Contest Fever

Don’t forget my contest! Information is here. Enter once a day until Sunday at midnight. And share with your friends!

Anyway, what I want to talk about today is the importance of a good night’s sleep. For me, it’s vital. Right now, I feel all bleh because I had a couple of bouts of insomnia lately, and it’s not helping with my writing. My brain doesn’t want to be creative, form an idea, run with it until it becomes a story. It doesn’t want to find all the uses of “was” and “that.” It wants to stare at the TV because I didn’t fall asleep until after one a.m. and woke up at six, tired but for some reason unable to slip back below the surface.

Falling asleep has never been easy for me. Well, maybe it was when I was very little, but I can remember being ten, awake, wondering why I’m tired, I want to sleep, and yet I can’t.

…

Sorry, I just fuzzed out for a little while. Anyway, I can’t pinpoint an exact cause for this terrible affliction. When I was young, I shared a room with my sister and she certainly wasn't any help. Think loud, screaming conversations with her boyfriend. And then in the morning, loud, screaming music as she got ready for school, which started over an hour before mine.

Hm. Making a little more sense now. But even after I got my own room (thank God), I could not fall asleep. It was nice and quiet, but I would crawl into bed at nine and not sleep until after midnight, on a good night. There were times when I was up until two, three, four a.m. and then had to get up to go to school at six twenty. And I can’t even say that was infrequent.

I tried everything: meditation, concentrating on nothing, counting backwards from one hundred visualizing gold letters on black backgrounds. All came with the same result, i.e. bupkis. I wanted to sleep more, but until a doctor actually gave me medication, I just figured I was someone who didn’t fall asleep within twenty minutes of lying down, like how some people can’t process milk. Sure, I wanted to sleep, but I assumed I was destined to a life of feeling slow and dull, like I do right now. One thing, though: it does make me appreciate the fact that my nights are now pretty much all good.

Here’s hoping that tomorrow, I can sit down here and do something. Without it, I can’t do anything properly. It makes me miserable. What is it about sleep, especially dreaming, that is so vital for the brain? It’s known that the day with the lowest rate of heart attacks and car accidents is the day after daylight savings time ends, and the day with the highest is the one where it begins! That extra hour stolen from springtime really helps. 

What about you guys? How important is sleep? And can you be creative without it? I’m curious to know.

It’s About Time

Not literally time. But the contest is starting…now! Forgive any blunders; I’m not very good with computer interfacing. To enter, all you have to do is leave your name in the form at the bottom of the page (scroll way down or click the blog background and hit END)! You can enter once per day until Sunday at midnight! For bonus entries (again, one per type per day), post about this contest, either on Twitter or your blog and fill out the form at the bottom of this page. Of course, if you took my advice and already became a follower, you get 5 bonus entries! Even if you aren’t, you can become one for two bonus entries.

Now for the Twitter and blog posts, you have to link directly to the post. So if you blog this, link to the post, not the blog. To link directly to a tweet, on the main page, select your tweets. Find the tweet and click on the time stamp right under it. That’s the tweet’s personal link. As for Facebook, sorry, it’s not included in this contest. I’m not on Facebook myself and I can’t check the posts. And honestly, everything about the site irks me. 

To reiterate: the contest ends Sunday, December 19^th, at MIDNIGHT, Eastern Standard time. I will post the winner, selected by a random number from Random.org, at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard time. The winner will have 48 hours from the announcement to contact me with their information. I’ll try to email them myself, but I know some people don’t check their Google messages, so be on the lookout. 

Finally, I’m sad to say this isn’t an international contest. US residents only. I’m sorry to my friends out of the country, but I can’t afford the international shipping fees. Again, I’m sorry and I hope I can make the next one international. 

But I’m not sorry about the lack of Facebook thing. I will never be sorry about that.