Time for a change

Today on the way back from a speaking engagement at Ipswich I saw on a billboard:

"as one door closes, another opens"

Today Pluto tip toes into Capricorn, where it will spend the next 12 or so years, and the door closes on my dance with Pluto over the past 12 years, including an intense period of having a Pluto transit of my sun. It truly is the beginning of a new era, after a false start earlier on this year.

For months, well if I was being totally honest, since I began blogging and writing seriously, I have resisted the idea of carving my blog up into subject specific blogs I. To me it was buying too much into the idea that you have to market yourself aspect of yourself in a certain way to get an audience. The Ezine site and supporting newsletters goes as far to suggest that you alter your name to put to different articles on different subject matters. Goddess forbid that one person actually know quite a lot about a number of subjects – to be a well rounded, educated and informed individual. Marketing – bah!

I’ve clung to the idea that, what you see is what you get with me and here. It reflects the fact that I am many different people and pursue a number of different roles in life – I am a mother, a writer and a lover of books, I am an observer of life, a tippler in the weird, the wonderful and the fascinating, I’m a feminist who’s spiritual beliefs are firmly rooted in Goddess lore and the wisdom of The Artist’s Way - oh and a sucker for a blog meme. I write articles on menstruation, birth, sex, health/illness, mothering and probably half a dozen other subjects that don’t readily jump to mind right now..

But today - I guess I’ve finally given in to having to segment up this original blog - to fracture myself into separate blogs? Or am I giving each facet of my personality a chance to catch the line and shine? To allow like minded people to find me, to resonate with me work? Perhaps that's what drew me to the painting - first one to jump out at me when I typed in "change painting" into Google Images. Maybe it's telling me its ok to expose individual parts of me?

Sigh! Only the Universe knows.


As a consequence I'll begin stripping the personal content from this website and shifting some of it over onto the next website. Perhaps the rest just needs to be archived out of view? Anything that has shifted, I will provide links to.

Well I shall give it a go. After all that’s all really one can do. And since, for me, this is the path less trod … it’s probably time to go exploring here a little.

Where to go from here:

You can now find my personal musings at Shine A Little Light, which will also include my photography.


This blog here will remain my writing blog, for fiction, non fiction and other articles related to writing.


I also have Blue Melissae which is my (winning) NaNo 08 project which will have more chapter posted up over time.


And the Reclaim Sex After Birth website and associated blog.

Painting: Unknown Artist - but found at this wonderful Urban Butterfly blog

Rickshaw

_______ Shet stopped by the next NewsFeed post she came to and stood for a moment trying to get a glimpse of what was on. She didn’t want to push through to the front for a closer view, happy to hang back and see what she could. She timed it and after five minutes, without seeing her face, she set off again looking for a rickshaw. She hailed the first one to go past.

The canopy was a sophisticated solar panel that charged a battery that drove a tiny engine. On a good day some drivers didn’t need to pedal at all.

“I need you to take me to the SpacePort interchange,” said Shet climbing into the pack.
The driver looked at her strangely. He didn’t relish the idea of having to actually pedal most of the way there and back. At 2pm in the afternoon there wasn’t enough charge to get him there and back on the battery.

“Why don’t you just jump on the Solarail out there ma’am.”
“Because it’s a beautiful day and I have some money to burn. And the customer is always correct.”
“If that’s what you want ma’am, who am I to blow off a huge fare in the middle of the day.”
He began to peddle, pulling out into the deserted street heading westwards to connect with the former Western Freeway, to follow the Solarail out to the interchange.

Shet was glad that she had chosen rickshaw to get to the Interchange rather than the Solarail. The Solarail would have got her there in less than 15 minutes. At the current pace it would be at least half an hour before the rickshaw pulled into the Interchange, the driving gagging and struggling to catch his breathe.

