Sun of Denmark

Winters in Denmark are very brutal because of the lack of daylight, and the COVID-lockdown of 2020 only made it worse. I didn’t use to be affected by the darkness, but living with a foreigner experiencing her first Danish winters, I became much more aware of it.

Some years back, I started following @SunOfSeldo on Twitter. It’s an account that writes daily tweets about the advancement of daylight between winter- and summer-solstice, and finds this wonderful balance between quantitative measures of minutes and seconds of added daylight, but also writing qualitative, emotionally uplifting statements about the sun.

https://twitter.com/SunOfSeldo/status/1361130358830432259

This winter, being back in Denmark, I realized that Sun of Seldo tweets about the daylight in San Francisco doesn’t map that well to Denmark. Additionally, I felt lonely having just relocated back to Denmark and being stuck in COVID-lockdown. I thought maybe I could start my own account, and @SunOfDenmark was born.

https://twitter.com/SunOfDenmark/status/1360846234546810883

I spent a bunch of time studying how to calculate the daylight of a given location, but didn’t seem to get the right numbers. I reached out to Laurie Voss, the person behind @SunOfSeldo, and he was very kind in giving me access to the tool he built to monitor the daylight for a given location, as well as providing some interesting statistics for it.

Writing

As someone who hardly ever posts anything anywhere and work inside confidential structures normally, it felt intimidating to start tweeting. Finding my voice, especially as Danish is a very different language than English, and at this point almost less preferable or comfortable for me to write in.

The first week or two, I wrote each tweet daily, whenever I reminded myself during the day. That quickly became unsustainable, mostly because I found it hard to be creative. Instead, I started writing a week’s worth of of tweets every Sunday. The act of compounding the writing made it a much more interesting creative process. Instead of thinking about each tweet separately, I could start building up narratives, and think about a weekly progression.