The benefits of insomnia

We went to bed at 11:30 the other night. I'd had one of those "I'm going to do all the things" days -- successful, I might add -- and I was ready to sleep.

I woke up at 3:50 a.m. with a hot flash. The kind where you have to get up and go outside in your nightie to watch steam come off your body. That's always fun. I came back in, and tried to go back to sleep, but the cold and the effects of the power surge had me wide awake.

Since I have a custom bear due to ship this weekend, and I hadn't started it yet, I decided to go into the sewing room and cut out the pieces. It's a cute little pink footie pajama, but it was newborn size so I had to pair it with some solid pink fabric to make it stretch. I got that done and pinned for the morning (I'm not so bad that I'll sew while Mario's sleeping; he's a sound sleeper, but sewing machine on the other side of the wall might be a bridge too far).

Still not sleepy. Started cleaning up the sewing room, which has to be kept tidier these days because of the size. Also, because I have it laid out well, it's not difficult to clean. So I did that.

And then I sat down, pulled out a pad and pen from the drawer, and started what I thought was making notes for the next day's writing. Those "notes" turned into 6 close-written pages that felt almost like dictation. When I typed them up yesterday, I was surprised at how clear the writing was (both in thought and in actual handwriting), and more than that, I had middle-of-the-night scrawled more than 1800 words, 300 more than my word count goal for the day.

It was a section of the new project I hadn't even planned on starting yet, so I just inserted it where the outline says it belongs, and today I went back to trying to write in order.

If my characters wake me up in the middle of the night again, who knows what gets written next.