This is number 115 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I GET UP AT 5:00 AM. I’m usually down for my first nap by 8:00.
Naps are usually only an hour, but occasionally, I crash at 11:00 and don’t wake up until 1:00. And, of course, then I can’t get to sleep at night because there is so much going on in my head.
What’s more, I’m seeing this all around me—and not only in the septuagenarians and up. Young people look exhausted. Baristas look exhausted. Doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and policemen look exhausted. The grocery store clerk even looks tired.
Oh. I used self-checkout. Maybe that isn’t a fair observation.
But wherever I look, I see people drained of the will to carry on. I took the title of this from a post regarding the WNBA and everyone’s concern that Caitlin Clark has only made one of her last twenty-three 3-point attempts! What’s wrong with her.
The list of women's basketball greats who are usually 3-point sharpshooters but are currently hitting less than 30% is extensive: Sabrina Ionescu, Paige Bueckers, Marina Mabry, Kelsey Plum, Arika Ogunbowale... The poster of the list on WNBA Threads says, "All the WNBA is in a slump!"
It was Kelsey Plum of the Los Angeles Sparks that summed it up: “’Cause we’re tired.”
I had lunch this week with my alpha reader Les and his wife, Marianne. We had a great and lengthy conversation inspired by an artificial intelligence character in my next novel, Forever Yours. Pythia engages in a conversation regarding the meaning of life. Les thinks I’m brilliant for thinking up the artificial intelligence and her answers to questions, by the way.
Marianne said she always wanted to write, but her life is made up of lists of things she needs to do. Empty the dishwasher, grocery shopping, laundry, answering a letter, visiting a son and grandson and great grandson. She felt the meaning of life was just her lists, and every time she scratches something off, she adds three more things to the list.
She expressed a moderate amount of envy that I ‘have time’ to write.
I’m not married. I have no pets. I have no debts and no job. I don’t have a collection of knickknacks I need to dust or display. While I’m in the Pacific Northwest for most of the summer, my routines are interrupted by visits with my friends and family, buying groceries and taking my turn cooking meals, walking the dogs, eating out, preparing dinner parties. I’m cooking Greek pastitsio for seven Monday, partly because I don’t have the opportunity to cook that often back in Vegas.
Otherwise, my life continues to be: wake up, write, nap, repeat.
I don't write for a living. I write to live.
The life can be exhausting, but I don’t think that is what has cut my productivity from a new chapter or more a day to about two new chapters a week. Something else is tiring us out.
I think one of the things writers—especially of thrillers—fail to take into consideration when they are writing about their heroes who are constantly on the go, is the effect of exhaustion on how a person thinks and how well he or she can perform. It’s as if all spies, detectives, agents, and politicians don’t need restful sleep.
When I wrote
El Rancho del Corazón, book six in the
Living Next Door to Heaven series, I recognized what was happening to Brian the way I was writing him. He was in college and taking a heavy load, he had a television show, he had a business to run, he had ten girlfriends and a variety of others who were interested, he had an enemy on campus, he’d founded a clan that he was head of, he had both sororities and fraternities vying for his attention and that of his television show, and he was wearing out.
At the peak of his burn-out he awakens from a nightmare in the middle of the night.
I was too tired to complain any longer. When we got back to the ranch, I stripped my clothes off and left my suit and everything just piled in a corner. I fell into bed and was asleep in thirty seconds. I didn’t even hear the girls come upstairs.
*
“Mary!” I yelled, sitting bolt upright in bed. “Where’s Mary?”
“It’s all right, Brian,” Rose soothed from beside me. “Mary will get here later today. You’re dreaming, love.”
“Rose! Hannah?”
I couldn’t catch my breath. Something was terribly wrong. My hearthmates were all stirring.
“Samantha. Jennifer. Courtney. Whitney. Liz. Elaine!”
I gasped. Where are they? Someone is missing.
“Sarah? Sora? Nikki? Cassie? Josh! Angela!” I yelled.
“Brian! Brian, wake-up.”
I’m awake, goddammit! Don’t you understand? Someone’s missing!
“I can’t forget anyone. Don’t let me forget. Brenda! Rhiannon! Doreen! Where’s the baby? The baby!”
Arms were holding me. Someone was rocking me. I kept calling out names. Please, don’t let me forget anyone!
“Carl? Doug? Louise? Sandy?”
And on. And on. I named everyone in the clan.
“Judy. Lexi. Susan. Leonard. Nancy. Denise. Don’t forget I love you. Please, help me remember! Don’t let me forget anyone.”
“And God bless Heaven,” Hannah whispered from beside me.
“And God bless Heaven,” I repeated. “And God bless Heaven.”
I sobbed a few times. How could I forget Heaven? And then I slept again.
Oh, but heroes are supposed to be perfect. No! They are supposed to be flawed.
What is more heroic than a newborn’s mother who has not slept in three weeks, is depressed, thinks her husband doesn’t love her, regrets ever having had a child, but who gets up in the middle of the night because the baby needs to be fed and changed? When the hero is too tired to climb to the top of the stairs, but does so anyway, that is working through exhaustion in a way that exhausts the reader as well.
El Rancho del Corazón, and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven collection are available at ZBookStore. It is also the first part of LNDtH2 on SOL.
I was more significantly influenced by a book I read in high school than I realized for many years. But whenever this subject comes up, so does Celia Fremlin’s
The Hours Before Dawn. She won the Edgar Award (Mystery Writers of America) in 1960. I must have read it about 1965. I have no idea why the book was in our house. I believe Mom or Dad belonged to a kind of Book of the Month club.
The book was riveting. I was a slow reader at the time and simply stayed up all weekend until I finished it. When I write about new mothers or people working on the edge of exhaustion, that book always comes to mind. It was brilliant!
But none of that explains
why we are so tired. It’s our society, our level of anxiety, and even our level of anger and frustration. We have the feeling that we are out of control. Life, the universe, and everything has taken a turn toward chaos that we cannot resist. Things we thought were guaranteed to Americans as part of our fundamental rights have been thrown away. Every news headline spins us around and faces us in a new direction.
And if we get our news from social media, network news shows, or directly from the source, we can’t believe it. We don’t really know what is going on. And we’re exhausted.
I’m going on vacation in a week. To Canada. The past two years, I’ve enjoyed stopping in my travels at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. It has been a number of years since I last attended the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival. I’ll be there for a week. Yes, I need the vacation.
I’m not taking my computer. I have a tablet I can read on. If I get a significant inspiration, I can write with the on-screen keyboard. If I have time, I can watch a basketball game—but I won’t sacrifice any of the six plays I’ll be seeing to watch basketball. I won’t be tracking my sales on a daily basis. I’ll check my bank accounts to be sure there are no mysterious transactions, but I won’t be recording everything in my spreadsheet. I’ll certainly be ignoring the news.
I’m going to try to be less tired when I come back. But you might not hear from me until then.