As a child, I often failed to take off my glasses before going to bed. Perhaps it was an attempt to keep at bay the fuzziness around me, or maybe just forgetfulness, but my mom would always make a joke about Schubert and take them off of me.
Franz Schubert, it seems, used to sleep with his glasses on, so that if he woke up in the middle of the night with an idea, he could write it down before it went away.
Sometimes my drifting-off time is like that. I’ll be lying there, thinking about this story or that game, and abrupt a whole page of dialog just appears like a dagger before me, waiting to be plucked.
I have two choices at that point. I can nod, say Good work, old bean to myself, roll over, and promptly forget all about it. Or I can get up and do something about it. Which, to avoid bugging the sainted wife (there appears to have been no Mrs. Schubert for him to worry about), usually means going into the bathroom, grabbing one of the plenitude of pens off the counter, fumbling for my glasses, finding a piece of relatively blank paper, and scribbling down what I’ve written under the indirect light from the shower room.
Which I did last night. And that’s easily a week’s worth of Catspaw ideas right there.
Even when I’m not writing, the Muse has ways of poking me with her pitchfork …
Doing Write
***Dave writes stuff. Here's his world of (non-blog) writing.
Well, since I’m enjoying Catspaw a great deal, I’m glad she’s poking you.
I can relate to the glasses thing, sometimes I’m gripped with the urge to get lasix or contacts….
I find the idea of poking little disks into my eyeballs to be viscerally repellent. Lasix remains a possibility, I suppose, for all that having someone carve up my eyeballs with lasers seems kind of scary, too, but I’m not so unhappy with glasses to have any great motivation toward that end.