I live, I die, I live again.
I am trying a new thing. The old thing (effectively this blog up until now) was not really working. It was getting out of hand, particularly with the Eye Candy series and the endless fiddling that that entailed. It was becoming yet another of my secret, private projects, elaborate, highly engrossing, and shared with absolutely no-one.
My new thing is elaborate, highly engrossing, and shared with anyone who wants to buy it. I'm writing ebooks with a view to getting them distributed to loads of places where people can read and pay money for them.
I'm not aiming to make mega-bucks, but the money thing is important for me. This is not another of my pet projects that ultimately goes nowhere. This is all above board. Furiosa knows, and is supportive, although she doesn't actually want to read any of it. Too weird, and I agree.
This is a legitimate repository for all the kinky things that go on inside my head. The things go on, it's impossible to stop them going on. This is a way I can do something with them that doesn't end up going nowhere.
It's exciting. I've written two chapters of my first trilogy already. I've got a second trilogy mostly planned, plus a third idea that I tried to write about before but purged in a fit of self-recrimination. I've also got ideas for a side-line in single-player creative writing role-playing game systems, because that's something I'm really good at making, and nobody seems to be doing that on the internet yet.
My new hobby is taking over this blog, for promotional stuff, chapter samples, updates and links. Don't worry, I'll still write posts about my personal quest for submissive self-acceptance. It's still going to be part of this blog because it's still part of me, and exploring it will fuel my writing the very activity exorcises my demons. Cases in point: my first trilogy is about work, and my second will be about my first fiancée.
Stay tuned.
LMW
Thursday, 18 February 2016
Tuesday, 1 December 2015
My head is not right (Old Blog)
 |
| All this will become clear |
Quick roundup of news before we get down to business:
Work is little better, but progress is being made, slowly but surely, and it looks like the whole place is going down the toilet anyway, so my concerns of having a bright career future at such a fine organisation are dwindling. My new manager is a cowbag. My old manager is properly wonderful. My emails are evil.
A friend who goes by the name of Joanna came to visit. Good chats, potable beers and general positivity all round.
Christmas looms. I mostly have all the presents. It should be a good one.
Now, down to business. This is a long one, and it ends up in a very troubling place. It was quite hard to write all this, but it's even harder trying to live with it. Bear with me if you can, but this post carries a severe Weirdness Warning. Credit should go to my therapist, who is really fucking good, but the results of his inquiries are pretty much as follows:
My head is not right...
Monday, 9 November 2015
Actual crisis (Old Blog)
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| A google search for 'femdom motorbike', apparently Because the solution to all mid-life crises is a 22-year-old girlfriend and motorbike... |
It's been a rough four weeks, and I'm feeling at a very low ebb, and last night I had a chat with Furiosa.
And it was good.
Tuesday, 3 November 2015
I aten't dead (Old Blog)
I'm still here, but it's complicated... Here's a quick roundup of what's new with me:
I have beta-blockers. They're not magic, but they help my body to stop giving a shit about all the adrenaline it seems to produce. Trouble is, while they remove the physical symptoms of my anxiety, I'm still left with what's in my head, and also a complete lack of motivation to do very much at all. If I was going to get all bad teenage poetry about it, it's like there's a space in me for my aspirations, hopes, dreams and desire, but I fill it with anxiety, and when the anxiety is taken away, the void remains. Which brings me to my next thing:
I don't know what I want to do. That's not a function of having too many conflicting choices, it's simply that I am really very bad at knowing what I would like to have and what I would like to do.
And that's pretty chilling. When I'm anxious I can get a few things done around the house. When I'm at work, if I can hit the sweet spot between fired up and burnt out, I stand a chance of getting something done. Take my anxiety away, and I'm not sure I'm really a person any more. It's weird.
I have a therapist. He's a man. I chose a man on purpose, not because I don't like talking to women. I love women. See here. Trouble is, I find it quite difficult not to fancy them, and very difficult not to include them in some kind of fantasy. If I'm spending regular time with them alone and they're wearing shoes, it's highly likely that something will develop. If I'm talking about my Cinderella thing and my sissy maid thing, it's almost inevitable. I chose a man for my therapist so this would never happen.
He's also very good. During the first session he poked a couple of things that were pretty raw, leading me to the following conclusion:
I'm trying to defeat my father by channeling my mother, and neither of these things is good. In subsequent sessions he's raised the idea that my mother might be partly responsible for the state that I'm in, which is an idea that I am highly resistant to. The height of my resistance is probably very telling. I see him every Monday. He's very good.