The breeze caressed and tousled her hair. The gentle rocking motion of the rickshaw was soothing. Her mind calmed. She needed that. Her whole world had been turned upside down in the same time that it would have taken to have been wined and dined at the Polo Club … and then told that she could still not be given the job. She was used to methodically plotting her course through life. On the moon you didn’t leave things to chance. Leaving things to chance meant death. You checked your distances, you doubled checked your oxygen supply. You planned each job down to the second. You considered and brainstormed salutations to all problems. You thought about and countered potential hazards. Time wasn’t forgiving. If you screwed up, if it took longer than anticipated, if you broke down, got injured there was only so much time and so much oxygen. Then you died. And that made her feel safe, secure.

She’d never had a major incident under her command and she’d certainly never lost a man. She couldn’t say that she’d ever lost a woman … she’d never taken a woman up with her. She’d never given a woman a chance. There had been plenty to choose from, a steady stream of confident, talented and ambitious women coming through and she’d said no to everyone of them. Just what were they willing to sacrifice. Were they willing to make the sacrifices that she had made. She’d decided no, without even asking them. When it came down to it, she was cut from exactly the same fabric as Tennyson.

No job for a woman.

Yet she was confident that she could go into the Polo Club and convince him that she was capable – that she was the only one for the job. That as a woman she could do it. But was she even a woman any more? She never thought of herself in terms of being a woman. She thought of herself as Shet Harmon.

She sat there in the rickshaw, in her crumpled and sweat dampened Chanel suit and wondered who she actually was. Man or woman – or something in between that made even less sense to her. And why did everything have to be reduced down to biology. What ever happened to persona merit.

Now was not the time to get herself into a complicated philosophical debate that ultimately would provide no more answers than she had now, but would twist her mental processes up into knots, cloud her thinking. She needed to think clearly and she needed to think quickly.

She was about to gatecrash the Directorship of her sworn professional enemies. Wasn’t Langely just going to love that? If felt oh so wrong, but oh so right. It gave her a thrill unlike anything she had experience in a long time – since landing on the moon for the first time … since leading a deployment for the first time?

And not only that, she was going to demand that they choose her to go make first contact with aliens on another planet. She was going to insist on being part of a project that didn’t even exist.

Why? Why did she want this so badly, when 24 hours earlier she was chaffing to get back to the Moon, to get back to her team and the end of the project. Why was she ready to give up the accolades that were her due after two years of careful planning, of hard work, of going where no one had gone before to do a job that no one had ever done before.

And that was it. Establishing the Helium-3 mine and overseeing production was never going to make her happy. Her ambitions were currently sated but within a year she would be a manager, behind a desk, running and trouble shooting schedules, transports …

A slow lunar death. She was an adventurer. She pushed boundaries and went places that others were too timid to go.

The fact that it would piss off Tennyson – one of the most powerful, ambitious and well loved men of the Post Apocalyptic period, was just icing on the cake. She was glad that it was straight in her head. Chasing this project was about her, it wasn’t about Tennyson. Because at the end of the day, potentially marooned light years from home she had to drawn on her own individual strength and conviction, not spite for Tennyson.

How she had got herself on a course to undermine and trade blows with a man she had successfully ignored for the past decade was something she had all the time to ponder. To wonder exactly who it was he saw when he opened that door

Love & Rockets

Fortitude Valley, Brisbane
July 2008

(This is my favourite photo of the year to date ... taken from my car window as I waited as a set of lights in the Valley. I was lucky enough to have black and white film in my camera at the time. Yes I an heathen who still shoots photographs on film)

10 of the best

Today two things needed to be attacked - the housework and my NaNo work count. I came up with, what I hoped, would be a procrastination proof plan. My plan: 10 minutes of writing, followed by 10 minutes of cleaning. Then I would not use cleaning to procrastinate from writing and visa versa.

I do admit that I was a little curious - would I really be able to do it.

Answer? Yes. It worked a treat.

