Weekly Update - 171 (Patreon)

Pages that still require some serious redos:

Page 1

Page 24

Page 34

Pages that just require normal-ish fixes:

47, 27, 43, 30, 29, 26, 48

And that is it! Once these pages are all done, I can send everything over to the publisher. My goal from this point forward is to try and force myself to crank out about a page a day. But I'm also running low on easy pages, so I don't know if that'll be possible.

So like I said, last week was kinda busy, so I didn't make as much progress as I should have. But with the amount of work remaining, we're seriously probably looking at about 2 weeks worth of work? Give or take? Depending how quickly I can power through?

Ramble:

I'm just gonna jump into it here because I have a lot to say today... Last week, I spent a big chunk of whatever time I had to draw (and much of the time I normally allocate to video games) drawing Riley #8. And it's done. It's finished, it's ready to be posted. I was so hyper-fixated on this specific page that I got it done in record-breaking time, despite it being probably one of the most involved pages (x2) that I've ever drawn. I nearly had it done by Wednesday, before we left on our trip. And yet I hesitated to post it, and after we returned (and showed it to my friend to confirm what I was feeling about it) I ultimately decided to not post it last week.

So why haven't I posted it? The short answer is simply that I'm not sure I want to subject people to this thing I've drawn until I'm able to follow it up with something in a reasonable amount of time.

The long answer is... it's complicated.

Riley #7 shows us a fall. Riley's gremlins are stressing her out and she's barely keeping it together. Riley #8 is... much worse. And it makes me really sad. It made me sad to draw it, and it makes me sad to look at it. I WILL share it, but I want to have some follow-up pages ready to post in short order afterwards, because... I dunno. I don't want to make YOU all sad too. I don't know if everyone will feel the same way, but damned if I don't need a palate cleanser after drawing #8. I don't want to deliver this terrible moment in the story and then leave you all hanging and wondering for untold weeks or months what happens next while I finish this book and get the next page ready.

Riley's story is centered around her mental health, and that's a sensitive topic from any perspective. While we might not suffer from the same specific issues, all of us can relate to trying to manage stress and depression and just trying to keep our own internal thoughts from turning toxic. Riley's psychosis is a prominent feature of the minicomic, and attempting to explore the possibilities of storytelling around that in a fictional setting, showing what life is like for her trying to live in a distorted and often very disruptive reality is a big part of what I'm trying to do with it. I feel like I need to be careful though, because if I get this wrong, I could end up really upsetting some people, and I don't want to do that. I've never put a content warning on any of my art. I want to write stories that are, yes, sometimes dark, and that sometimes explore sensitive or deep topics, but are ultimately uplifting. I want my characters to get knocked down so they can show us how strong they are when they get back up. I want us to have something to hope for even in the face of hopelessness. I trust people to be able to govern themselves and to understand that what they are seeing is fictional characters in a fictional story... but when I look at Riley #8, man does it make me sad.

I've said several times that I feel it doesn't matter so much what Riley's hallucinations actually are, because if I'm doing my duty correctly the focus should always be the effect they have on her, and how disruptive they are for her ability to live a normal life. Her hallucinations are not real, so it doesn't really matter what they look like, what they say or what they "do." How she reacts to them and the impact they have on her, however, is VERY real. The way that people see her and the way they treat her as a result of her acting strangely is very real. These are the things that matter. 

It's common, even in some of the more recent stories featuring psychosis to depict hallucinations in ways that are predominantly nightmarish or horrific. And yes, some patients do report those are the sorts of hallucinations they experience, and it's also perhaps the easiest thing for media to sensationalize. But I've tried to challenge that trope by making Riley's "gremlins" a bit less commonly so. Her main antagonist is a cute gremlin with the seemingly innocent request for socks. He might seem benign to us, but to Riley he's actually an insurmountable opponent, and his persistence for a request that cannot ever be fulfilled is what makes him so stressful for her. I *HOPE* that is coming through in the comic. I worry endlessly that I'm failing to depict that properly.

