Last night around 5:30, I decided to have a second cup of coffee. Normally, I only drink it in the mornings, but I’d been struggling to stay awake and write this fight scene and coffee seemed like a totally brilliant idea. I still fought for each word in this scene–part of my balancing choreography with emotion issues–but now I was wide awake as I ground it out word by word. (Part of the problem is that I need emotion to drive action, so that even while I was telling myself just get the action down and layer in the emotion later, I had to have some emotion in there.)
So at 10pm when I’m tired, my brain is still wired from the caffeine. I don’t know how long I laid in bed, tossing and turning. A long while. As frustrating as it was, though, it was also a good thing because I figured out some stuff. Like how my characters kill the creature that seems unkillable. (I know, not a word, but I’m going on very little sleep here.) I also came up with something cool about the hero’s scars. I knew part of it from earlier in the evening when I had the original idea, but I didn’t figure out this last part until I went to bed. It’s going to work really well because it will be a plausible excuse for some action he takes in the scene that his co-workers (and do you really call fellow magical troubleshooters coworkers?) are angry about. And the best part is that I actually remembered these things when I woke up this morning and wrote them down.
Anyway, once I didn’t have a restful night and getting up this morning was painful. Painful enough that I overslept for about twenty minutes and now I’m exhausted and rushed. Oh, yeah, while we didn’t get any snow yesterday during the day, we did get some last night. Less than half an inch, I think, but enough to mess up traffic.
Tonight, I’ll continue to pay the price for coffee last night. I’ll be dead tired by the time I sit down to write. The question then becomes do I have coffee again or not?
The other problem is that there’s a lot of stuff going on in this scene. My hero has all these emotions bubbling and he’s used to being pretty emotionally cut off, so I have to deal with all that too.
