I'm sick today. I was awakened this morning at 6:30 by painful stomach cramps, and spent nearly twenty minutes in the bathroom afterward. I'll spare you the details. By the time I would normally start getting ready for work, I felt reamed out and, in the words of my loquacious fiancee, urrgghhy. So I called in sick, then set the alarm clock for 9:30 so I could get some more sleep. After hitting the snooze button half a dozen times, I finally got out of bed around 10:00.

My snooze operates on a seven-minute cycle, which I think is pretty ingenious. It's not quite ten minutes, but it's more than five. Just enough time to drift off into the shallow pool right above REM sleep. My perceptions lengthened with each slap of the snooze, seeming to stretch the time into ten minutes, or fifteen, making me feel like I was getting more rest than I actually was.

I don't know what it is about the number seven, but it has some metaphysical importance in my mind, forever connected with the number three. There were times when I was younger that I would transpose seven when I meant to write three, and vice verse. I use these numbers often in my fiction, usually subtlely, but sometimes conspicuously, as in "King of the Traffic Lights".

I first started writing imaginatively when I was seven years old. The first science fiction book I picked up - Prelude to Foundation - was after I had turned ten, the addition of seven and three. My birthday is October 3, i.e. 10/3.

I'm by no means a numerologist, but these things sometimes make you think. And being sick this morning, I don't have much else I can do at the moment but think.

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Now Reading:
Viriconium by M John Harrison

Stories Out to Publishers:
10

Books Read This Year:
28