Not being at work for 3 weeks was good, but again, it wasn't magic. I had surmised that without the work stress to deal with, I wouldn't turn to my fantasy creations for solace and soothing. Alas, I had time on my hands, so I ended up making an interactive Powerpoint thing. It has a Cinderella theme:
You get a picture of some ladies in nice dresses (nicked shamelessly from some Russian bloke on Flickr) and you click through a little scene involving domination, humiliation and cruelty that casts the viewpoint character as Cinderella, serving at the Royal Ball rather than attending as a guest. Half the slides have a random element, and the other half feature a Fairy Godmother character to whom you can appeal for help. Naturally, the help that is given is often counterproductive, and she actually joins in most of the time with the barbed remarks and the enjoyment of Cinderella's suffering. The first picture is what it looks like to play, and this is the bit where we're being offered a choice of magical help. You click one of the buttons on the right and you head off down that path. The second picture is what it look like behind the scenes, with the script in the slide notes. Behind that is some VBA that reads the script, displays the right text, shows the right buttons and moves you on to a random next slide when you're done. Towards the bottom of the second picture you can see what happens when you kiss or don't kiss the ring. TL;DR: If you kiss it, you become sexually aroused whenever you're within 20 feet of the ladies in the picture (but stray too far and you get period pains (my head is weird)). If you don't kiss it, there's some nipple twisting to be suffered.
It took a couple of late nights to get the slide templates and the VBA done, and then a couple of days to get the pictures and the scripts written. Suffice to say that I can make Powerpoint do pretty much anything. It's weird. It's enjoyable. It eats my time and robs me of sleep, but, like this blog post, I can't seem to go to be until it's finished. My behaviours, here they are.
But yes, even without the need to self-soothe after a day at work, I found myself making the Cinderella-themed interactive Powerpoint. So it's not just self-soothing. It could be more of a hobby, and that's a worrying thing. I'd like to have a normal hobby, something that I can admit to doing. Something that doesn't have to wait until my family members have gone to bed, and something that I can be enthusiastic about with other people.
But that's the thing. I don't know what that hobby could be, because I don't know what I want to do. And then my therapist suggests that I could find some way to do this sort of thing for a living. I was talking about the whole thing with captions, about which I've posted before, and it's pretty obvious that my output is very well-received in the various communities to which I've posted it. My therapist was interested in my enthusiasm for it, and also how I manage to express power and dominance with only a few words of text, how I give various different voices to the women in the pictures that I use, ranging from soft and teasing to full-on totalitarian bitch-queen. I can do things with words, and I appear to be able to write reasonably well. Could I, perhaps, be able to put something together, get published under a pseudonym and actually make money out of my fevered imagination?
It sounds very tempting, but also highly risky, and not something I could give the day job up for. I need to keep the job that I can explain to my mother. Also, I've never finished anything long. I rarely finish a Powerpoint thing, as I always find more pictures to add, more choices to script, &c. &c. The only thing I appear to be able to finish is a run of 6 captioned images, and even then it takes up more of my time than I'd like. Perfectionism is a curse.
Also, there's the issue of how I'd monetise something that's as inherently personal and idiosyncratic as a Cinderella-themed interactive Powerpoint fantasy. Captions are infinitely-more-than-ten-a-penny, there are hundreds of free webteases on Milovana, the community around SexScripts is very much open and free, and more often than not I'm stealing pictures from Flickr to use in my projects, so I'd be in serious trouble if I tried to charge any money for them. There's ways to get supported by Patreon and donations, but there's no way I can generate enough output to get more than £2.50 every decade by that method.
Can you tell I'm trying to talk myself out of it?
It's November, of course, so there's NaNoWriMo going on, which could have been my way into the wonderful world of dodgy paperbacks, but something else has got in the way:
I've gone back to work. I went back yesterday for meetings and got back in the classroom today. Everyone's being very supportive, and it feels good to be out of the house and doing things again, but my anxiety levels are through the roof, even with my medication. I can't imagine what I'd be like without the beta-blockers. It's exhausting, but I'm doing it. It'll get better once I've sorted out everything from the 4 weeks that I've missed. If anything, I've demonstrated to my employers just how much stuff I've been doing for them for free, and just how time-consuming and frustrating it all is to do it without proper support.
