Random Thoughts Before Sleeping

 I often read myself to sleep with a book of poetry or a play. Yes, I'm a nerd. Being a writer, I also keep a notebook by my bedside. Many authors do this, for as you know, brilliant thoughts are ephemeral, and if you don’t get them down immediately, they are gone forever, lost, and ever to be mourned. In fact, I usually look at what I've written the next morning and have no idea what I was thinking. Here are a couple of particularly strange and poetic notes I found on one page of this notebook:

The courage to be nobody.

I have broke my heart over a lost child.

Elizabeth—this cannot stand.

I meet every man as I find him.

The book of parting.

Do you know what love is? It is bringing all of who you are every single day (I probably read this somewhere)

From Ellis Peters—they found nothing incongruous in having one foot in the 20th century and one in the roots of time.

As I look over the rest of the notebook, it occurs to me that anyone who read these scribblings would conclude that I either need a psychiatrist, or that I write mystery novels.

Here are some more odd notations taken from another random page, in order. These may be from the time I was writing Crying Blood which has a long passage about hog butchering in the fall. Or maybe All Men Fear Me, which has a riot scene. I don't know what the ennui business had to do with:

Tobacco and soapsuds to kill aphids

Boning knife – sharp point, long thin blade

Skinned hog keeps better than scalded hog

war hot blood vandals

What is this ennui? I think it must be possible to die of ennui.

[illegible]

now I had never seen a riot, but I expected I was about to

Her father hanged for murder

severed renal artery

Nothing that I see before my eyes is real

Action. Snakes. Storm. Pecan pie. Stampede.

I wish I could fit all these random thoughts together. There’s a hell of a book in there, somewhere.