'Tis the Season

You'd think yes, but actually no....

This could quite easily double up as my end-of-year roundup, but we'll see.  Basically, we're at my Mum's for Christmas, with everything that entails, and I need to write something.

Because that's how things work now.  I write.  I've had my little tablet since just after my birthday, and if I'm honest, it's been pretty revolutionary.  I needed something that I could use in the evening while my phone was playing audiobooks to get the Chap to sleep, and something that wasn't the computer.  Computers are too easy.  They make my habits easy.  But my tablet is crap enough to make my habits really hard to do, leaving just typing stuff as the only realistic option.

And it's brilliant.  I've found an outlet for my stories that doesn't involve late nights and dangerous behaviours.  Wattpad is great.  I've found a friend.  I've got two long books about half-done, and the feedback I'm getting on each chapter is really positive.  I think that might be one of the things I need in order to keep going.  I need feedback and support, which is why my Flickr behaviours are so addictive.  I get sucked in by favourites and comments.  It's dangerous.  But not with writing.  I still get nice comments, but I can somehow manage to get to bed before midnight.

And just this month, when it looked like none of my stories would be ready for publishing, I took a short story and put it through Smashwords.  It's over there on the right, just under my profile stuff, available to buy, for something like 75p in our money.  Smashwords is also great, and I liked it so much, I wrote another short story and made it available for free.  I'm developing unhealthy behaviours with the stats page, hoping that I might crack 100 downloads before Christmas, but at any rate, I'm having a very positive experience.  The plan is to get the HGS thing in shape in the New Year and upload a chapter book for a coupla quid.

Like we're about to form some kind of
 Power Rangers Voltron Mega Zord kinda thing,
which me and my siblings could probably
actually do if it came to it

And so it is in a good place that I find myself at the end of this year.  There's a blog post to be written about what's come out of therapy recently and how it relates to my Cinderella thing, but I'll save that for another time.  Spoiler alert:  I had a horrible childhood with enough privilege to paper over the cracks.  It'll take some working through, but in the meantime I've come to spend the festive season with the very people who caused it all, and I don't feel bad at all.  These people, aside from one obvious exception, are the people who will ultimately see me through.

LMW

There's a draft in here...

Except this is a short story, not a big book

This is exciting.  I have a draft, and it's now a revised draft that I'm happy to spread about.

I'm also happy to spread it about freely, because I'm fairly sure I'll be giving it away for free when I come to properly publish it via the proper publishing thing I'm looking at.  First one's always free, and if I can get more than 2 people to download it, I'll count that as a win.

Clicky link here for the revised draft.

It's just shy of 5k in terms of words.  I think that's not too shabby.  You can read it and leave it at that, and I'd really welcome some feedback, mostly on the whole 'doctor' 'Dr' issue that presented itself.

Of course, there's a back-story and a trail of inspiration which might give you a window on how my mind works these things out.  Read on below, with spoilers...

Make Good Art

Does this picture really need a caption?

It's been a bad year...

Let me fess up:  I'm in a bad place, and I'm not handling it well.  2016 can officially get to fuck, for so many reasons, and while therapy is going well, it's a regular slot at the start of the week during which my anxieties are poked and prodded.  Current massive crisis detailed below.

This post is pretty much a list of what's going on at the moment for me, and how much of a mess I'm getting myself into.  Also, some vague and misapplied wisdom from Neil Gaiman.  Ready?

Me and my Shadow

My therapist is really good.  I think I've found my problem.  It's brought back a memory of an excellent short story that I read years and years ago by Jeff Noon.  It resonated with me back then, which seems to suggest that the problem that has now been identified has been my problem for a good many years:  I have a shadow.

Full disclosure:  I've had a bad week, and wrote most of this post while at work, for reasons which will become clear.

Eye Candy - All about the context (Old Blog)

"Well?  What do you think?"

A bit of everything all at once (Old Blog)

Work-life balance, or something
along those lines

This post is a little bit of everything.  It's long and rambling and it has subheadings.  There's a long tract in the middle about personal stuff.  It's positive and upbeat, more or less, but if you're just looking for some nice pictures and a quick exploration of one of my occasional fetishes, then skip straight to the bit at the end, subheaded accordingly.

It's the start of a new year for me and my colleagues, and everything is happening all at once.  There's work stuff, family stuff, house stuff and Dad stuff.  There's also fear and work avoidance, but there's also success, focus and concentration, which is feeling pretty wonderful.

There have also been triggers which have failed to set me off on one of my habitual binges, which is a good thing, and finally there's been one thing I saw today that's worth a bit of a blog post about.  That's the bit at the end.

Sound good?  Read on!

My relationship with captions (Old Blog)

After a couple of rather important, but relatively submission-free posts over the last week or so, a few words on the subject of captions, which seem to be very popular in certain dark corners of the internet.  Such as this one.

There's a whole side of captions that I don't explore in this post, the theoretical bit, but that will probably be better dealt with if I ever come to post about porn in general.  In the meantime, here's a long-winded ramble about my relationship with captioned images on the internet.  Let's go!