Crashing Out

I just realized something. In a few months it’ll be 20-years since that time I quit a perfectly fine job to chase my dream of becoming a writer.

This happened to be my second job out of college after getting laid off from the first one in the aftermath of the dot com bubble. It was a perfect storm, really. I’d just broken up with my girlfriend of two years, several friends had recently quit their jobs as well and seemed to be living the good life, and after four years with my company, I’d about had it with my job and the overbearing supervisor it came with.

But I still probably wouldn’t have quit if not for something else.

A few weeks before giving my notice, I was lying alone in my Culver City studio apartment when it suddenly came to me, an ending for my story. Or at least the ending to part one of my story…

For years, I’d been trying to think of a story for this novel I wanted to write.

The idea to write a novel at all had come to me on another sleepless night years earlier when I was a sophomore in college.

Basically, I was laying awake in my Berkeley apartment, staring out the window at the moonlit sky, when I started thinking of the word insomnia. This wasn’t unusual at all since I always saw myself as an insomniac, and this night was no different.

But what was unusual was how I couldn’t seem to get the word insomnia out of my mind that night. I kept seeing the word swimming around inside my head until suddenly it was joined by another, and together they made me think, “Insomniac’s Dream.”

Immediately I knew. That would be the title of the book I wanted to one day write. But as if that wasn’t enough, like some kind of magic was in the air that evening, I could see the letters of the word insomnia start to drift apart and reorganize themselves into Simon Cain. Again, I immediately knew that had to be the name of my main character. (Now you know why I go by Cain.)

Anyway, for years afterward, I kept trying to come up with a story befitting of Insomniac’s Dream. For a long time I had nothing. Anything I tried to come up with sounded lame or stupid. But I never gave up on the dream, and every so often, something would happen in my life, sometimes small, sometimes big, and it would give me an idea, a small piece of the puzzle that I would hang onto while I continued looking for the rest of the pieces.

Then it finally happened that night alone in my studio. Four years into my dreaded job, fresh off my difficult break-up, I thought I’d finally found the last piece I was looking for to finally begin Insomniac’s Dream…

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