Well, it appears I choose a teeny-tiny picture for what amounted to a massive week and one that saw a miracle take place, the return of an unwanted old acquaintance and of course the usual things, like saving the world, finding a dry cleaner for my super hero outfit and deciding I need a hair cut.

Real Life:

Last Sunday my real life was rocked to it’s foundations by the return of an unwanted acquaintance. I hadn’t seen this acquaintance in nearly eight years and if I experience it again it will by too soon. I woke up last Sunday with a migraine. You know the type of thing; blurred vision, pain beyond a writers ability to describe in words, nausea. I don’t do migraines. I tried to work through it but by Sunday afternoon and then all day Monday I was lying on the bed trying not to move. It took until Tuesday for the blurred vision to go away. I used to get migraines on a semi-regular basis when I was younger. It was how I discovered I was allergic to MSG. I have no idea what I ate that gave me last weeks re-visitation. It was totally awful.

Work Life:

My work life gets it’s own paragraph this week because frankly I seem to have created an absolute miracle. As I think I mentioned last week, work lost internet and server connection for a week. It threw my timelines to hell. I had a week only to finish the current program I was working on. I had it written but invitations were impossible to send without an the internet. From Tuesday to Friday I managed to not only finish the conference but secure some of the best industrial relations/employment lawyers in Australia to present. Not only did I get the program completed on time, it was able to be printed on time for the insert it was booked in for. Sometimes it amazes how things can come to together when your back is to the wall.

Reel Life:

Last nights movie for Reel Life was the American remake of Girl With A Dragon Tattoo. I have wanted to see it for ages, and saw that it was on Foxtel late last Sunday night, so I recorded it on my IQ. Damn that’s a long movie. The film – like the book – sets a slow and steady pace.For an adaptation, it is fairly faithful to the novel, although there were a couple of bits and pieces that were changed that made me think “why change that bit of all things.” The discovery of what happened to Hillary being the main thing that caught my eye, and Mikael’s sentence at the beginning of the film. But those were only tiny things, and all in all it was very faithful to the original. The way the film handled the dark twisted sexual nature of the book surprised me too. I admit I was expecting a water downed version of the events in the book, but the film didn’t shy away from that either. The cast were amazing as a whole. It’s definitely a 4 and half nuts out 5 in my opinion.

Online Life:

I’ve tried to keep a steady presence in Writing in Shadows during the week. I wrote a couple of blogs, one of them was on the moments of random Inspiration we come across when we least expect it. I’ve always loved photography, but I’ve never been really good at it. I’m average at best when I take a photograph. The creation of software programs like Instagram gives every one the chance to be at least semi-decent and the picture I used in the Inspiration post was one I took on my iPad one night coming home from work on a moving train. I loved it.

After I wrote that blog on Thursday, I really didn’t give it a lot more thought. I was standing on the station on Friday night, waiting for my connecting train and happened to glance up over the marshes and saw this;

Another quick snap, this time on the iPhone and not a filter needed to provide the colours or the sun rays as the setting sun was breaking through the clouds.

Writer’s Life:

I spend a lot of my life writing. Usually conference agenda’s, marketing copy, web copy etc. But since I began the process of creative recovery I’ve been writing down bits and pieces, nothing overly substantial. I’ve been working on Butterfly, which all going well should be finalised by next weekend. I’ve been revisiting old idea’s that have been floating around for years and examining them. I’ve also been – of late – considering writing queerotica novels and selling them on Amazon. Beyond the standard issue problem of “whose going to want to read what I have to say?” I’ve also got the new issue with erotica of having read some of the existing stuff and thinking “crap, mine is so totally different, my writing style, the story line, it’s never going to fit in.” Fitting in has always been a desire for me. Don’t stand out, don’t rock the boat, don’t fall into the spotlight. I’m a member of a forum and I mentioned on there the “sameness” that seems to be infiltrating gay based erotica. I was surprised to find so many people on the forum write in that genre. Not many of them write for anyone but themselves, they don’t try and sell it, but they all agreed that it’s all the same thing with different generic characters. One person in particular has been egging me on to write my short story idea.

She recently – I admit I egged her on to do this – released her first gay erotica novel “The Boys in the Band” on Amazon and has had a pretty good level of success in the fortnight it’s been up there. If you’re up for something original in the gay erotica genre check out The Boys in the Band. It’s a good story with really well drawn characters. Plus, it’s FREE this weekend, so grab it while you can and if you read it, leave a review.

At her urging I decided to write the opening sentence of my story Broadband Lovers. It’s been in my head for a couple of days. 45 minutes after starting I had 1500 words on screen. I’m going to play around with the story and see how it goes. I had considered writing another idea for NaNoWriMo but with this one now started I’ll just set myself the word count title and throw myself into. I thought I’d share the opening paragraph with you;

” Jacob and I met in the usual way. At a cooking class, and by cooking class I mean on the internet, and by internet I mean I saw him one night on a webcam.

I’d just thrown caution and 28 years worth of parental training out the window and moved half way across the country to the far north coast. One of those spur of the moment decisions I was half regretting and half excited about. ”

Bodytrim:

Another kilo down *insert cheers from all over the world” taking me to a total of 10 kilo’s lost so far. Well it’s actually closer to 11, but I can’t claim the 11 until I lose another half a kilo. I find my only struggle relating to losing weight is laziness. I’ve not exercised this week, and I noticed on Friday I was slipping into bad habits of just grabbing take away chinese food from across the street, rather than walk the 2 minutes to the food court for a nice fish and salad. I’ve also started back on the cola, rather than walk to the kitchen to get a jug of water. Changing habits – be it bad eating habits or anything else – requires vigilance. If I allow old programming to take over, I’m going to end up right back where I started from.