And the small boy is being weird, because both his parents have gone weird, and he's been disrupted by half-term, and the clocks went back, and his sleep patterns went weird, and he's got some sort of chesty cough / cold thing that knocked him out for a couple of days, which is not what either of his parents need when we have our own stuff to deal with, and Furiosa appears to be more or less falling apart, which is affecting me and affecting the small boy, who is acting up and ruining everyone's sleep patterns and causing everyone to fall apart. And now I've gone back to work. And now it's approaching midnight on a school-night and this was supposed to be a quick round-up, but I got sidetracked by my Powerpoint...
I think I've created a properly messed-up tesseract of life-work-fantasy-addiction-computing-habits-blogging-family. Thank the Lord I have a therapist...
ȹ
I have beta-blockers. They're not magic, but they help my body to stop giving a shit about all the adrenaline it seems to produce. Trouble is, while they remove the physical symptoms of my anxiety, I'm still left with what's in my head, and also a complete lack of motivation to do very much at all. If I was going to get all bad teenage poetry about it, it's like there's a space in me for my aspirations, hopes, dreams and desire, but I fill it with anxiety, and when the anxiety is taken away, the void remains. Which brings me to my next thing:
I don't know what I want to do. That's not a function of having too many conflicting choices, it's simply that I am really very bad at knowing what I would like to have and what I would like to do.
And that's pretty chilling. When I'm anxious I can get a few things done around the house. When I'm at work, if I can hit the sweet spot between fired up and burnt out, I stand a chance of getting something done. Take my anxiety away, and I'm not sure I'm really a person any more. It's weird.
I have a therapist. He's a man. I chose a man on purpose, not because I don't like talking to women. I love women. See here. Trouble is, I find it quite difficult not to fancy them, and very difficult not to include them in some kind of fantasy. If I'm spending regular time with them alone and they're wearing shoes, it's highly likely that something will develop. If I'm talking about my Cinderella thing and my sissy maid thing, it's almost inevitable. I chose a man for my therapist so this would never happen.
He's also very good. During the first session he poked a couple of things that were pretty raw, leading me to the following conclusion:
I'm trying to defeat my father by channeling my mother, and neither of these things is good. In subsequent sessions he's raised the idea that my mother might be partly responsible for the state that I'm in, which is an idea that I am highly resistant to. The height of my resistance is probably very telling. I see him every Monday. He's very good.
Not being at work for 3 weeks was good, but again, it wasn't magic. I had surmised that without the work stress to deal with, I wouldn't turn to my fantasy creations for solace and soothing. Alas, I had time on my hands, so I ended up making an interactive Powerpoint thing. It has a Cinderella theme:
You get a picture of some ladies in nice dresses (nicked shamelessly from some Russian bloke on Flickr) and you click through a little scene involving domination, humiliation and cruelty that casts the viewpoint character as Cinderella, serving at the Royal Ball rather than attending as a guest. Half the slides have a random element, and the other half feature a Fairy Godmother character to whom you can appeal for help. Naturally, the help that is given is often counterproductive, and she actually joins in most of the time with the barbed remarks and the enjoyment of Cinderella's suffering. The first picture is what it looks like to play, and this is the bit where we're being offered a choice of magical help. You click one of the buttons on the right and you head off down that path. The second picture is what it look like behind the scenes, with the script in the slide notes. Behind that is some VBA that reads the script, displays the right text, shows the right buttons and moves you on to a random next slide when you're done. Towards the bottom of the second picture you can see what happens when you kiss or don't kiss the ring. TL;DR: If you kiss it, you become sexually aroused whenever you're within 20 feet of the ladies in the picture (but stray too far and you get period pains (my head is weird)). If you don't kiss it, there's some nipple twisting to be suffered.
It took a couple of late nights to get the slide templates and the VBA done, and then a couple of days to get the pictures and the scripts written. Suffice to say that I can make Powerpoint do pretty much anything. It's weird. It's enjoyable. It eats my time and robs me of sleep, but, like this blog post, I can't seem to go to be until it's finished. My behaviours, here they are.
But yes, even without the need to self-soothe after a day at work, I found myself making the Cinderella-themed interactive Powerpoint. So it's not just self-soothing. It could be more of a hobby, and that's a worrying thing. I'd like to have a normal hobby, something that I can admit to doing. Something that doesn't have to wait until my family members have gone to bed, and something that I can be enthusiastic about with other people.
