Catching Up

Well, it's been eight days in a row of absolutely no sleep. What an annoyance! Sometimes I manage to get an hour or even four hours. But this stretch!!! Zippo sleep! Not good. Especially when you have to get up in the morning to take care of a non-verbal child labelled autistic who seems to have been in pain for every day of his life...and who also sometimes doesn't sleep. Am in a great deal of pain at present, plus tired, and antzy.

Will be reviewing my ebuddy's book So Many ways to Sleep Badly. He also has fibromyalgia but he manages to get around. Gonna be interesting, reviewing his novel. Me a born-againer and he a transgendered person in the sex industry. But ever since he accepted my essay in the collection, Nobody Passes, I've had a real love for him. That sleeplessness bond. Plus the sex abuse bond.

In Wind Follower, I gave Satha my sleeplessness but I didn't follow through on it. Cause I didn't want it to take over the novel. Just waiting to see what Mattilda does with sleeplessness in his novel.

Church was fun yesterday. One of those fiestas we all love. Which reminds me:

What would have happened to me, Lord, if it weren't for your grace and your love?


I love you more than my life:


Made a really intense and good catch in my novel a couple of days ago. Okay, I am all too well aware that my stories and novels generally have folks in interracial relationships. And I am aware that I tend to have light skin men doing the conquerinr and dark-skinned women in the women in distress mode. But there I was writing Constant Tower when - 202 pages into the story, mind you-- it dawns on me that AAARGH the good guys are the light skinned Wheel Clan and the bad guys are the shifty conniving dark-skinned clan. I had gone so overboard in depicting the rational of the main characters -- the light-skinned tribe-- that I pretty much made them saints who were merely avenging themselves. What a turmoil that put me in! What to do? Do I go back and turn the entire thin on its head and make the good tribe dark-skinned? (But then the woman who suffers in the beginning of the story would be a light-skinned woman suffering at the hand of a dark-skinned man. Not exactly historical.) Or should I make the light-skinned tribe not so light skinned? Like the Doreni..a kind of mixed tribe. And forget white-skinned folks entirely? That's kinda what i did in Wind Follower. But then a brilliant suggestion came to this brain o mine. I was overjoyed when it came. So am leaving everything as it is....and really bringing in a subtext I had not seen clearly: that of large multinationals taking over the resources of third world places. Not that two wrongs make a right but at least both tribes are equally greedy and shiftless. Except that the larger tribe is so used to using up 70% of the resources of their planet they don't really realize they're selfish. So it works. Nice.

I really have to fast though. I have to get some wisdom or some breakthrough in our family's life. Twenty years of this kind of continual suffering and pain just has to stop. I'm not saying, "I am going to fast because it's the right thing to do." I'm fasting cause I simply have no desire to eat...being so sleepy and nauseous from this long stretch of utter sleeplessness. Wish me luck.