Werewolves, Insomnia, and Cleaning

Werewolves

I learned some interesting things this week while doing a little research for my new/old serial story, Hunting the Hunted. Hunting the Hunted is an urban fantasy story with werewolves as a key fantasy element. I didn’t want to do the same old werewolf stuff that people have done before. But, I also wanted to keep from the wolves being the bad guys and that’s it. Well, in poking around into werewolf lore, I discovered that the whole idea of lycanthropy being transmitted through a werewolf’s bite is a work of modern fiction. This is despite the roots of the werewolf myth going back around a thousand years. Same thing for the concept of killing werewolves with silver. The silver vulnerability seems to come from German folklore in the 19^th century. Hollywood played on this heavily as the silver looked good on the screen. The last tidbit I’ll share here from my research is that there were places in Europe that held werewolf trials. They were identical to the witch trials most people are familiar with, only they accused people of being werewolves instead. Fascinating stuff, going back to the original werewolf legends.

Insomnia

I loathe insomnia. As in abhor, detest, revile, I can’t think of a strong enough word to fit. Can you tell it’s been bad as of late? Yeah, the last couple nights have been filled with tossing, turning, getting up in the middle of the night to do something for a bit hoping to fix it. And it’s only somewhat worked. I’m hoping tonight I’m tired enough to just plain sleep. Most of it comes from being tired, but I also have a job interview in the morning and don’t want to go into it yawning every other word. I think my insomnia comes from my struggles with turning my brain off at night. The most random, crazy stuff goes through my mind when I’m trying to sleep. It’s not funny how much random, dumb stuff keeps popping up in my head like mushrooms after a rain. Would dragons who lived for generations underground still be dragons since they’d lose their ability to fly? How did bats become associated with evil and bad stuff? And this is just the couple things I could remember off hand as I write this. When someone figures out where the brain’s off switch is so we can sleep at night, please let me know?

Cleaning

I cleaned my office this week. Well, cleaned a bunch. There’s still more to do, but I got a bunch of it done. I can walk through it without dodging stuff, I winnowed the pile on my desk down to a much shorter stack. My floor is clean enough I even vacuumed some in here. My goals for this week are to get a couple things hung up on the walls, continue to thin out the piles left in places, and continue organizing stuff. I hope to get to a place where I don’t feel bad doing live show type things because of all the mess in the background. That and then I can find what I’m looking for without digging forever first. One thing I’ve realized as well is that my office is the spot that gets neglected in favor of the rest of the house. Similar to me taking care of everyone else to my detriment. So, I’m working on not letting my space suffer too much because I’m so focused elsewhere. That way maybe it’ll help me remember to keep my life balanced better than I have been this last while. One can hope.