Today will not be a very productive day, on the writing front. One reason is that I only got about 4 hours sleep last night. There’s no good reason for the insomnia–it was a busy enough weekend with lots of physical exertion that I should’ve slept all night. But at 3AM, I woke up with a bunch of little details for the week in my head, not even pressing ones, and they managed to keep my head revving all night. This went on to a soundtrack of Yes’ “Close to the Edge”. These sleepless periods always come with a song that won’t stop looping, and when I’m lucky, it’s not a song I hate (when I’m not lucky, it could be anything from Sting to The Buggles, which Number One Son keeps talking about for some reason). In this as in so many ways, I hope I’m not turning into my mother, who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in 30 years.
I also agreed to go downtown today to speak to a writing class at Columbia College about humor. I hope I can convince them that I know what I’m talking about, b/c I have a hard enough time with editors. My main goal will be to scare them into making hundreds of revisions–either scare them straight or scare them straight out of the profession. I wanted to be able to show them the first marked-up pages I ever wrote for Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, which some interviewers and critics said was such a slam dunk that anyone could’ve written it. Those slam-dunk pages, of course, were rewritten 20 times before publication. But unfortunately I can’t find those files anywhere. I have other examples to show, but I really wanted those first entries b/c they looked like redacted CIA documents. Just want to be able to beat it into their head to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. But I’ll probably be lucky to get them to turn off their Facebook pages.