toearlyretirement
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Reflections on 2019
Firstly, this is my 301st blog post! Wow! I completely missed the fact I’d hit three hundred when I published the last one. My first post here was 7 November 2011. It seems like a lifetime ago, although eight years is a pretty long time too. I’ve done a lot of stuff in that time,…
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End of year schedule madness
We’ve entered the realm of Christmas parties and end-of-year celebrations. I had my work party last Wednesday – good chicken, disappointing dessert, my poetry group end-of-year do today and my writing group Christmas party tomorrow! As we’ve done in the past, the poetry group visited the Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria…
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Winning and Procrastination
Yesterday, November 28, 2019 I won NaNoWriMo for the eighth time. I’m proud of myself, but having done it before it doesn’t feel like such a big deal anymore. I’m ready to take a bit of a break from my story, but I have two more days of November to try to get some words…
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ABC
A poem can start with anything But seldom leads to any Cause worth exploring Don’t think about it Everything is worth writing about For yourself, or for someone else Get the idea down, fix it later However, you must remember I can’t be the one to fix it Joust wordily with your thoughts Kill procrastination…
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Lead up to NaNoWriMo
Hello dear readers! This is just a short update post. I haven’t posted for a while, I’m going to blame this largely on going on an overseas trip (I’ll probably write more about that later). I have just come back home to Melbourne and I now realise I have a week to come up with…
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Building Stories
Online dating is full of weird, awkward questions, especially in the initial contact phase, when you don’t really know anything about the other person. Doubly so before you meet and all you have is text. So, this is a (slightly condensed) transcript of a conservation I had today: Him: Is it hard to invent new…
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How I got triggered at work
Content warning: diet/food, health, anxiety, depression It’s 9am Wednesday, 21 August, 2019. I’m at a professional development session run by someone who is supposed to be teaching me how to be better at doing my day job. I walk into the session and the special guest is a nutritionist. I work in Quality and Compliance…
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Romance Writers of Australia Conference
Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend the annual Romance Writers of Australia conference. It was held in Melbourne, my home town, this year so I thought I really should go. The conference consisted of three days of writing and business workshops and seminars. The first day was a full day workshop on plotting…
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Winter nesting
A couple of months ago, I bought an apartment in Melbourne. It’s near a park, and a river, and nice cafes. It has two bedrooms, and only me to live in it. For a while tried to tell myself I wouldn’t spread out into the second bedroom, in case I wanted a housemate or air…
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Solitude or Loneliness?
It’s been a while since I posted here. I’ve been so busy doing this and that I guess I forgot. The last few weeks I’ve been thinking it might be nice to have a dog for company. I’ve been living alone, for the first time in my life, since I bought an apartment in late…
Fleur Blüm 