After the first hour I'd got done just short of 1000 words and I had vaccumed the floor, cleaned the toilet and organised some lunch to heat in the oven. By the end of four hours I had not just vacuumed but also dusted, got rid of a whole heap of clutter on the coffee table (read horizontal filing space!) and in the hidey hold between my desk and the bookcase, I cleared another pile off crap off the top of a tall bookcase and reorganised some ornaments on there. With the free coffee table space I put all our photos down there, and I'm working on creating a new shelf for the bookcase. I also mopped the loungroom, dining, kitchen, hallway, toilet and bathroom (did I mention we have polished wooden boards through our house!), cleared off the dining room table (more crap - I am sure that it breeds like rabbits!), changed the table cloth and got rid of the dried up cat vomit that I'd been stepping around on the way to my desk, pretending that it wasn't there.

And in amongst all of that my story Blue Melissae got VERY interesting. I had a concept that invovles two key characters. I wont disclose here else to spoil the story completely for those that are following it over at word press. At the end of my second writing spurt that concept was challenged with another by one of the characters involved. There was a moment where I thought "No way! You are not going to do that to the story!" That was not the way I conceptualised it and it had some pretty serious ramifications for the rest of the story.

But then I realised, after sitting thinking for a few minutes, that if I resisted my character's history, the direction that they wanted to take it, then I was going to come to blows with this particular characters and it's a character that I dont really want to be at loggerheads with.

So I let it go. I let this character choose the history that suits their story ... and in doing so, I've come up with the ultimate twist for the story. And you know what? It's win win. My character gets their way and so do I. It's also another of those dark moments where a character pushes your boundaries. This character is vile - really vile. And his motivations make my skin crawl - and your's too if you stick with the story until the end.

I am hoping that by tomorrow part one of the story will have been wrapped up and it will be time to jet on into out of space. And thus the next cycle of the story will begin.

I have a couple of ideas about Th-Urn's planet (which remains un-named - I shall let the the Th-Urnians name their own planet). I have a vague idea of how their city will look like, and that it is a dying planet .. but beyond that.

I remain glad that I did very little planning for this - because it makes NaNo the most amazing ride. I never know what my characters are going to do, which way the story will twist and turn. I am constantly shocked and awed by the behaviour of my characters. And while I've been challenged by Shet's lack of emotional landscape to day - I''m looking forward to her getting to the Th-Urn's planet, and for her memories to begin leaking back into her consciousness.

So at the end of Day 8 of NaNo ... I'm happy. I'm creeping towards being 2 days ahead of the NaNo projection ... and my family are happy because the house is clean. If you are struggling through NaNo ... I highly recommended 10 for 10. Take 10 minutes for writing and alternate it with 10 minutes of housework. It really does become win-win.

Note: the cat did not get the once over - like the pic. He was noticeably absent through most of the housework. Though with all the malting he's going at the moment, I should have taken to him with the vac. He might have been sucked up though - considering I finally got around to getting some new vac bags and it was like someone had put a turbo booster into my Miele!

Creative Carnival: Fugue

The year is some time in the not to distant future. My main character, Shet Harmon - a lunar geologist and engineer, has been summonsed back from an important scientific project on the Moon to meet with the Mayor of New Brisbane about the confidential project that she's been nominated for. Arriving back on Earth the meeting is cancelled, leaving Shet rather pissed off.

In this scene she is returning from a day out driving her car (cars are banned and only an elite group of people have the money to possess and run one as a hobby!) and has been goaded into a rescheduled meeting with the Mayor by his advisor after being told the Mayor refuses to have her onboard because she's a woman. Shet gets on the Solarail and is 'chatted up' by the only other guy in the carriage.

WARNING - this entry contains strong language so if you're offended by such language, best you don't continue on reading!

He half stood as if to move to sit next to her. Shet grabbed her bag and dumped it on the seat beside her, shooting him a challenging look.

“You got a boyfriend?” Shet ignored him, toying with the idea of plugging in her music. “Hey little lady, I’m talking to you. You got a boyfriend.”

Shet played with the idea of telling him she had a girlfriend, but guessed it would just incite him further. “Actually I am a long way from home. I’m normally based on the moon.” At short notice it was the best diversion she had. She’d never been one to have those snapping comments that put people right back in their place.
“Yeah right little lady. Sure you work on the moon.”

