Staying awake for 80 hours is not usually a qualification for being a writer. An Elphinstone Secondary School graduate, Heidi Cordsen, has just defied sleep by staying awake for that long, starting on Jan. 16 and live streaming the process on Twitch (twitch.tv) from her home in New Zealand.
The waking marathon was to promote her first novel Sleep Over: An Oral History of the Apocalypse. It’s being described as an inventive new spin on the apocalypse – a worldwide plague of insomnia. It’s told through a scrapbook collection of stories from those trapped in a world where society is crumbling and madness is slowly descending.
Although the Sunshine Coast knows her as Heidi Cordsen, once a member of the community concert band, high school band and Choralations Choir, she now has a new persona and a new name as an author: Heidi Grace Bells or H.G. Bells.
“I wrote my first novel while I was at Elphi,” she writes, “and made it my mission in life to get published. Well, I had to write five novels, podcasts, screenplays, and a boat-load of short stories (many of which I’ve had published) to get to where I am today. Now I have a New York literary agent and a New York publisher! I am beyond excited.”
One of the major chapters takes place in Gibsons. “Some of the survivors band together to add a game layer onto the efforts to create and maintain a new functioning society. It’s a story of leadership emerging in crisis, the usefulness of games, and trusting the power of community.”
Despite the book’s dark theme, Cordsen did not suffer too much during her marathon that ended after 80 hours. Friends brought her coffee and “yelled” at her through a chat room to keep her eyes open. When she finally dropped into bed, she noted that she had the best sleep ever but that her whole body was still upset the next day.
Sleep Over is published by Skyhorse Publishing, which promotes a wide variety of science fiction, including space opera, time travel, aliens and dystopias. The book is available through Amazon.com.
