Although I rolled over and looked at the clock at 6:00 am this morning, I managed to go back to sleep. Then my cat allowed me to sleep in because his automatic feeder went off at 7:15 and he didn’t have to rouse me, and I woke up properly at 8:00 am. Unfortunately, it was an uneasy sleep, and I used the two hours, as one does, “working.”

That happens from time to time, when I’m really asleep but my brain refuses to relinquish its grip on whatever I’m thinking about. Sometimes, when I’m like that, I’m “packing for a trip.” Other times, I’m “getting to an appointment.” At the worst of times, I’m “apologizing.” This time, I was “writing,” which is at least relatively innocuous in terms of emotional weight.

You see, yesterday, I reached one of those stages in my current writing project where I have to force myself to put something down on paper. It’s a first-draft stage, and one that sometimes brings me to an utter halt, and sometimes sends me off to work on an entirely different project. Luckily, yesterday, I looked at everything that was wrong and just decided to write anyway, inventing a whole crew of other characters in the process who will probably vanish into oblivion on second draft, but I went to bed uneasy.

My brain had a hard time letting go of the story, and now I was obsessively rewriting in my half-conscious stage, without being able to get up and do anything about it.

Around 8:00, I had a final thought, and it was that my first-person main character is a “grommet.” Just like that. “Grommet” seemed to solve all my problems.

Now, a grommet is a reinforced hole; the reinforcement is often made out of metal or some other hard material. It’s what the rope goes through to hang a flag. Sometimes the eyelets on your shoes have grommets. Usually, you just stick the grommet in the hole, and it stays there. The point is that the grommet stays in place, while everything else moves past and through it.

I looked it up when I got up and realized I probably meant a rivet, which has a shaft that gets driven through material and then gets hammered flat. I suppose a rivet could go through a grommet.

My point is that despite my conviction that “grommet” solves all my writing problems (and somehow deep in my psyche I still believe that, with all my heart, at 10:00 am), it probably doesn’t. It’s a nice metaphor, though.

Going forward, next time I get stuck, I may just mutter “grommet” to myself, in a froggy sort of voice.