Dramatic confession: I CAN’T sleep.

Actual truth: I haven’t been sleeping well for the past couple of weeks and it has been driving me BONKERS.

Clearly, it is Sleepless in Janella Land, but after some thinking, I’ve finally discovered why this is happening. I’ll go to bed at a semi-decent time (even settling down at a grandma-approved hour doesn’t do me any good), indulge in a bit of shameless Pinning or read for a bit, then it’s lights off and all is silent.

Except it’s not—because I hear MUSIC.

And no, no one is playing it. And no, my iPod isn’t going nuts. I just hear music, ALL THE TIME.

Mostly Phantom of the Opera.

And no, I’m not going crazy. (At least I don’t think so.)

For anyone who knows me, music is such an important part of my life, as well as my writing process. I listen to my music when I’m writing, when I’m driving, when I’m at the gym, when I’m just sitting down to think. Heck, sometimes I listen to music while I’m playing music on the piano. All in all, I’ve got to be listening to something. Music helps me coax out those ideas and bridge scenes together like nothing else. But with all of that constant music-listening and daydreaming each day, I think my head just becomes a little too full, and my ideas a bit too loud.

Weirdly enough, closing my eyes when I sleep is just as bad as opening them. When closed, I see my characters and my worlds kind of fireworking all together, with whatever song I listened to the most that day on a constant loop in the back of my mind. To the average person, this probably sounds enormously torturous, but I guess it’s normal for writers. Certainly becoming normal for me with all the ideas bursting in my mind, looking for a way out.

Now that I think about it, this sort of antsiness was exactly what happened to me before I started writing my pirate fantasy. I was super restless, always distracted with the the scenes flashing through my mind, and most times not paying attention in class because I just needed to jot down lines in the margins of my notes. So I guess with NaNo coming up, and with my new project plans tentatively solidified, I should’ve been expecting this. When my story ideas are so loud that I can barely sleep at night, I know that it’s just their way of begging to be written.

Okay, crazy Janella is done talking. But seriously people, please tell me this isn’t just me!!

Also, talk about how much this classic just speaks to my current dilemma.