till I get some sleep

The good thing about insomnia is - oh wait - nothing.  The sort-of interesting thing about insomnia is the wonderful ideas you come up with in the middle of the night as you lie there, begging all that's good and holy for sleep. The only issue with that, of course, is that your judgement is clouded by, well, lack of sleep, and sometimes the ideas are not as wonderful on second reflection.

I'm trying to write something - a proper, amorphous something that will have shape, and legs, and go somewhere, bogged down as the other thing I am 'writing' is at present. A writer's min-break, as it were. And I'm finding my sleeplessness fuelled by and sustaining of the ideas I am having for this thing, this piece of imagined reportage, this unworthy tribute to the muse.

So last night - or this morning - whenever it was - my marvellous idea was that I need to do some active re-reading of things that are completely different from the thing I am writing now, and the book I am also 'writing'. My brother-in-law reminded me of Ken Follet as we had a glass of wine at child-swap time last night. When I was 14 I LOVED Pillars of the Earth.

Googling it just now, I discover that Donald Sutherland was in the mini-series - delightful, since my dad (who has a Donald Sutherland-ish) look to him, first gave me the book to read as a teen.

Another writer I've been thinking about lately is David Lodge. Again, as a teenager, I read his campus novels - which, growing up as a professor's kid, were pretty hilarious. Reading Eugenides' The Marriage Plot earlier in the year had made me think of Lodge's Small World, in which a young English lecturer inverts his actual thesis topic into being the beautifully po-mo 'influence of TS Eliot on Shakespeare.'

So this morning, when, after sending him a scary, PBRF-related email, a very sweet colleague* turned up at my office door holding his umbrella and two David Lodge books - Paradise News (which I've never read) and Nice Work - and gave them to me - well, some sort of confluence of the stars seemed indicated.

So I'm going to read some Lodge, and get some sleep, and try to turn these scrawled-down, middle-of-the-night ideas into a thing people might actually want to read.

*middle-aged econometrician; hates PBRF, email, and phones. Likes vintage tools and talking to me about books.