I don’t sleep well at the moment. The plague that wiped me out last week was of the cold-and-cough variety, which is one of those that goes from minor inconvenience to major inconvenience when you strap a pressurised breathing mask to your face every evening. The moment the breathing mask pressurised, I would start a coughing fit and pull it off.

The cold part of the equation is largely gone, but the cough lingers. And so I sleep in two hours bursts, packing in as much shut-eye as I can before the coughing starts and I wake up. I get, maybe, six hours of interrupted sleep a night that way. Enough to function, but not enough to be particularly happy.

Thursdays I go to work. For the next two weeks, they are days when eight hours of work is followed by a two hour workshop. I still have to wedge writing in there, find the time to get the manuscript for Float up to 2,000 words before I go to bed. Naturally, I was afflicted with horrific insomnia when I went to bed at a reasonable hour last night, and did not actually sleep for several hours.

This is my starting point for the day.

And so I rolled out of bed at six-fifteen in the AM, humming the chorus to Rufus Wainwright’s Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk. I showered and ate my first complete breakfast in nearly a week. I drank coffee. I realised how much I’d missed coffee. I put on clothes and fired up youtube and set up a slightly maudlin, I-do-not-want-to-be-up-this-early playlist.

I listened to Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk three times in a row.

And then I started writing.

PROGRESS ON FLOAT

Boom. Time to go watch the first episode of Cleverman.

CPAP FAcemask and Breathing Tube

PeterMBall

PeterMBall

Peter M. Ball is a speculative fiction writer, small press publisher, and writing mentor from Brisbane, Austraila. He publishes his own work through Eclectic Projects and works as the brain in charge at Brain Jar Press.
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