Chris Advansun is a Toronto-based sleep writer that creates his stories with one thing in mind – to make them interesting enough to get adults’ attention, but dull enough to put them to sleep.

39-year-old Advansun is a screenplay writer who sort of just got into sleep writing and fell in love with it. He just adores the challenge of balancing his grown-up bedtime stories in such a way that they gently pull the listener away from the thoughts that usually keep them up at night and then gently allow them to drift off to sleep. He has to stay away from anything attention-gripping to keep the listeners from becoming too involved in the story, but also make it interesting enough to keep them listening. For Advansun success means never reaching the end of his stories.

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Meet Gong Xunhui, a 62-year-old Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patient who recently wrote a detailed autobiography using only her eyes!

Gong Xunhui has been suffering from ALS for the past 12 years. She’s been confined to a wheelchair since 2006, but despite her almost complete paralysis, she has actually managed to write a 150,000-word book on her life – something that even able bodied people might struggle with. And she did it with the only part of her body she still has full control over, her eyes. 

It all started about three years ago, when Xunhui’s family bought her an eye-tracking assistive device that she could use to communicate and also control a computer. After it was installed, the first line she typed was: “I am very happy today, and after I get better at typing with my eyes, I will probably write an autobiography.”

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Typing with one hand when the other one is occupied can be a real pain, so imagine having to type with just one foot. It’s got to be a nightmare, but 21-year-old  Hu Huiyuan from China’s Anhui province is using her only functional foot  to write not just a few sentences, but an entire fiction novel!

Born prematurely, Hu was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was only 10 months old. This left her permanently paralyzed – the only parts of her body she can move are her head and left foot. As she grew older, she learned how to perform everyday tasks using her foot.

Despite not having received formal education, Hu is surprisingly well-spoken. Over the years, with the help of her mother, she taught herself to read and write. “I’m not a genius, but I’m very focused,” she said, modestly. “When I watched TV in my childhood, I often learned words with subtitles.”

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‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet. That’s why it’s so hard to believe that a whole novel exists without a single use of the letter ‘e’.

The book in question was originally written in French in 1969, by author Georges Perec. La Disparition (The Disappearance) is a 300-page lipogrammatic novel – a kind of book that consists of constrained writing or a word game.

There is absolutely no mention of ‘e’ throughout all 300 pages, except the author’s name of course. Even the most common word of the French language, ‘le’ (which means the), makes no appearance at all. La Disparition was later translated into English by Gilbert Adair, with the title A Void.

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Chen Siyuan, a young translator from Handan, China’s Hebei province, has the incredibly ability to write with both hands at the same time. Even more impressive is that fact that she can write vertically with one hand and horizontally with the other, or in two different languages.

In this age of technology, writing with both hands is not as valuable a skill as it once was, but that doesn’t make 24-year-old Chen Siyuan’s ability any less remarkable. This young English translator has been wowing onlookers with her amazing talent of writing with both hands simultaneously, in two different languages (Chinese and English). You’d be tempted to think this kind of unique capacity requires years of practice, but Chen says she discovered her ability completely by accident, during her high-school years. She was overwhelmed by the quantities of English homework, but found that she could complete respective tasks much faster by writing with both hands at the same time. “When I was in high school, I unconsciously wrote with both hands while trying to finish my homework in a hurry,” Chen told People’s Daily Online. “My classmates were curious and tried to imitate me, but none of them succeeded.”

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