Bad Sleep (or is it just Misunderstood Sleep?), sweaty bedding, fucked up intense dreams, yadda yadda yabba dabba doo, where are you.

I think the key here might avoiding afternoon naps. For some reason, that’s when this kind of sleep strikes the most, and the hardest. Perhaps it has something to do with going to sleep when it’s light and waking up when it’s dark. Stupid winter with its darkness at 4 pm. Whose brilliant idea was that, anyhow? What Madison Avenue genius came up with this whole getting dark before suppertime shit?

I mean, what is the deal with that?

The worst was when I was a kid, walking to school each day in the winter. Not only did winter itself make walking to school even less fun than usual (and boy, do I have a lot of bitter resentment left over from having to walk to school when others rode the bus or got rides from their parents), but for an interminable period in the winter, it would be still somewhat dark when I went to school, and then it would be getting dark when I got back out again.

Not quite the flipside of the Land of the Midnight Sun, but it was still intensely depressing. It really made me feel like I was shut off from the sunlit lands like some kind of troll or goblin, unworthy of the sun’s rays. Fear! Fear the yellow ball in the ceiling of the upper world! It burnses us!

Speaking of sunshine, I have been considering getting myself some “sushine” compact florescent bulbs for this room. Have I mentioned this before? Probably, but I can’t resist a segue like that, so you’re going to hear it again. Feel free to skim ahead.

I don’t suspect myself of suffering from seasonal affective disorder (sometimes called ‘winter depression’), or at least, I have never noticed that I am any more depressed in the winter than the rest of the year.

But when I look out my window and see a sunny day, it really does seem to lift my mood a great deal. This, despite knowing full well that a sunny day is probably a hot day and I am highly prone to heat-stroke, so honestly, it would make a lot more sense from a practical point of view to be happy to see a cloudy day.

But something deep inside me really responds to blue skies and sunshine, to the point where when my my all time favorite colors is sky blue, otherwise known as azure. Sky colors in general seem to make me happy. Sky blue, cloud white, sun yellow. All suggest a clear, sunny day to me, and that makes me feel good inside.

Why? I am not sure. Could simply be cultural programming, I suppose. The general consensus in the zeitgeist is that a sunny day is a good day, literally and metaphorically, and a cloudy day is a bad day.

And what do you know, what do some of my favorite songs assert?

That there’s nothing worse than a Sunless Saturday , and the best thing would be Everyday Sunshine where every day is a Sunshiny Day.

And sometimes, for no apparent reason, strange cloud formations scare the hell out of me. It’s a deep down primal fear, way below the level of reason or even phobia. I could not tell you why I am scared, or what I think is going to happen. It’s just this deep and terrible dread that makes me want to either scream at the sky or go to the deepest place I can find and put as much matter between me and the sky as I can.

Obviously, I don’t actually do that. I am not that kind of crazy. For one thing, that kind of thing is just way too much work.

And the sorts of clouds that cause it are not common. For all I know, it’s not even the clouds themselves but some weird weather side-effect.

Anyhoo, my point is, sky things seem to really have a strong emotional impact on me, which is richly ironic given how I spend all my time indoors and only see a little bit of the sky through my window.

So I suppose, for the full effect, I would have to get the sunshine bulbs and paint my ceiling sky blue with little white fluffy clouds. Then it would be a happy sunny day all the time in my room! And when I want it to be night, I just turn out the sun.

Who knows, maybe it would work. Maybe I would feel a lot better just from that. Color therapy and light therapy are both known things. Beats the heck out of taking still more drugs!

Also on the sunshiny front, I managed to send another of my stories off to a market I discovered via exhaustive research today. Well, exhuasting research anyhow. People in the sci fi community keep sending me to Ralan for their admittedly quite large list of science fiction markets.

but the website design is so clunky, ugly, and old-fashioned that I feel like trying to find anything there is just too damned depressing to be worth it. Just looking at it makes me sad.

So I have been poking around for other market lists, and found this good one on the SF Canada site.

It might not have a lot of listings, but they are all Canadian (smaller market means less competition!), and most importantly, it has a nice pleasant readable web design.

So I sent my story to AE Canada, whom I had never heard of before, but they are Canadian, they accept electronic submissions, and they pay actual hard currency spendable money! Six cents a word, even, which is decent for s short story. If they bought the story I sent them, it would be around $170. Not bad.

Not likely, but not bad.

And I am totally going to hang a photocopy of my first ever check for my writing on my wall.

Corny or not, it’s a good idea!