toearlyretirement
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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…
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So I’m project managing an art competition!
I’m sure you’re all aware that one of my jobs is modelling for art classes and drawing groups. I’m also heavily involved in the running of an organisation called the Life Models’ Society – a collective of models who advocate for better pay and condition for life models. The LMS has been around for thirty…
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Auckland Airport
I sit, headphones on, but no music playing I can listen to things around me without attracting attention The woman next to me on a phone call, the two men across the way watching some code of football. Rugby I’d guess based on the city I’m in. Slow revelation of meaning through poetry has never…
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NaPoWriMo Wrap-up
I made it through the challenge of NaPoWriMo again for April 2019! It is always a struggle to feel that my poems are any good when I do this challenge, I seem to churn out so much rubbish, but as with NaNoWriMo, the point is quantity over quality. I will have to set aside some…
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The Painter
‘I have done five layers of background I want to make it twenty,’ she says. ‘What’s the background of?’ I ask. ‘Just colours, like everything I do.’ ‘I spent hours on this one making the background. I was really pleased with it – a rich matte black but then I got drunk when I did…
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NaPoWriMo 2019 WIP
So far I have written eighteen poem as part of NaPoWriMo this year. I wouldn’t necessarily say that they’re all good, but they’re not all bad either. I will probably go back to them later in the year and review them, There’s sure to be a couple that are worth working on. I had be…
Fleur Blüm 