Help! I can’t find the ‘off’ switch…

I have once again discovered a downside to living the creative life. It happens periodically for me, particularly when I’m dedicating a lot of time to generating ideas and living in that wonderful creative space that I love. In my ‘other life’, I am a full-time stay-at-home mum to three gorgeous boys whom I call Possum, JJ and Moo. Possum is about to turn 4 and JJ and Moo are identical twins who have just turned 1. Needless to say, my days are rather busy. From 7am to 7pm I am Mum. I cook, I clean, I play. And just occasionally, I might squeeze in some time to write while the babies are sleeping, but I often try and use that small window for some special one-on-one time with my beautiful, patient Possum. Come 7pm, however, and I am transformed. Like a regular Clarke Kent, I put the kids to bed and in a single twirl of my office chair, I am Karen Collum, writer. I write most nights (or do writerly things like read other people’s blogs), anywhere from 3-5 hours. This is wonderful. It’s fantastic. It’s thoroughly enjoyable…until it’s time to go to bed. As I crawl into bed, utterly exhausted both physically and mentally, I encounter a big problem. Help! I can’t find the ‘off’ switch to my brain.

I have always had a brain that whirs and clicks and grinds at lightning speed. Even as a child I remember lying awake for hours, dreaming of great adventures, analysing problems and generally deep in thought. As an adult, I am no different. But this has some serious ramifications for me. Right now, I am simply exhausted. When I am sleeping, I feel like it’s that light, unrefreshing kind of sleep where I’m almost cogniscant of everything thought still. And I write in my sleep. New scenes, new books, new blog entries. The words keep churning even when I close my eyes. And I don’t have the luxury of long sleep-ins to recover from my nightly mental gymnastics. I am by nature, a night owl and yet the great universe of motherhood doesn’t really care. No matter how tired I am, the kids will get up between 7 -7:30am (believe me, I know that’s late for many households!!). And this week, 2/3 of my crew have been miserable with ear-infections so I’ve been up a lot at night.

Last night I knew I was running on empty. I knew I needed an early night. So, using every ounce of self-discipline, I shut down my computer before 9pm and was in bed, asleep, by 9:3opm. Hooray! A victory for me and my brain…except that it’s now 12:30am and I have woken with my brain sending thousands of creative ideas to my subconscience. And the more I try and ignore the rumblings, the louder they get.

It’s not like I’m frightened I’m going to lose some magical idea by morning. I have great faith in my ability to either remember the great ideas that come to me at 3am or trust that if it was that great, it will happen again one day at a more civilised hour. And I don’t feel like I’m unduly stressed or anxious about my writing. In fact, it’s the complete opposite. I’m having a ball! I’ve found my niche. I found a soft place for my cacophony of words to fall. This is me! And in my excitement, I simply can’t turn my brain off.

I thought it might be helpful to do a ‘brain dump’, so here’s what’s been running through my head for the past 45 minutes while I’ve been trying to go back to sleep:

1. I’ve been thinking about which publisher I should send my junior novel manuscript, Operation Raspberry, to. I had a manuscript assessment done by Sally Odgers a few weeks ago and she loved it. I made the minor changes she suggested (which included a name change to be more representative of the story) and feel really positive about it. It’s been knocked back by Penguin for their Aussie Chomps series, but I did get a lovely rejection letter that praised the book, so I like to think it was at least an option they considered and that it has a bright future somewhere else.

2. I’ve been mulling over what needs to happen next with some of my picture book manuscripts. I offered them to the publisher that has accepted Samuel’s Kisses, but they have declined them, so I need to find my babies a new home. I’ve just sent two off to Penguin, but I’ve got about another dozen or so in various stages of editing. Some will probably never work, but there are a couple with real promise. One of them is a rhyming text which I know can crash and burn quickly under an editor’s gaze, but I’ve spent a lot of time tightening up the rhyming scheme to the point where I think they’d have trouble picking a fault in the structure. It’s just a matter of whether I’ve compromised any of the natural flow of the language in the meantime. I need to now go back and look at it as a story, rather than as a poem.

3. After consultation with the same publisher, my Toby series on optimistic thinking skills has been abandoned for good reason. It’s simply too overt as a teaching tool to work as a run-of-the-mill, entertaining novel. However, that doesn’t mean the project is abandoned for me. When I came up with the idea for the series about 5 years ago, it was in the context of being part of a teaching kit (that already exists). I still think it would work beautifully in that context. I have emailed the non-profit group who produce the kit. I happened to work for them a few years ago and got a new optimistic thinking skills program off the ground for kids in foster care, so I’m thinking they’ll be very open to the idea. My plan is to self-publish this particular series with the goal of onselling to the non-profit X number of copies a year. I’ve investigated self-publishing seriously before, mainly because I want to write therapeutic-style books that are not necessarily ‘mainstream’. Self-publishing was prohibitively expensive for picture books, but with a junior novel with a few line drawings here and there, I think it’s going to be a different matter. And if I have a market for them (however small), I get to avoid the horrible distribution dilemma where distributors take up to 75% of the RRP. Most self-publishers can’t afford to cover their costs when using a distributor, and yet most bookstores won’t stock books unless they are through a distributor. It really is the quintessential Catch 22.

I also might have access to a few international contacts through my membership with the International Positive Psychology Association. All it would take would be an endorsement from someone with lots of letters after their name and the inclusion of my series in a newsletter, and I’m pretty sure I’d get enough orders from people in the optimism/happiness business to cover my costs.

And, I have a great relationship with Innovative Resources, a company based in Bendigo that produce all sorts of therpeutic products for teachers, counsellors and therapists. They actually accepted one of my manuscripts last year, however due to the economic downturn, a change in management and the decision to cease their publishing arm of the business, the project was cancelled. The good news is that I firmly believe that although things don’t always turn out the way we would like, you just never know when relationships you’ve developed might come in handy down the track. They have already stated they’d be happy to wholesale any of my books, so there’s another distribution point for me.

4.  And the final thing I’ve been thinking about is non-writing related. I’ve been thinking about how miserable I’ve felt physically ever since I had my gallbladder removed 9 weeks ago. I just haven’t been back to my normal self. Prior to that I was energised, going to the gym every morning and feeling on top of things. Right now I feel like I could sleep for a week. Maybe it’s taking me a while longer to recover than I thought.

OK, brain dump over. Now, has anyone found that off switch yet?