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...

I'm working on 'Moving On' again, but it's slow, slow going. I know fairly well by now what I want to do with that fic, but the plotlessness (in the sense of 'lack of actual things happening') makes it extremely difficult to write. I have a detailed list of themes I want to tackle and a bunch of paragraphs that need to go *somewhere* in that fic, but nothing really hangs together, and I have no idea how to make it hang together. It's all the more annoying because the bulk of the fic, I feel, is already there on the page - much like the bulk of 'Normal' was, an entire year before it was finished; much as the bulk of 'Found in Translation' has been for three years now, with no way of stitching it all together in sight. Gah. Sometimes I really hate the way my writing mind works (or rather, doesn't work).

(A part of me really wants to call for help when a fic of mine gets stalled like this. But I know from past experience that, really, there is nothing anyone can do to help me here. I have to figure it out on my own.)

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Re: other stuff: have begun trying to catch up with jumping_off, very slowly. I've also taken a look at the other LoM communities and found, to my somewhat sad relief, that fic-wise, the fandom's still developing almost exclusively in directions I'm not really interested in (some/most fics posted to jumping_off being the exceptions to the rule, which is why I *really* need to start giving feedback there again - gotta feed the few authors who produce stuff I'm interested in! *g*) This lack of fic catering to my kinks is actually kind of good for me, because 1.) I don't have much time to read fic at the moment, anyway, and 2.) if a fandom doesn't produce the kind of fic I'm interested in, that just means I have to work harder at producing that kind of fic myself. It's a very good motivator. *g* The only problem is that it's so much easier to satisfy my cravings by 'writing' half-assed mindfic in my head instead of actually working on my *real*, 'serious' fic on paper. You wouldn't believe how much crack I've produced in the privacy and solitude of my brain in the last few months. Endless permutations of Sam angst. It's so easy to gloss over the stuff you don't know how to deal with, or just to drop a scenario entirely and spin the idea it's based on in a slightly different way for a new scenario once you get bored with the previous one, if you don't have to convince any readers or produce a coherent narrative...

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I also need to get back to catching up with individual LJs. I'm afraid I've spent the last two weeks in a bit of a mental slump.