He adjusted his crotch with little regard for decency and then spread his legs wide – resting his elbows on his thighs, planting his chin on his hands and staring at her.
“Didn’t your Mum tell you it was rude to stare?” Shet felt it start to build inside her and tried to fight it, to deep breathe it away.

He kept his eyes fixed on her, trying to zero in on her cleavage even though she had a tattered hoodie on. She kept breathing and avoided looking at him.
“I’m not talking about my Mumma little lady. You wanna talk about your Mumma?”
Inside something snapped.
“You know fuckwitt. I’d drop you in an instant if I wanted to. And you are really pissing me off.”
“Yeah right little lady. You look about as dangerous as a fly.”

She looked away, as panic raced through her eyes. She’d have to get off at the next stop and walk back to her apartment. If she hurried she’d make it back before curfew and without arousing the suspicions of the Night Watchmen. The blood began to pound in her ears. Her vision narrowed and she became more acutely aware of the fetid body odour of the pervert across from her and the rich smell of oil. Looking around the carriage she saw that it was just the two of them. There were closed circuit cameras recording every inch of the carriage, on a direct feed back to a control room in the BIP. The TransitCounter had logged the two of them getting on, the time, the location and their citizen number. It placed her on the train.

She groped with one hand for the strap of her bag as an automated voice announced the next station.

They were back in the city limits.

“You don’t have a boyfriend do you little lady. You’re wound up tight – need a good fuck that’s what your problem is?” Shet kept breathing, the blood was thundering in her ears now, her muscles tense with anticipation.

“It’s that damn chip in your brain. All you damn women and that chip.” Her pupils narrowed and there was a sour, dry taste in her mouth. She willed him to shut up. To just shut the fuck up - for his own sake.

The automated voice announced their arrival and the doors opened. Shet never understood why they always automatically opened but this once was relieved to see them slide open of their own free will. Grabbing her bag tight to her chest and launching herself from the seat in one fluid movement, she ran past the sexual prowler who mistimed his lurch, fingers brushing her arm as she flew past him and out on onto the platform. She prayed that he was sensible, that he stayed on the train, but she heard with shocking clarity the footfall of his heavy boots on the concrete behind her. The platforms were all unmanned and unlit beyond 10 metres. She looked up at the camera and saw as she ran past that the light on the camera was red. It was inactive.

The sound of blood forcing itself through her ears drowned out anything else, and she ran, out into the darkness, taking the stairs from the platform three at a time down onto the parkway. Her assailant was faster than she’d given him credit for. But she hadn’t actually sized him up. Racing out onto the parkway she jettisoned her bag, needing both her hands. Any sense of logic had gone, overwhelmed by the black haze.

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she tried to put some distance between them. She saw a pole ahead, heard the crack of the advertising banner as the wind caught the material. She took the risk of slowing enough to gauge his distance behind her, and changed her course ever so slightly, her muscles obeying with power and agility. As the pole approached she jumped out to grab it, feeling her arms snap as they took up the momentum and she swung her legs around, bracing with her abdominals and pulled the pole close into her chest to maximise the power of the impact.

Her legs whipped around, horizontal to the ground and her feet crashed into his chest, propelling him backwards. Shet let go of the pole and they moved together through the air, Shet landing crouched over him. Before he could move, register what had just happened, she clenched her fist and jabbed it into his throat, hearing the satisfying crunch of her knuckles crushing his wind pipe. His eyes wide open in disbelief locked into hers and she held them as his body twitched, then went limp. She felt numb … empty ... automatic.

With calculated precision, Shet pulled down the sleeve of her shirt, the one she hadn’t used to soak up the sweat and checked for a pulse. Then she stood, tracked back to where she had thrown her bag, using her hands in the darkness to check the contents of her bag, and then on hands and knees making a quick visual check of the area to ensure nothing that could identify her had fallen out. She stood, surveyed the immediate area, and satisfied that she was still alone, she did some slow stretches to help her muscles cool and her breathing to return to normal. Everything was silent, the rush of blood gone. A night bird twittered nearby. She pulled the backpack over her shoulders and turned the station without a second glance backwards at the dark shape lying on the path behind.

