send email, which is what I did last night, or read, or have a snack, or, um, perform a certain activity with myself which I have no tactful way to describe but is the best cure for insomnia I know.

[Oh, boy, am I blushing. I'm sorry. But I'd have been leaving out an important part of the story if I hadn't said it.]

The problem is that this hiatus interrupts my sleep cycle enough to leave me cranky and barely focused the next morning. But I can't just stay up once I'm awake - it's worse. I thought about that last night, but my eyes hurt so badly just sending a few emails that any thought of serious work was quickly discarded.

(I've mentioned before that having burning eyes is my number-one "I need sleep" cue, so much so that when my eyes are burning for other, unrelated reasons, my brain assumes I'm tired. Unfortunately the computer also gives me red-eye, so it's kind of a losing proposition. And right now my eyes are burning from last night, but if I went home and tried to sleep, I wouldn't be able to.)

Last night was very, very bad. I got up and had some water and sent email and went into the spare room and tried my Favorite Insomnia Cure and that didn't even work. The big cause was "Rereading." I had gone straight from postcoital bliss to postpartum depression.

I got an annoying and anonymous email last year from someone who instructed me to "stop worrying about my f**king talent" (their words) and just write. Well, I don't worry about my talent, oddly enough. I know I have talent. I write things people want to read. But I don't write things I can sell, and I have utterly no idea why.

Every time I've tried to write something commercial, it's either been utterly lousy (you don't get to see those) or has mutated into something non-commercial while I was writing it (you can see a few of those on the story page). I don't have any control over the process.

Manuscript buyers (aka submissions editors) are some of the most conservative people on the planet. (Next to movie producers.) They like stuff that's an easy sell and is easily pigeonholed. They like things that go where others have gone before - if it's the same formula as something that's already succeeded, then it's a shoe-in, right?

Now - before you berate me - F/SF editors are different. They are generally willing to scale their slushpiles in search of the new and unsaid. Their readers demand more intelligence and complexity from their stories - usually - and get bored with the same plots rather quickly - again usually - unless the variation is clever.

But there are maybe three paying F/SF markets in this country, and they are so glutted that even the pros have a hard time getting in the door. I explain this all on the story page. Mary Anne mentioned Asimov's to me last night. I didn't even know whether Asimov's was still running. You know the last time I saw an SF magazine at a newstand? And "Rereading" wouldn't sell to Asimov's - there's barely even an element of the fantastic in it, let alone SF.

I am not saying all this to get sympathy.

I am not wallowing in self-pity.

I am not looking for an excuse to avoid shopping my work.

I am not looking for martyrdom.

I am merely calling things as I see them.

I will never stop writing. I can't. I'm just not sure I will ever be able to sell any of it.

1. I write stories where the plot is the thinnest excuse for the character development. I write, at the core, stories about what happens when people get caught in weird situations, and since I'm mostly concerned about the people, I don't bother to explain or talk about the situations much. That annoys the SF types.

2. I am partial to characters who are emotionally closed to the world, because I like to see what happens when I either coerce or force them partially out of their shell. I like embittered characters. These characters are not popular - I got a lot of negative feedback about them the last time I was on a crit list.

3. The only time I have ever varied from this, the stories have been autobiographical. The main character in The Novel, who is lively and who does have emotions, is a thinly disguised version of me from the Rocky Horror, hand-to-mouth days. Aedie is me as a fifteen-year-old, way too smart and a little too cynical and completely naive about many things. These are good characters. But I can't write autobiography forever.

All right, all right, end of rant. I have to go pretend to do work now. You can flame back, as ever. Think my facts are warped? Think I'm dead wrong?

Mary Anne is absolved from comment. She's already made it clear she thinks I'm wrong, and I think I've annoyed her - no point in more friction over fiction.

Xeney noted the other day that she kept thinking to herself But I was supposed to have had so much potential! I know I have potential. I just don't have a market.

I didn't get to sleep until seven this morning.

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