An early draft of my memoir manuscript started with the sentence, “I come from a long line of women who don’t sleep.”

It then stretched back to the prophetic dreams of my great-grandmother, my grandma sitting up all hours of the night, my mom feeding the cats at 2 AM, and eventually to my sister and I. If we weren’t awake, we were having night terrors, or–in my case–sleepwalking and scaring the living daylights out of everyone. I used to sleep-RUN in circles around the first floor of my house and sometimes bolt down the basement steps. I was a charming child.

I scrapped that opening when more than a few writer friends suggested that I get on with the story already. The “book” now opens with me lying awake and hearing the sound of a car blowing up outside my house just before we managed to escaped the awful town where I lived for the first decade of my life.

I put quotes around “book” because it isn’t a book. It’s a manuscript. You don’t speak too much about manuscripts until they become books because, well, in the publishing world, they aren’t real yet. My subconscious would beg to disagree. Every time I read through the 90,000+ words of my childhood story, a new tidal wave of insomnia drowns out my life.

If I do briefly dip into sleep, I have bizarre dreams, ones I spit out in a text to my friends the next morning to their horror. “My house was infested with those little plastic babies from King Cakes and I had to let them outside to escape into the snow!” Or then there’s a the recurring one where I have to press myself up against a wall in order to time travel before the person chasing me catches up.

And this doesn’t even touch on the violent dreams. Locking doors and windows, watching armies of people arrive outside my parent’s house, shadows of men standing with sickles at the end of my old block (this didn’t really happen, my imagination is just super considerate.)

To bring this all back to why I’m sitting here writing this blog post in the first place–I miss writing. Sure, all I do really is write. My day job is writing. Wanna know how to detect termites in your old house? How about how to pick the right amount of high-gloss paint for your bathroom? Turns out, I’m your gal.

I incessantly tweak my manuscript, my short stories, and essay after essay after essay. I submit them to a long list of literary journals and they send rejection emails that I know are rejections before I even open them. The preview often says something like,

“Dear Ginny,

While we appreciated having the opportunity to read your work…”

No fun email has ever started with the word “while.” I know this is the name of the game. I grew up playing this game in theatre. Hell, at least you get a rejection in the writing world. Ghosting an actor after an audition is the norm.

But yes, I miss writing. I miss this writing. The writing that got me on this track in the first place. If I hadn’t started this blog, I never would have gotten a few things published back in 2015-ish. I never would have gotten my day job or left my previous day job. I never would have had the practice space to eventually write a manuscript. This blog is where it all began. It is the liminal space between a diary entry and an edited essay. No one will review it before I hit publish. WordPress can’t say, “While you got out of bed at 7am to write this blog post, we’ve decided…”

When I look back through everything I’ve written here since 2011, I’m floored. We’re always told that the small, seemingly insignificant, projects are the ones that build into your true work, but I suppose I had to lose track of this blog to realize that. Having a home for an unedited voice is the only reason I grew brave enough to have an edited one. And don’t get my wrong. I love an editor. I often scream “yes!” at the screen when a good editor sends a suggestion or catches another cockamamie sentence I wrote. A great editor and a flexible writer can cast powerful spells together when given the change.

Anyway, where on earth am I going with this this? Ah yes, I haven’t been sleeping. Is that obvious yet? I recently got to hear a favorite writer read her work and I chatted with her afterward. When I told her that my manuscript was out on submission, she asked which sleep aid I was taking. The vulnerability of writers–particularly ones I see as highly successful–will never stop amazing me.

I hate to say that I enjoy the writing crowd more than the acting one (because the acting one still makes up the majority of my friends–hi everyone!), but I do feel more at home with writers. When we do make it out of the house, we seem to wear mostly black, which is ironic because we all seem to have cats and likely spend 20 minutes lint-rolling ourselves before leaving the house. Writers can be chatty, but if one of us is sitting in the back corner nursing a glass of pinot, no one thinks you’re the weird actor who’s never gonna get cast (this is how I used to feel). Now I can sit back there in peace, and maybe even look contemplative in the process.

In between seeing this new crowd of writers in my life, I go through multi-night bouts of insomnia mixed with dreams egged on by picking apart all the memories from my early life that I’ve tried to bury, deconstruct, neutralize, and banish with various therapists and four long-distance hikes. If you’re considering writing your own memoir, I’d never discourage you to do it, but make sure you have a support system and a healthy outlet to release your rage during the process. And the next time you want to casually tell someone just to “write their book” like it’s as easy as taking up knitting, check yourself.

I’ve lost the thread again. Like I said, I’ve been losing sleep. But in the process of being this tired, I’ve realized how much I miss this writing. And so, hopefully this is a promise to get back to it more regularly. There’s a lot to report on, after all. A lot, A LOT, has happened in the past year.

The original opening to my memoir manuscript–the scrapped bit–now lives in a document called “initial thoughts and rambles” and “tossed sections.” Maybe I’ll share those here?

Since I’m not sure what this blog post was other than a way for my to get something down, I reward all you kind patient readers with a “tossed section” that didn’t make the cut.

The scent of late-summer grapes on a vine carried me back to the space between my garage and the wire fence that marked the perimeter of our small property. Mr. Hill’s grapevines bridged the space between his trellis and ours to create a minuscule vineyard just wide enough for a child to pass through. I wriggled back there some afternoons, risking the run-in with the bees feasting on the dying fruit. I was in the jungle, or in Italy, in deep dark forests, or sneaking through a villa on a mission for the greater good. My escape route emerged into a line of sunflowers that flanked the back of our garden vegetable garden and around the compost pile. This perimeter of flowers blocked the piles of rusting metal, empty beer bottles, old tires, and scrap wood from the neighbors. I learned about the threat of tetanus early in that town.