Later, lounging on her king sized bed naked, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, Shet sipped chamomile tea as her computer booted up. With ease she hacked into the Solarail security stream, located the portion of vision she was looking for and deleted it, set up an alternate string of data to make it look like a camera malfunction, checked the vision from the station and any other cameras in the nearby area then cleaned up her own hacking trail.

_____ The NewsFeed screen flashed up the perpetual string of visual and sound bites that constituted news as Shet chewed on a piece of toast, a note pad covered in scribbled ideas pushed to one side. The meeting with the Mayor was in less than two hours.

She amped up the sound with a voice command when she saw a news item about a body found on a residential parkway on the city limits. There was a visual of a lump, covered in a white sheet with words streamed across the bottom - Violent death of a male linked to other parkway deaths? The Commissioner of The Night Watchmen’s voice was overlaid making a statement to deny that this attack was linked to the spate of violent deaths of women in the area followed by the Chief Executive Officer of Solarail commenting that the security system was not working at the time. A viewer commented via text transfer that maybe he was the perp of the other crimes and he’d obviously got what was coming to him. She certainly hoped so.

Shet couldn't remember New Brisbane being such a violent place the last time she was back from the Moon. She was glad that she knew some martial arts to keep herself safe, but she'd be glad to be back on the moon.

Reaching for the second piece of toast, Shet took huge bite out of one corner and stared at the screen. It was happening again. It was as though she was meant to remember something, know something ... a niggling sense in the back of her consciousness, the feeling of something on the tip of her tongue. When nothing came to her, she shrugged her shoulders, took another bite of her toast and glanced down at the points she’d made on the notepad in preparation for the meeting.

KEEP CALM … DO NOT LOSE YOUR TEMPER! .... even if you think the guy is a fuckwitt and you didn't vote for him.

[Fiction] Friday: Dreams

Dreams actually constitute a really important part of my NaNo story, tentitively named "Blue Melissae", as this is how my MC has her memories restored to her after 12 years. This is the first exploration of that realm.

This installment (which is chapters and chapters ahead of what I am currently writing) finds my MC Shet Harmon on the Planet of the Th-Urn in conversation with her guide Ka-Ru, a young Th-Urnian 'male'. You can read more installments of Blue Melissae here.

“It’s not so much a dream,” she said, “because it’s just voices. I don't actually 'see' anything.And it doesn’t make any sense, if dreams are meant to make sense.”
"Dreams are often symbolic rather than logical."

Shet rolled onto her side and stared deeply into his dark eyes. His eyes willed her to reveal more, but years of silence caught her.
“Why do you not want to talk about them?” he asked, wanting to reach out and touch her, even though he was aware it was inappropriate. He wasn’t even sure what made him want to do that.
“There’s no one to talk to about it for one.” She rolled away, lying on her back and staring up at the stone ceiling, the tiny lights twinkling, in perpetual chemical stasis enabling them to burn indefinitely. The balance meant that one did not consume the other. “And well it would throw out my balance. It’s best for me to pretend that they just don’t occur.”

But it was getting harder to ignore them. When she said it was only voices that was only partly true. On earth they had only ever been voices and occasionally the dream with the Jacaranda tree, waking as though she was being choked, but here the dreams were morphing and taking a life on their own. The voices were merging with music, and there were flashes of images.

She remembered reading about poker machines. One armed bandits they were called before they became electronic, where the punter had to actually pull the arm to set the barrels spinning. Something about being here had sent off something in her, something pulling an arm in her subconscious and she knew sooner or later that all the symbols were going to line up for the jackpot. But something about the moment terrified her. Her subconscious was trying to line everything up for her, every night was another attempt. When it poured forth, like the cascade of coins from the pokie machine she guessed that she would be trying to flee rather that to thrust her hands beneath to catch and scoop it all up.

“This need of yours to – hold on. It is not healthy, no?”

