Does it count as an all-nighter if you go to bed at 5:30am? I wonder where the true cut-off stands. I’m going to answer my own question and say that if you make it past 5:00am then your evening officially qualifies for all-nighter status. In that case, I’m nursing a mighty hangover from last night’s unexpected all-nighter.
You see, I got home from the grocery store last night at 8pm to find that a literary agent had requested my complete manuscript. My stomach hasn’t settled since then (going on 22 hours now), but I managed to get the manuscript out the door early this morning.
Of course the book was finished. There’s a rule about that: never submit to an agent unless your book is finished. It’s just that I have a to-do list of little tweaks I’d been postponing.
As feedback trickled in from my various readers over the last month, I collected their nits and suggestions in a spreadsheet while I focused on writing the ending. (Digression: It’s no wonder so many endings suck. They’re awful hard to write.) Mr. King, I apologize for the curses I cast your way upon reaching the conclusion of The Stand...
But I’m not really here to talk about my book; I’m here to contemplate The All-Nighter.
There is something special about staying awake through the night and accomplishing a goal while the rest of the city sleeps. Those lazy people, think what they could have done if they had worked through the night!
I enjoy the peculiar silence of 3:00-5:00am on a weekday. I remember, like it was yesterday, walking through the corridors of my dormitory in search of one more can of Mountain Dew. All the thermostats were set at 63deg on the assumption that everyone would be nestled in their beds at that hour; I shivered under woolen layers and pinned my eyelids back with another swig of caffeine.
At some point in the night, one you fight past the depths of fatigue, you find a special clarity, a hyper-awareness of your world. You notice the sounds of pipes and wonder who has called them into service. Staring at your computer screen, you find errors you overlooked when others filled adjacent seats in the library. Fresh ideas spring onto the page, since it seems that the internal editor (the hyper-critical one, anyway) heads to bed around 3:30am.
Anyone who has stayed up through the night knows the unique feeling of observing the dawn. When you get up to an alarm clock before sunrise and the room slowly brightens, it is expected rather than profound. But when you stay up all night, the brightening is different somehow, nearly magical.
Eventually, weariness overwhelms you. But even that fatigue is special, different from the sleepiness one feels at a normal bedtime.
I think everyone should sneak an all-nighter into their itinerary once or twice a year, if only to feel that blend of excitement and fatigue in their bones.
Voluntary all-nighters = see your description.
Involuntary all-nighters = no magic, only: "Holy Shit, it's dawn already?!?! I'm totally screwed."
I don't know, don't you think there's something kind of special about being up all night compared to just working late? You look at other people filing into the office and think "hey, you bunch of slackers! I've been up all night..."
Okay, maybe that's just me.
01-15-2007: Contacted first agent with my novel.
01-06-2007: Revamped home page launched!
Send your thoughts:
jason@jasonshaffner.com