As of today, the new baby care schedule will allow each of us five hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. Five hours! And two hours for writing! It's like getting a postcard that says you won a free trip to Bora Bora; I feel happier and more relaxed already.

I managed to write 50 pages of a novel before Kathleen went back to work and our resulting schedule blew my writing time right off the calendar. So today, seeing as the Powerbook's in Texas someplace, getting repaired for free, I took a printout to Starbucks and read it.

It's disjointed--the work of a sleep-deprived mind that couldn't contain a story as a single shape, working every night next to the catbox because there are sleeping family members in every other room--but I thought I'd written junk, and it's not. It's actually... well, for a draft without several of the basic story questions even framed correctly, let alone answered, it's great.

I have no intention of working on deadline with this story. It's so huge, I don't actually know it's writeable, and it needs to be as personal as I can make it--maybe more personal than I'm yet capable of. I'm also committed to continuing to make screen musicals of increasing length and complexity.

So it'll take as long as it takes. There are some pretty whacked errors--for example, two people who end up meeting each other a few chapters from now are written in (oops) two different decades. But it's gratifying to learn that even when my mind is gone and I can't comprehend how anything I'm writing connects with anything else, I can do good work.


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