On Post: I’m Not Sleeping

Date: January 19, 2014

This was a pretty simple twisting of the lyrics to make things just that make more sinister. In the song, Adam Duritz (the Crows’ lead singer, if you are not aware) sings about what sounds like an unhealthily enmeshed relationship that he is now shaking off because he is “not sleeping.”

Rather than make it a benign relationship conflict—which I felt I had already done too much of this time—I went for a more supernatural angle. Our POV character is not just co-dependent, he’s being held (implicitly by psychological means, predominantly) hostage and being “fed” on by his “lover.”

It is a decent enough setup but, in reviewing it now, I don’t feel the tension ratchets up well and it is pretty clear that I had no idea how to end the action. It was a story that I had a premise going into but not much else.

To be clear though, this happens with The January Project. It’s kind of the point. No Project entries are polished. They are basically entirely first drafts. The only exception to that rule is the ones where I wrote most of the entry, hated it, deleted it, and used a different approach. The whole thing is designed for me to come up with a different idea every day, using a variety of writing structures to realize said ideas, and complete said entry in a 24 hour period. So tension that does not build enough or an ending that is not as strong as I would like is part and parcel of the whole endeavor.