Update

[hmpf]

Actually working all day now, i.e. upwards of eight hours per day. Literally the only time I'm not working is when I'm trying to sleep, which takes inordinately long to accomplish. It takes between four and six hours for me to manage to fall asleep. Since I can't function without sufficient sleep for more than a couple of days that means that most days I spend insane amounts of time in bed - twelve hours in bed gets me six hours of sleep. Going to sleep can be hard work if your brain is constantly nattering away at you. I tend to try to calm the inevitable panic with mindfic, which sometimes does the trick - except when it works *too* well and becomes inimical to sleep in its own right.

My research is making progress now, which is good. The online version of Science Fiction Studies and Neil Barron's impressive bibliography of the science fiction field, "The Anatomy of Wonder", are proving useful in determining what books might be good to get on interlibrary loan. I've also started reading through the archives of When Fangirls Attack, although that's of limited usefulness so far.

I miss real food. Deep-freeze pizza and sandwiches just aren't very good for the soul... (And it's only been a few weeks... arrgh.)

On the plus side: researching indie fantasy comics of the nineties led me to Artesia, which rocks rather a lot more than I expected. Heroic fantasy - despite my love of Tolkien - is usually not quite my thing. But then, "Artesia" is not exactly cookie-cutter heroic fantasy... This just may be the first comic I'm aware of (outside the unique and disturbing universe(s) of Donna Barr, that is) which actually equals Finder in terms of depth and breadth and *believability* of the world it creates.

Speaking of Finder... Do I love Roy or do I love Roy? Heh.

Right. Going to bed now, to wrestle with sleep and 'write' some sickeningly domestic/bizarrely disturbing mindfic...

Comments

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on getting so much done!

I sympathise with the falling asleep problem. I might not usually have to spend 4 hours, but a couple isn't unusual for me. You know I also mindfic! I know it's probably not helpful, but I literally can't stop my brain from doing something so I figure it might as well be something I enjoy.

Just...focus on your end goal. Soon the days of deep freeze pizza will be over!

As to Artesia, I've never read the comics, but I have the roleplaying game (though I've never played it) which I bought because the book was so damn beautiful and the world looked so wonderfully complex. It's written and illustrated by the same guy who does the comics. I'll show it to you, one day, when you've finished your uni course and I'm not headed to the opposite side of the globe in a few months. :)

I have faith in you!

(((hmpf)))

Artesia, and definitions of 'soon'

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

>Soon the days of deep freeze pizza will be over!

You must be using some new definition of 'soon' that I'm not aware of. More than a year is not 'soon' in my dictionary. ;-)

>As to Artesia, I've never read the comics, but I have the roleplaying game (though I've never played it) which I bought because the book was so damn beautiful and the world looked so wonderfully complex. It's written and illustrated by the same guy who does the comics.

Yeah, he seems to be crazy prolific with anything *but* his comic. (*grumble*). He also runs a pretty interesting - from what I can see, anyway - comics company, with a lot of not-quite-mainstream fantasy titles, some of which sound very interesting. There's one about Zeus fathering children with inanimate objects, and these children - half-divine cars and talking brick walls and what have you - going through an exceptionally angry adolescence or something...

>I'll show it to you, one day, when you've finished your uni course and I'm not headed to the opposite side of the globe in a few months. :)

Yeah, how's that plan progressing, btw? (I need to check your LJ...)

[dswdiane.livejournal.com]

Okay, my apologies, but I'm speaking as a psychologist, if you don't mind too very much. Sleep research indicates strongly that one should never lie in bed not sleeping. If you cannot get to sleep in the bed after 20 minutes, get up and do something utterly boring for you (in my case I play solitaire) until you feel sleepy. Make sure that going to bed and putting your head on the pillow is associated with nothing except sleep or sex. One should not let getting in bed get associated with reading, television, or lying awake. One should make sure that lying down in bed in associated only with going to sleep.

I have had insomnia for over 40 years, and I attest that following the above rules helps mightily with sleep. I can also attest that many of my patients have reported the same as have many research articles from sleep labs.

Give it a try. And happy dreams to you.

But I *am* sleepy when I go to bed.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

It's just that the sleepiness evaporates, or is overpowered, once I'm *in* bed, even though on most nights I'm bone tired. Mostly because when I lie down and try to sleep, all my fears come to the surface. This has always been the case. When I was a kid, praying helped. Later, after I lost my faith, I started inventing stories to keep my mind from the fears until I fell asleep. And, as I said, some of the time this works quite well, and I'll slip directly from story to dream. It's just that at the moment there's rather too much nightly panic for me to contain it this way.

