Writing in my sleep

I woke up yesterday morning and started writing right away. That doesn’t seem unusual, except I didn’t get out of bed to do this. I was lying there, mostly awake, constructing sentences and paragraphs, going back to edit what I’d written in my mind. It was almost like I was dictating it to myself. After a while, afraid that I would lose what I had written, I found the ledger that I always keep close at hand and transcribed what I had composed—in the dark. All told, over 1000 words, which I typed up last night and worked on this morning. It’s for a new short story that I’ve been preparing to write for a few weeks now. I had one idea about the voice and style the story was going to take, and another for a storyline concept, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I saw how to put the two together.

I did a lot more genealogical work this weekend. I tied into an extensive database compiled by someone from my neck of the woods whose ancestry intertwines with mine a few generations back, so I was able to expand the family tree extensively, all the way back to an area near Aberdeen, Scotland, in the late 1600s. I also found online church records for the English region of Quebec that confirmed some of the details I had only anecdotally and allowed me to add some new information. I had expected to find more Irish connections, but to date I’ve only identified three people out of nearly 300 in the tree who came from Ireland. I have more than that from France, to my surprise. And only two or three individuals born in the U.S. One of them was possibly a United Empire Loyalist born in NJ or Pennsylvania who moved to Canada as part of His Majesty’s armed services, though there seems to be some debate over whether he was born in the US or England.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent was good last night. The brief cameo of Mary McCormack from In Plain Sight had a funny moment where one of the characters said “What on earth could anyone do at 10 pm on Sunday night,” a reference to the other show’s air time. I like the way USA handles crossovers, like the commercial with Vincent D’Onofrio as Goren driving all the way down to New Mexico to offer Mary McCormack a pie to welcome her to the neighborhood.