I’m going through one of my usual rough patches of insomnia – and these days, one doesn’t know anymore if it’s plain vanilla insomnia, or if it’s pandemic-stress-related insomnia, or something else.
Anyway, the end result is that I stay up all night, and then in the morning I feel like a zombie. This morning I went to sleep at 5 am, and woke up at three pm.

For reasons connected with our podcast, I’ve been re-watching the “body snatchers” movies, Don Siegel’s, Phil Kaufman’s and Abel Ferrara’s. In the movies, the alien vegetable parasites “take you when you sleep” – given my current sleeping pattern, I guess I’m safe: the body snatchers would either call and find me up and unavailable, or find I spend so much time sleeping I’m not worth the bother.

Meanwhile, I’ve come to a critical point in my novel – that is still in need of a title – and I’m reading a beautiful book, called The Nature of Autumn, by Jim Crumley.

As you can guess from the title, the book is an exploration of all things fall-related in the natural world. The challenge is to finish the book in time before the autumn is over, and then move on to the following title in the series, The Nature of Winter.
There are two more books following that – you can figure out what they are about.

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I am always impressed by the number of high-quality nature books published in Britain – hereabouts it’s either “it was so good when we were hunter-gatherers” or handbooks for birdwatchers or flower-pressers.
Now I’ve found out there is a book by Crumley about foxes – and I like foxes a lot.
It’s next on my reading list (but boy, is the list getting long!)

So, despite the messed-up sleeping patterns, we keep going.
Take care out there.