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I wrote a science-fiction screenplay, entitled True Blood, right around the same time that Charlaine Harris would’ve been writing the first book of The Southern Vampire Mysteries – these are the books that, eventually, became the TV series True Blood. (I mention that as nothing more than coincidence – I just found it funny the way two similar things can occur on different sides of the world. I emailed Charlaine about it, and we got to talking, and are now collaborating together on a science-fiction vampire opera featuring zombie gerbils.) I wanted to sub True Blood to a comp a couple of years ago, so I took it out with…
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I was diagnosed with sleep apnoea several years ago. In the simplest terms, sleep apnoea is when you stop breathing, so your brain panics and startles you awake just enough to get everything going again. Because this is happening, you never settle into a deep, restorative sleep, so when you awake you feel tired, even if you’ve slept eight hours. To give you an overview of its seriousness, when I was in hospital with a broken leg, a nurse woke me around 3.00am because she said I didn’t appear to be breathing. On another occasion, after I was wheeled back to my bed following surgery, a nurse said she was…