But that's the thing. I don't know what that hobby could be, because I don't know what I want to do. And then my therapist suggests that I could find some way to do this sort of thing for a living. I was talking about the whole thing with captions, about which I've posted before, and it's pretty obvious that my output is very well-received in the various communities to which I've posted it. My therapist was interested in my enthusiasm for it, and also how I manage to express power and dominance with only a few words of text, how I give various different voices to the women in the pictures that I use, ranging from soft and teasing to full-on totalitarian bitch-queen. I can do things with words, and I appear to be able to write reasonably well. Could I, perhaps, be able to put something together, get published under a pseudonym and actually make money out of my fevered imagination?
It sounds very tempting, but also highly risky, and not something I could give the day job up for. I need to keep the job that I can explain to my mother. Also, I've never finished anything long. I rarely finish a Powerpoint thing, as I always find more pictures to add, more choices to script, &c. &c. The only thing I appear to be able to finish is a run of 6 captioned images, and even then it takes up more of my time than I'd like. Perfectionism is a curse.
Also, there's the issue of how I'd monetise something that's as inherently personal and idiosyncratic as a Cinderella-themed interactive Powerpoint fantasy. Captions are infinitely-more-than-ten-a-penny, there are hundreds of free webteases on Milovana, the community around SexScripts is very much open and free, and more often than not I'm stealing pictures from Flickr to use in my projects, so I'd be in serious trouble if I tried to charge any money for them. There's ways to get supported by Patreon and donations, but there's no way I can generate enough output to get more than £2.50 every decade by that method.
Can you tell I'm trying to talk myself out of it?
It's November, of course, so there's NaNoWriMo going on, which could have been my way into the wonderful world of dodgy paperbacks, but something else has got in the way:
I've gone back to work. I went back yesterday for meetings and got back in the classroom today. Everyone's being very supportive, and it feels good to be out of the house and doing things again, but my anxiety levels are through the roof, even with my medication. I can't imagine what I'd be like without the beta-blockers. It's exhausting, but I'm doing it. It'll get better once I've sorted out everything from the 4 weeks that I've missed. If anything, I've demonstrated to my employers just how much stuff I've been doing for them for free, and just how time-consuming and frustrating it all is to do it without proper support.
And the small boy is being weird, because both his parents have gone weird, and he's been disrupted by half-term, and the clocks went back, and his sleep patterns went weird, and he's got some sort of chesty cough / cold thing that knocked him out for a couple of days, which is not what either of his parents need when we have our own stuff to deal with, and Furiosa appears to be more or less falling apart, which is affecting me and affecting the small boy, who is acting up and ruining everyone's sleep patterns and causing everyone to fall apart. And now I've gone back to work. And now it's approaching midnight on a school-night and this was supposed to be a quick round-up, but I got sidetracked by my Powerpoint...
I think I've created a properly messed-up tesseract of life-work-fantasy-addiction-computing-habits-blogging-family. Thank the Lord I have a therapist...
ȹ
Friday, 16 October 2015
That's the thing (Old Blog)
Some more information about what's currently going on with me:
I've been signed off work sick for two weeks, with the official diagnosis of 'anxiety with depression'. I was surprised at how easy it was, but then, that's the thing.
Having the time off is brilliant, as I'm not having to put up any fronts or seem like I'm coping with anything. That's something I've been doing for years, and getting dressed and going to work is one way that I can 'pass' as a functioning adult. Now that I don't have to do that, I can simply deal with how I actually feel on a daily basis, which is: anxious, but then, that's the thing.
I've also had time and space to talk to Furiosa about what's going on with me. She's also been signed off work for a couple of weeks, due to work stress and the stress of the Chap starting school. This has been brewing for 6 years now (he'll be 5 in January, that's a lot of brewing). Her symptoms were panic, anxiety, hyperventilation and The Fear that came out of nowhere to paralyse her and screw up her morning. It was when she was telling me about it that I realised that what she was describing was reasonably normal for me, and that's the thing.
The thing is, my normal is messed up. My baseline level of background anxiety is mild to moderate. Just existing on this planet is enough to make me nervous, and that's before you start adding in things like money, work, hoovering, talking to other people and having sex. Furiosa's symptoms are fairly regular occurences for me when I'm at work, and have been for several years. I've been existing at work-stress levels that can get you signed off sick for several years, and they've become normal for me. I've normalised anxiety with depression.