As for reading in bed - the bed is the only place where I *can* read, as I like to be comfortable when reading for fun, and reading at my desk just isn't very comfortable - it feels like working, and also, after spending eight or more hours at my desk my back and knees usually hurt like hell and I really *need* to lie down. (I only have a desk and chair, and the bed). And it actually usually helps me to sleep, to some degree - I tend to sleep better, and somewhat earlier, when I've read for an hour or so - if the book isn't *too* exciting *g*. On nights when I'm really exhausted, though, like yesterday, I don't tend to read.

Re: But I *am* sleepy when I go to bed.

[dswdiane.livejournal.com]

Okay. I have a very comfortable recliner chair where I do my reading out of bed.

You go ahead and do what you need to do to get your sleep. I was just trying to tell you what sleep researchers have found to work in helping folks get the sleep they need.

I sure understand how anxiety can interfere with the ability to sleep. I think your strategies for working with the anxiety are sane and sensible.

The only comment I would make is that if your strategies don't work, stop trying to sleep and do something to take your mind off what you are anxious about. Try to learn that the pillow and the bed mean sleep time and even if you are sleepy when you go to bed, if you can't sleep because the anxieties take over, get up and do something boring to take your mind off anxieties until you are overwhelmingly sleepy again. And then don't allow yourself to take the anxieties to bed again.

Thinking is a behavior and you can control what you think about as you have already told me. Much better to spin out a fantasy than think about what you need to do that hasn't been done yet.

{{{hugs}}}

Disturbing

[dbarr.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the book mention. Can I leave my website address? www.donnabarr.com "Artesia" sounds interesting. Speaking of mindfic: check out Dickens' "David Copperfield" and the way the boy wanders the streets making up stories about the people around him. How many writers have started like THAT? Using their art to get out of a horrible situation, at least in their imagination?

Wow.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Speak of the devil Donna Barr... I'm kind of scared to ask how you happened upon my entry! ;-)

I've actually plugged your comics here before (http://hmpf.livejournal.com/182130.html) (thought I'd done more than one post, but apparently not... it's been a crazy year and a half since I discovered your works), but yeah, you're always welcome to leave another link. I should have put one into the original post, really, but I was in a hurry. Will remedy that immediately.

Oh, and I hope you realise that I meant 'disturbing' in the best possible sense!

I've read David Copperfield (ages ago), but I don't remember that bit. Have to admit my mindficcing was always more about people who were already fictional; somehow I've never been as tempted to invent stories for real people... possibly this has to do with my love of fantastic scenarios/worlds: much more fun to play with the stories of people who live in a fantastic world! The 'what if?' options were so much more interesting there. (Unsurprisingly, I eventually started writing fanfic. Though actually fanfic is a bit of a weird choice for me, considering I was always more interested in worlds than in people, and fanfic is nearly all about people. Hmm. Then again, I'm possibly better at writing people than at creating worlds... my teenage attempts at worldbuilding were hopelessly pedestrian. Oh, hell, I'll figure out what I want to (and can) write *some* day... *g*)

Since I conveniently have you here, I may as well ask: I'm currently considering doing my M.A. thesis about a comics-related topic, possibly about some aspects of American independent comics with a fantastic theme. Now, my knowledge of your works so far only encompasses the Desert Peach, which isn't exactly fantasy and/or sf (well, it's a bit of a borderline case, really. Afterdead certainly fits the bill). Stinz, I imagine, would fit the description better, being more clearly set in a somewhat fantastical world, but I'm not entirely sure if the issues that are still available from your website would be a good entry point for a novice. (Addendum: Oh damn, I see they're no longer available. Should have ordered sooner. Double damn.) Do you plan to make Stinz available in some form online, be it as paid download via Lulu or free download on WOWIO? Stinz is one of the major gaps in my little library so far, and also, leaving aside the issue of the, ahem, advancement of science ;-), I'm just personally curious about the series! Libraries here in Germany are unlikely to have Stinz, so it seems as if some form of online access would be the only chance for me to actually get to read it in time to be of use for my thesis.

Oh, and lastly: back in early 2007, when I completed my Desert Peach collection with issues bought from your web store, we had a short e-mail exchange that was broken, on my side, by Real Life intervening forcefully in some manner or another (I don't remember the details, but 2007 was a very real-lifey year.) I'd like to apologise for that.

[dune-drd.livejournal.com]

Just a quick hint: You got recced at crack_van. Congrats :)

Thanks for the hint! :-)

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

And, wow, third time! I'm beginning to feel like I'm doing something right. ;-)