Shet wasn’t sure how long she’d been quiet for, lost in her own thoughts. Ka-Ru was lying beside her, staring at her.
“I said that I don’t have anyone to talk to. It’s healthy for me to keep it to myself. There is a lot I don’t understand and at the moment it’s all really confusing. Being here - has upset the balance.”

“Tell me about the dream Shet.”

His words had a lyrical hypnotic ring, that lulled her long enough to feel comfortable in sharing something.
“The voice, it says that I’m not good enough. It says that Dad left because of me. That it’s my entire fault. And it’s like I’m in a cave, the words echoing but rather than getting softer they get louder, until I can hear nothing and it’s just a chaos of words screamed at me.”

Shet rolled back to see Ka-ru’s face impassive. The Th-Urnian’s lack of facial expression continued to make her feel uncomfortable.
“How is this strange?”
“I have no idea who my Dad was. I was in an accident when I was 17 and I have no memories prior to that.”
“This is something that upsets you.”
“Why should it upset me?”
“I get a sense of it.”
“I’m not upset.”
“You keep your emotions locked away as well.”

Shet got up off the floor. She wasn’t going to have this conversation and she certainly wasn’t going to have it with Ka-Ru. Her emotions, or lack of them were her own business.
“I have a report to write and a broadcast to be sent back to Earth. You’ll have to leave - now!”

Ka-Ru got a sense that he’d pushed too far. He pulled his legs to his chest and then rolled onto the balls of his feet, standing in one graceful movement.
“I apologise if I have upset you Shet,” he said, turning off the translator, bowing shallowly and leaving her room.

Shet didn’t understand why Ka-Ru always managed to zero in on the confusing and uncomfortable parts within her and make a b-line for them. In the morning she’d ask for another guide to be assigned to her.


______ Ka-Ru arrived back in the Empress’s chamber and prostrated himself at her furry feet.
“What of the dreams Ka-Ru?”
“She says they are just voices in her head and denies any emotional connection. They make little sense to her.” He sat back on his feet looking into her deeply furrowed face.
“She is lying. Was there a change in her energy waves? In pheremones. The Old Ones were certain.”
Ka-Ru shook his head.
“Try again.”
“She does not trust me Mother.”
“Make her trust you.”
“Your will Mother.”

Wordless Wednesday: Mumma Milkshake

My Soul Sister and Goddess Daughter
Wynnum - August - 2008

Quote for the Day: Anais Nin

And the day came when the risk [it took] to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Photograph: (c) Linda Willets 2004

Day 5 of NaNo

It's getting a bit predictable these posts ... welcome to November!

It has been an interesting few days for me. More health challenges as my gums heal and my body struggles to deal with the change in diet. Last night I had a stomach upset which just felt like salt in the wounds (actually salt in the wounds is the two hourly mouth rinses with warm salt water and a syringe) I have been feeling more like myself, though I'm still battling to have the same energy levels as I've had in the past. It obviously doesn't help that I'm in the dark moon phase of my own cycles and therefore my body is slowing down and beginning to turn inwards from some introspection. It will be interesting to see what this medical adventure will do to my experience of bleeding this month.

While I've stuggled with my body, I've been struggling with my head also. The clarity and the ease of writing have been anything but. It's been frustrating and disheartening, and it hasn't ben the best way to launch into NaNo for 2008. However I'm relieved that the flow is beginning and the labour of words (finding the right bloody word) is returning. Phew! I'm feeling that this is a 'will do' project - though I have to admit to having not quite fallen in love with my story yet.

I currently have just short of 10,000 for NaNo. I'm keeping up with the pace, despite all that's been going on. Yesterday was a slow day - it wasn't just the day with a race that stops the nation (The Melbourne Cup for those international visitors) but the day that stopped the writing. Thankfully I knew that I was already a head of the game so I didn't worry too much, nor beat myself up for not having made the word target.

This morning I was awake at 6:00am which was cruel considering I'd been up to midnight with stomach pains. I had a shower, got dressed, procrastinated for a good half hour chatting to Paul via MSN and then got stuck into it. Dale, the Tuesday columnist at Write Anything gave some really good advice yesterday ...