Looking back to try and find out how I got this way, when it started and how it developed, I couldn't. I can't think of a single time in my childhood, in my teens, or as an adult when I've actually felt relaxed. Not at home, not at school, not on any holidays. I've always been anxious about something, and I've never found anything that can make that go away.
But they don't, not really. They keep it at bay for a time, they offer me a space where my anxieties simply aren't felt any more, they throw a towel over the poison parrot's cage. But, like an alcoholic sobering up, which is a massively barbed analogy for me to draw, my anxieties are all still there in the morning, with an added layer of guilt on top, ready to be evaded all over again.
So, plan: time off work, good, therapy, good, pills to quell my baseline anxiety, good, staying my version of sober, good, finding another outlet for my submissiveness, very very necessary.
This blog? Not sure yet.
ȹ
I've been signed off work sick for two weeks, with the official diagnosis of 'anxiety with depression'. I was surprised at how easy it was, but then, that's the thing.
Having the time off is brilliant, as I'm not having to put up any fronts or seem like I'm coping with anything. That's something I've been doing for years, and getting dressed and going to work is one way that I can 'pass' as a functioning adult. Now that I don't have to do that, I can simply deal with how I actually feel on a daily basis, which is: anxious, but then, that's the thing.
I've also had time and space to talk to Furiosa about what's going on with me. She's also been signed off work for a couple of weeks, due to work stress and the stress of the Chap starting school. This has been brewing for 6 years now (he'll be 5 in January, that's a lot of brewing). Her symptoms were panic, anxiety, hyperventilation and The Fear that came out of nowhere to paralyse her and screw up her morning. It was when she was telling me about it that I realised that what she was describing was reasonably normal for me, and that's the thing.
The thing is, my normal is messed up. My baseline level of background anxiety is mild to moderate. Just existing on this planet is enough to make me nervous, and that's before you start adding in things like money, work, hoovering, talking to other people and having sex. Furiosa's symptoms are fairly regular occurences for me when I'm at work, and have been for several years. I've been existing at work-stress levels that can get you signed off sick for several years, and they've become normal for me. I've normalised anxiety with depression.
Looking back to try and find out how I got this way, when it started and how it developed, I couldn't. I can't think of a single time in my childhood, in my teens, or as an adult when I've actually felt relaxed. Not at home, not at school, not on any holidays. I've always been anxious about something, and I've never found anything that can make that go away.
 |
| "But Darling, your sexual fantasies make it all go away, don't we?" |
But they don't, not really. They keep it at bay for a time, they offer me a space where my anxieties simply aren't felt any more, they throw a towel over the poison parrot's cage. But, like an alcoholic sobering up, which is a massively barbed analogy for me to draw, my anxieties are all still there in the morning, with an added layer of guilt on top, ready to be evaded all over again.
So, plan: time off work, good, therapy, good, pills to quell my baseline anxiety, good, staying my version of sober, good, finding another outlet for my submissiveness, very very necessary.
This blog? Not sure yet.
ȹ
Tuesday, 6 October 2015
Hiatus (Old Blog)
So anyways, I've been signed off work for the next couple of weeks. Very very complicated issues involving work life, home life and family life, all three of which have had the bottom fall out in the past month or so.
It's all here on the blog, it's what the blog was supposed to be dealing with. The blog wasn't dealing with it.
This will need some time away to sort out. Patience is a card game. It's at this point that the blog could take a dog-leg into something much more interesting, or it could stop altogether. It's hard to say at the minute, but this minute is where I need to be right now.
Who knows.
ȹ
It's all here on the blog, it's what the blog was supposed to be dealing with. The blog wasn't dealing with it.
This will need some time away to sort out. Patience is a card game. It's at this point that the blog could take a dog-leg into something much more interesting, or it could stop altogether. It's hard to say at the minute, but this minute is where I need to be right now.
Who knows.
ȹ
Monday, 5 October 2015
Normal service (Old Blog)
It looks like I've disappeared. Work is back in full swing, and there are issues going on. The labels for this post should allow you to triangulate (septangulate?) what's going on. I'll post more about it when I have the time, but for the moment I need to focus my attentions away from self-absorption and cross-addiction and onto things that actually matter.
Normal service might resume.
ȹ
Normal service might resume.
ȹ
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