Well, that worked well...

[davidgillon]

Yesterday I was fairly desperate to change the hours I'm awake, which had drifted to 2PM - til 6AM (this happens semi-regularly, my body doesn't seem to work on a 24 hour cycle, never mind the regular spontaneous crashes from overdoing stuff). So I'd stayed awake for 36 hours and at 2AM I was in bed, reading (Mishell Baker's 'Borderline') in the hope of drifting off to sleep, when the intersection of the book, me, and my writing sparked a thought in character voice: "I don't so much have brain-weasels as brain-wolverines."

I thought about it, sighed, got up and went downstairs to jot it down before I could forget it.1250 words later I'm not certain whether to call it a vignette, or a short story, but there's a twist in my protagonist's back story that potentially explains a lot.

And shifting my waking hours? I woke up at 3:30PM, {le sigh}

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

A lovely notion re: brain wolverines.

I found myself quite hostile to Baker's book, perhaps because I'd heard such good things about it. I perceived 96% of the information re: the hero's mental health to be Baker thinking "I did my research and I must prove it to you by retelling it all."

Yet OTOH (or leg) I thought the hero's dealing with amputation was handled much more subtly. I've managed to reach my advanced age without knowing the bones of the Fae Cosmology, so I can't speak to those elements.

My shrink gave me a very small Rx of haldol, of all things. He said that it's quite effective for a killer migraine, and "we all need to have a sure-fire sleeper in our medicine cabinets." Perhaps a sure-fire sleeper is indicated?

[davidgillon]

A lovely notion re: brain wolverines.

Yeah, the thought process was: "That's too good a line to risk forgetting. Bugger, I've got to get up"

WRT the Baker, which I finished yesterday, I was inclined to think the same way, but apparently she actually has borderline personality disorder, so it's more over-zealous educating the audience.

I thought she did a pretty good job on the amputation stuff, and I've got a double amputee character in the book I'm working on, so I'd hopefully have caught anything egregiously wrong. Worst I could see was Millie should be getting some proprioception from her feet, they'll transmit loads to the sockets, so she wouldn't be completely unaware of stairs, or standing on feet.

WRT sleeping, my patterns are so awful I don't want to start using anything for it, as the likelihood is I could find a reason to use it most days. (Plus very mixed experience with amtriptline in the pasty

[lilysea]

(Plus very mixed experience with amtriptline in the past

Oh god, yes, I hated Amitriptyline. It made me Depressed and also so drowsy I was driving my powerchair to the local shops with my eyes closed 80% of the time!

(At 3pm in the afternoon, when I had taken it at 10pm the night before.)

[davidgillon]

That's pretty much exactly my experience, with the exception I was driving my car to work...

[lilysea]

I'm also struggling with my sleep cycle:

my fall asleep time drifts between 1am and 6am

and my wake up time between 9:30am and 1pm.

It is VERY annoying, because it makes it hard to

a) phone friends who are available early in the day but not later in the day

b) get to medical appts

c) buy groceries before the trains become horribly crowded around 3pm.

If you do find anything that helps you sleep earlier and wake earlier, please blog about it (assuming you feel comfortable doing so)! ^_^

Also: sometimes I manage to get into bed Early, but then have an Anxiety attack instead of falling asleep. Not fun.

[davidgillon]

Well, I've swapped bedrooms as the smaller one gets more sun and early street noise. Though as I'm regularly getting to sleep after dawn, light to wake me may not be the solution - there was a finding with pilots of the original stealth fighter, which flew only after dark, that getting them indoors/out of natural light before dawn was pretty much vital to avoid fatigue issues.

I've actually concluded my optimum solution may be to aim to wake around 11AM, as that seems closest to my natural, non-fatiguing cycle, but I keep getting thrown out of it by either crashes post exertion (for values of 'exertion' as low as driving into town and getting a coffee), or various events that keep me awake (such as catastrophic fires and terrorist attacks), or even just paying computer games and loosing track of the time (looking at you, Crusader Kings 2).

[davidgillon]

Today's situation. Slept 6AM-noon, hit snooze repeatedly until 1:10P., 5 hours and several cups of strong coffee later I still don't feel safely awake enough to drive, and that's been true for the last couple of days as well. It's just as well I have a couple of butrans patches stashed against emergency as I needed to pick up a repeat prescription this week and just haven't managed it.