So today I woke up at 2 a.m. Great. FYI: Not a good idea to go to sleep at 6 p.m.; you will wake up at 2. (Hey, I was tired.) Then there you are, stuck with your middle-of-the-night frettings and nonsense for another zillion hours before the sun comes up and you return to your saner self. It is very silly to be doing yoga & meditating at 2 a.m. And of course this "meditating" amounted to said fretting. Today's fret topic: work. What else? So I arrive at my desk at normal work hours, already having worked myself into a tizzy—I will never write again! The novel will be terrible! What will happen when the book comes out? Why do I write books? Why didn't I get a sensible job? The problem with writing: you never know if you're doing it right. You sit down every day, and even when you have your scene list next to you (the list that tells me what I will supposedly write that day), you start the scene and have no idea where it goes next. It is the ultimate in uncertainty and ambiguity. And of course those are just two of my very favorite things. Not knowing—I'm just a pro at that.

And to top it off, when I woke up at 2 and felt it necessary to hit Jeff on the head several times to try to wake him up so he could have a nice chat with me in the middle of the night, the rat refused to do so. Speaking entirely in his sleep, in his own special sleep-language, he explained very rationally in gibberish that I could sit up all night by my very own self and fret well enough without him. When I finished laughing so hard I fell off the bed, I thought about how extremely cool and weird the brain is in its ability to create entire grammars and vocabularies that make sense to the sleeper but no sense to the waking world; the brain in its endless coolness, no?

I have been terrifically impressed this week with how much the folks I know in recovery are kicking ass. Notes on this in the ED board.

So this week was spent dashing back and forth between a poem that is nagging at me, the first few scenes of Section 2 of the new novel (ok, the first scene, and a really elaborate scene list for the next 12...), and various things coming up with pre-pub stuff: a couple of interviews, including one that I think appears today in People Magazine, and some plans for articles that will come out closer to April 9. Will post news of those when I know when they'll come out. As for the endless fretting about the novel, my agent has, I'm pretty sure, put me in her spam folder so I'll stop bugging her about how many scenes I should write per day/week/month/forevermore in order to write the book Exactly Right. Her only response is, Would you just WRITE? So, because she knows everything, I'm just writing.

As for endless fun with bipolar, I forgot my meds the other night. DON'T try this at home kids—not fun. I'll be bats all day today, and kicking myself for forgetting, and remembering with horror all those years I spent pretending I didn't really have it (no, really! all this chaos is just, you know, situational!) and refused to take my meds and was bats ALL the time—ugh, it just gives me the willies & the nightmares now. For those of you with any kind of mental struggle—for God's sake, take your meds. I don't want to hear any nonsense about how great crazy is, and how much it helps you "create"—forget it. Read the comments on the mnartists.com discussion on the Madness blog for some smart, insightful words on how the image of the crazy artist is crap—we need to be on our toes to do good work, and that means taking care of our wayward brains.

Weirdest thing the other night: I had a conversation with a person who thinks that mental illness is, ok, partly chemically-driven, but mostly psychological. I fell out of my chair. I am so used to being around people who know about mental illness, and know it's a brain disease, and has an entire body of brain research to support that, which concurrs with all the psychological research that is learning to develop therapies that help people deal with the psychological and emotional EFFECTS of the brain disease, that I often forget that a whole lot of people—most—really still believe it's a matter of character. Lordy, I hope that the publication of Madness will help dispell that notion at least a little bit. But it's also up to those of us who have it to talk to people on a case-by-case basis to bring awareness to the public about the medical nature of mental illness. Hey, maybe if people were aware that it's an illness, they might actually support medical research funds to find treatments that can more effectively help us MI people function well—we're perfectly capable of doing so, if our treatment works. I'm sick of being consigned to the slag heap of people whose illnesses aren't taken seriously, and therefore aren't given the research funds to help us out. I'm not asking for much, people—just some basic awareness that my illness is an illness, and as such deserves the same efforts to treat it so that I can kick as much ass as I'm capable of doing. Lots of ass, thank you very much. Much kicking ass. And I think a lot of us could do with a titch less stigma? No? Well, it's our job to make that happen.

Weather report: cold. Grey and cold. (Say, does anyone know for sure whether it's "gray" or "grey"? I always get it wrong. I have gotten it wrong in every book I've ever written, and every time the copyeditors change it to the other one, and I do it the other way in the next book, and the copyeditors change it to the other one again. Please inform.) So I've got the trusty lightbox on (for those of you who are unfamiliar with the trusty lightbox, it's a box that lights up—I'm so clever it kills me!—and mimics sunlight & triggers the production of vitamin D, so that people whose mood flags/plummets during the lightless winter months can get a little light and keep mood up to par. It's often covered by insurance—look into it if you're one of those people, because it really does help), and fantasizing about warm sunny places, and trying not to think about February, which seems like a very long month up here in MN, where it's winter five months of the year. I'm not really sure what those settlers were thinking, settling up here in the semi-tundra; but there you have it, and now we're here, and we have Minneapolis, which is awesome, so that's good payoff.

Ok, so those of you checking out the tour schedule: Jeff hasn't had time to correct it yet, but the San Francisco date has been changed to APRIL 23 (not 24); I'll be in Portland APRIL 24. He'll get those changes up this weekend—right after we take down the Christmas tree. Yes, I know it's January 11. We've been busy. Give us a break—one year we left it up till February. So, on the whole, we're doing pretty well.

As for tour: the idea is I'll blog every day while I'm on it. I can't guarantee it, but will do my best.

Enough out of me. Back to the novel. See you next week. (And for thoses of you lurkers who aren't posting yet—for heaven's sake, post!)

Cheers,
M