I write most days at 4:30 AM.  This is a strange one.  For some reason all my thoughts coalesce then, and the house is silent.  I need silence inside my very messy mind and in my surroundings.  But 4:30 AM is something else.  It marks a major trauma in my life, a call from a County Coroner that my brother had been in a fatal accident.  That 4:30 AM call completely shook my psyche.  For the first couple years, I woke up nightly at that time, completely shattered.  Then, it began to be a time of comfort and clarity.  Basically, if I am working with past events, even if I am rewriting them as fiction, 4:30 is the time they come clear, both in content and significance.

Off the Tracks was a strange process, because my brother and I are so deeply connected to the story.  I had a lot of audio tape and notes, but that 4:30 time was a time to think about his character and how he responded to the challenges of the world around him.  Like me, he was frightened and bewildered at the events that surrounded us.  Unlike me, the adults thought he was hilarious because he was detached to the point of being “cool” in tough situations.  I fought back.  But I think his “cool,” or is it bewilderment? comes through.

I have now begun another book, but at night, a clear message jumps out of my sleep.  What am I going to write about today?  So, I just wrote for two hours beginning at 4:30.  I’m going back to bed.