Mark Brand and Davis Schneiderman get all Life After Sleep at the Big Other.

Most definitely have the CCLaP, the other, literary one, on the brain this week, much more on all that soon, and so really excited to see good, old friend, TBWCYL, Inc. favorite and This Podcast Will Change Your Life podcastee Mark Brand talking Life After Sleep with new friend and more recent TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Davis Schneiderman at the Big Other. Please do take a look and please do enjoy some excerpt. Please. Thanks.

Davis Schneiderman: Describe where the idea for Sleep emerged from, if you can…

Mark Brand: I first started piecing together Life After Sleep in 2007, shortly after the birth of my son. I was working 50+ hours a week in a medical office and was sleeping only 3-4 hours per night. As all new fathers do, I eventually came to accept that this is typical life with a new baby at home, but at the time it felt to me like I was the lone astronaut on a rocket to Planet Insanity. I had also always wanted to write something that pulled in some of my knowledge of medicine and the hospital/clinical environment, but I hadn’t really come across an idea I liked enough to make that happen.

By chance, I stumbled across an article in Discover magazine called “How to sleep 4 hours per night.” The article made mention vaguely of TMS technology and the potential side effect it has of putting people straight into REM sleep. My first thought was THAT’s what I want for Father’s Day, and my second thought was this would make an awesome short story. So I sat down over the course of a few weeks and wrote a short story that eventually became the “Dr. Frost” section of Life After Sleep. His section initially was a standalone short that I really liked and got some good reactions to from readers, but I just felt like I hadn’t done enough with the premise, and that there was so much more to say there about sleep and work, and it seemed to grow more and more relevant and alive in my head with each passing year. So I floated the idea to Jason Pettus, my editor at CCLaP Publishing and he liked the idea and told me to run with it. I went back and added Max and Lila and eventually Jeremy to make it more one large work.

Aside from just pure plot cleverness and a giant pile of subtext and not-quite-pointed statements about what I think people would do with a technology that allows someone to have 6 or 8 more hours in a day, (and not a few medical inside-jokes), I wanted to capture some of that experience of just being absolutely flat-out exhausted for an extended period of time. Things start to get wonky, you start waking up not knowing what day of the week it is and you realize you’re at work and you have no memory of having breakfast or driving there, that sort of thing. And in the middle of it, especially if you’ve got a new baby at home and you’re so mentally tied to two different and equally demanding facets of your life, you start to feel really bitter and fatalistic about it sometimes. I tried to grab onto that emotion and show the characters just full-on in the path of that oncoming wrecking ball.