Do not count words while you write (I don’t use exclamation points often, but…)! I can’t stress this enough. Writing is difficult enough on its own without letting your unconscious get bogged down with the extra baggage of NaNo. Just write. When you hit a block or run out of time and have to stop, then count. If you’re short of your daily goal, you can pick it up again later.

That's exactly what I did and somehow the words just flowed out. I was hoping to have wrapped up the setting for the story in the first 10,000 words but it seems it will drag a little bit further. There are at least two more scenes that need to be played out first between Shet and Kyle first, then Shet and the two other consortium directors. But it will set it up with the same scenario as I always envisaged ... Shet going off into out space with a thing against Kyle - only in this version (as opposed to the test short stories I did leading up to NaNo) she has no idea who he really is.

I've reposted the Prologue of Blue Melissae here now that I've sorted out the proper order. And I will continue to post 1000 word-ish entries as I go for the rest of the month. So if you have the time or the inclination, please stop by for a read and post a comment.

Photograph: Istockphoto

Day 2 of NaNo

I felt a little better today than I did yesterday. The swelling has gone on the left hand side of my face and as of this evening, the right hand side is on its way down. I rested lots today and as a consquence missed out on a BBQ next door, but that meant the house was quiet and I could get some sleep!

I didn't get a chance to mention yesterday the awesome cream of chicken soup that Dave made for me - which was finished off tonight. I didn't realise how much I would miss meat and how grateful I would be that someone else would cook for me. Sadly I missed out on Moroccan lamb and a hot chickpea salad for dinner. Rather than torture myself, I took Dylan off to bed and read Monsters Inc instead.

I've cancelled the Women's Wisdom Circle for tomorrow because for once in my life I'm being sensible. If tomorrow goes like the last couple of days - I don't start to feel like I am capable of any other than sleep until about 3pm in the afternoon. While I'm slowly feeling my energy and my resilence building, I don't want to destroy it by pushing myself. What I find most amusing about all of this - is that the site of the tooth extraction is honestly the least of my worries - they are both healing well and offering up little pain.

As long as I manage to keep pace with my NaNo word total (currently standing at 4066 words) and keep healing .. that's all I'm really worried about.

November is here

Well it has arrived. Just like the sun comes up in the morning, and the moon rises in the evening, after October comes November.

The last few days have been challenging from me - since having my wisdom teeth removed. I struggled both on Thursday and Friday to be able to sleep and then last night, against probably my better judgement, I went out to a Halloween Party. Granted we left early (9:30pm). Today it has been like hitting a wall. I did finally catch up on some sleep, but have felt and been physically shakey all day. Thankfully Dave is cooking me some cream of chicken soup for dinner tonight. The body can only go so far on custard, jelly, yoghurt and scrambled eggs. While I may not know my limits, my body definitely does.

My face has swollen more than it has done since I had it done - I've got a fantastically assymetrical face from one side being more swollen than the other. My jaw is hurting from being clasped while writing and well being a little stressed out from the surgery.

In amongst all that wisdom teeth merde - yes NaNo has started. I decided I'd travel along with main character Shet on her journey from Earth to outerspace, and from no memories to the reclaimation of her memories. The project has been tentatively named "Blue Melissae" but we'll see what happens with it. After month of struggling to try and understand and create an alternate version of Brisbane - sat down this afternoon and there it was. I've been reading Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" and I think that's helped me to see a way in which to conceptualise a world, just a little removed from our own.

I've already killed off one character - Dr Pietersen of Paul's "Salvage the good times" podcasts (I did get permission to use Dr Pietersen- however I never intended to kill him off - that was a complete accident and totally unexpected - don't know what Paul will think about that!)

I wont be publishing all of my NaNo project here. However, if you are interested, you can find the whole blow by blow (including the ??? in places where I'm not quite sure what to say!) at Blue Melissae. I'd love to have you all along for the ride - especially this time around with me playing in a totally foreign genre.

Happy November, Happy NaNo .. and may the good times roll!



Cartoon from Toothpaste for Dinner