The Green Mile

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I go through cycles of insomnia—a fact that won't surprise people who've read the novel chronicling the adventures of Ralph Roberts—and so I try to keep a story handy for those nights when sleep won't come. I tell these to myself as I lie in the dark, writing them in my mind just as I would on a typewriter or a word processor, often going back and changing words, adding thoughts, deleting clauses, making up the dialogue. Each night I start over at the beginning, getting a little further before I drop off. By the fifth or sixth night I've usually got whole chunks of prose memorized. This probably sounds a little nuts, but it's soothing... and as a time-passer, it beats the shit out of counting sheep.

These stories eventually wear out, just as a book will after it's been read over and over again. ("Throw it out and buy a new one, Stephen," my mother would sometimes say, turning an irritable eye on a well-loved comic book or paperback. "That one's read to rags.") Then it's time to look for a new one, and during my bouts of sleeplessness, I hope a new one will come soon, because sleepless hours are long hours.

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