My own research (using google, not chatgpt. The latter suffers from its own form of psychosis) has lead me to believe that it's actually less common for those suffering from psychosis to be afflicted by what we traditionally recognize as nightmare or horror-themed positive hallucinations ("positive" being used as a term to recognize hallucinations that ADD things to a person's perception, the opposite being "negative" hallucinations, which... do the opposite). It's reportedly more common to see and experience hallucinations that are simply disturbing, unnerving, disorienting, out-of-place, or even sometimes neutral or funny. Think of how often we associate inappropriate and out-of-place laughter with something like psychosis, and consider that perhaps that patient just experienced something they find hilarious that the rest of us cannot see or hear. And almost no one ever writes stories about negative hallucinations, wherein the patient experiences the LACK of something that is actually there, be it objects, people, or even emotions or thoughts... though I'll admit that starts to get a bit harder to show in visual media. In one study I dug up awhile back, roughly 60% of patients treated for psychosis reported their hallucinations being neutral or benign, with some patients reporting that they missed their hallucinations once treatment began. For some patients, their hallucinations can be their best friends (which can still be very detrimental, since we as a social species are influenced highly by our friends, and if our friends aren't real, there are no laws or rules governing their behavior or what they say or do... so you can see why even if a hallucination is friendly, it can still be a very bad thing) And this is really sort of core to what I'm trying to do with this comic. I want to show that even these neutral or benign hallucinations can be very detrimental to a person, and that a person is still a person, worthy of our love and care and respect, no matter what form of reality they might be trapped in and fighting against.

When I'm writing about Riley, I hold myself to a few strict rules that govern how I handle her mental illness... these are rules I've sort of designed over the past few years to help me both keep her consistent and to hold myself accountable to make sure that I'm being sensitive towards the topic, because it's easy sometimes when writing to momentarily sweep aside the seriousness of it all and to thoughtlessly want to make a cheap joke at her expense, inspired by much of the other media that's out there. I've been keeping these all in my head, and I've never written them all down before, so this could be interesting:

Rule #1 is that she does not receive any value or benefit from having her mental illness(es). They are her conflict. Her obstacle to overcome. They are always standing in the way of what she would like to do. Her gremlins don't whisper secrets to her or clue her into things she wouldn't normally know. They cannot, because this isn't some sort of supernatural thing. And they should not ever come across in a way that is helpful. Even if they might APPEAR that way, inwardly and outwardly, she cannot gain any real benefit from them. Everything she has that's good in her life is because of her own hard work and because of the real people who care about her.

Rule #2 is that stress makes everything worse. Which is true for a lot of mental illnesses, as well as for normal, everyday life, and symptoms like psychosis can contribute to stress, which leads to a cascading effect.

Rule #3 is that Riley is NOT suicidal. This is a topic I don't even want to approach with her, and I will not be writing any stories involving her that even hint at this. She may absently hurt herself as a result of her symptoms, (like when scratching her arm) but it is never on purpose.

Rule #4 is that there are both good days and bad days, like with anything else. There are times when her symptoms are crushing her, overwhelming her, and it's all too much to bear. And there are days when her symptoms are almost entirely gone and she can almost feel totally normal. It varies day to day, moment by moment, hour by hour, and she just has to take it one step at a time.

Rule #5 is that Riley is very aware of her symptoms, and she has found ways to cope with them, most of the time. While she may not always be able to tell what's real and what's not, it was her that came up with the name "gremlins" to describe her hallucinations, and by classifying certain things as "gremlins" and others as not, she does her best to try and keep track of what's real versus what she alone is experiencing.

Rule #6 is that Riley is not dangerous to those she cares about. It's a common misconception that people with psychosis are always dangerous. While it's true that they can be, certainly, from what I understand this is another thing that popular media has sensationalized quite a bit, and it is actually quite uncommon for someone to resort to violence even in the midst of a psychotic breakdown. That said, Riley lives in a dangerous world, where violence is one of only a few effective ways for a person to protect themselves. Still, she's able to identify friend from foe, and she is ultimately in control of her actions, despite what she may be seeing or hearing. Like the rest of us, she would never intentionally harm someone she loves.

Rule #7 is that Riley is a normal person, with normal person wants and feelings and needs. I treat her like I treat all the rest of my characters, but her psychosis and other mental illnesses modify her behavior in various ways. What she sees and experiences can force her to react to her hallucinations in ways any normal person would, but from an outside perspective, this causes her to seem strange, crazy and weird, because we don't know and we may never know (in the case of Kiva's comic) what she's actually reacting to. She's not defined by her mental illness, she is only afflicted by and affected by it.

I think there's other rules still rattling around inside of my brain, and more will probably come to me now that I've written these out, but these are the biggest ones. So I dunno, maybe you can use these to apply to your own characters when writing your own stories?

Anyway, I've rambled on and on again, and I know I've talked about a lot of this stuff before, so I'm just trying to sort of recapture my thoughts and put them down in a semi-organized fashion. The fact is, at the end of the day, these are really complex topics, and I'm limited in the ways I can sufficiently address their complexity while also trying to tell a story. Hopefully this helps you to sort of understand... why. Why everything. Why I write, why I even do things. Even if I end up not being successful at it in the end, I have to at least try.