At least, my brain should be saying that. It’s so far been gleefully uninterested in sleep. Topics which have come up today:
- My performance in a Senior Staff Nurse interview (thanks for the additional answer to the question now. It’s a bit late. Thankfully I had a good answer at the time, but two would have obviously been better).
- Moving to Canada. See, we got notification through today that they’ve got and now checked all the documents, which means we can move to them assessing me to see if I can take the exam. A process which can, frustratingly, take 8 weeks. Why 8 weeks at this point is potentially a little frustrating is that the cut off date for booking the CRNE exam is… the 10th of April. In 3 weeks time. Which is less than 8, y’see. The next exam after that isn’t until October, which is a long way away and throws all the plans off by 4 more months and means trying to sell the house in winter which is bad and 4 months is a lot when we’ve both got back from the US to the UK and gone ‘oh god, we really, really, really would like to move now’.
- Sub-worry related to Canada: Finding a job and interviewing
- Sub-worry related to Canada: Moving our stuff, packing up the piano, and ‘how to stop the Morris Minor sliding around inside a shipping crate’. Now Brain, I feel we really must have a talk about this. The practicalities of moving Rebecca to Canada could, perhaps, wait until I am (a) allowed to get a job there and (b) am, say, maybe applying for them, or even (c) actually have a job there and we’re preparing to move. Until then, perhaps we could leave the specific practicalities of how to correctly load and fix a Morris Minor in a shipping container as the vague ‘car goes in shipping container’ which has done so well up until now.
- Then of course we were also treated to my Brain’s newest invention, a book about my experiences in the last days of the free for everyone NHS. A book that mainly requires my friends telling me which of the tales I’ve regaled them with amused them the most, and me interspersing them with the tales that depressed me the most, which generally go quietly into my brain or at most to my best beloved. Of course, the oh-so-delightfully creative brain then tried to map out some sample chapters. Yeah, thanks.
- And I think this was perhaps the award winner for me. A while ago I started penning a little story on my iphone. I was travelling somewhere, and bored, and idea that’s knocked around in my head formalised sufficiently that I was able to scrabble down a chapter or two. I’m sure it’s not great, indeed, given past experience it’s probably terrible, but better out-than-in as they say. And then as has happened in the past, I got stuck. My heroine was trapped (undiscovered, but trapped) and I wasn’t sure how it was going to resolve itself. Also, whilst various scenes and such have formed unbidden in my head, and despite my crappy visual-synthesis-failure brain* I’ve managed to get them down and actually, even thinking about the opening sequence makes it pop into my head, so mmm, it’s clearly there, wanting to be let out, but…err, what was I saying, oh yes, (late night stream of consciousness it is then), the other thing was, I’d no clear idea what the, shall we call them ‘baddies’, uhm, baddies were after. I knew our heroine’s ex had it, and had absconded. I knew that various people were after it for different reasons, but my oh so helpful brain had decided not to let me in on the secret of what it was. This is not unusual. When I’m stressed, my brain will often obfuscate and hand me lots of other things to be slightly stressed about and it takes me a long time to unpick things. Anyhow, I was stuck, my heroine was also stuck (rather more uncomfortably, as it happens, making me feel rather sorry for her) so I left it waiting for the answer to come.
The answer, of course, came now. At 2 in the sodding morning. The scene unspooled in my head, jumping back occasionally to make odd corrections, tweak descriptive language, try and rein in the worst excesses of what you probably all already know is my tendency to use 10 words where one would suffice. Or 20. Or overly complex phrases like ‘Her hand alighted on what had been, at least at some point in recent history, a bacon sandwich’. Although I quite like that phrase and it adds a degree of levity to a rather tense scene. Although I fear it also breaks the tension, which I’m not sure if I (or at least, the bit of my brain that has some idea about what’s happening) want(s) at that point.
However, phrases like that mean that getting from scene-where-she’s-stuck to scene-where-she’s-trying-to-work-out-how-to-escape-the-police-without-actually-running-away are taking a long time. And also, my brain is an asshole for waiting until two in the sodding morning (did I mention it did this at two in the sodding morning) to unleash this, and apparently, possibly the answer to what they’re looking for. Although it’s not wholly important right now, beyond that it could be ‘written down’ either on paper or on computer. It is not a physical object, like, say a refined Bain Marié that never lets the eggs for your hollandaise scramble.
Anyhow, it’s now past three AM, and I’ve been up about 30 minutes typing this. I’m unsure if I should have spent the 30 minutes typing the story, to make it get out of my head, but since the story showed no signs of abating, it was just toying with a few situations before we get to the police station… And now, even as I try and persuade my overtired (and still ill) brain that I should actually be sleeping my brain seems to be studiously ignoring me. Although the fever which I find harder to deal with at night has been driving me to the brink of insanity. Or at least, it would have been, if I’d’ve not had a story to think about…..
* I’d not really noticed until I was trying something from Homeland, visualising a window and then blacking out each of the panes, to try and attain some peace and calm, but my brain is terrible at that. Making an image actually form in my brain in a kind of ‘I can imagine that’ way takes much more work than I think it should. I assumed this is related to my appalling facial recognition abilities. Spacial awareness is generally pretty spiffy though. Odd.
