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Fleur Blüm

~ writer, performer, musician

Fleur Blüm

Tag Archives: Family

New Release Announcement

18 Friday Dec 2020

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

book baby, Christmas, Family, new book, New Year, norse mythology, Romance, urban fantasy, Writing

Well. 2020 has been a hectic year in a lot of ways (I refuse to say unprecendented because, far out, that word gets used a lot). With all the time stuck inside I’m excited to announce I’m ready to release my new book baby, an urban fantasy/romance, Singular Focus.

A book cover, a white woman with short hair and an eye patch stands in front of a moon and city scape, in purple hues, with a raven and storm visible. Text reads: Singular Focus, Fleur Blüm.

“When Freya loses her right eye on her 28th birthday, her life has to change. Little does she know the whole world had changed too – there is magic in Melbourne. 

Visions of an oncoming storm, victims of a mystery coma-like illness are dropping around the city, and Jacob, the occupational therapist she can’t keep out of her mind.   

Time is running out, Freya and Jacob must save the world before magic tears everything apart.” 

The ebook is available for pre-order now on Amazon and other good sellers, releasing on 1 February 2021. A paperback version will be available closer to the release date.

This book is a bit of a departure from my previous work. I was influenced by a lot of great Norse mythology and stories involving a real world with added elements, like magic. I’m sure fans of my work, and fans of the genre alike will enjoy it.

I’m taking some time off from the day job and not doing work for the LMS over the Christmas period. The plan is to lounge around, catch up with friends and family, that sort of thing. I also have a small list of projects around the house to do, cleaning the car, and other boring stuff. I hope you’re all able to have a break, or change of scenery.

See you for my annual new year goal post in a couple of weeks.

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Auckland Airport

16 Thursday May 2019

Posted by toearlyretirement in Art, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Auckland, Family, Inspiration, National Poetry Writing Month, Poetry, solitude, Travel, Writing

Untitled design

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 been my strong suit. I don’t do well at
layering. I tend to put my subtexts into the main text.

If you were teaching my work, it would be easy for the
students. Although perhaps, as Judith Wright said,
I didn’t write that in there. Of course, the postmodernists
don’t care about the author so I suppose what I do
doesn’t really matter

The lighting is dulled, outside it’s dark, but like a casino
they don’t want too much reality seeping into an airport
People with different body clocks, different destinations
different languages, all want to sit, alone, protected from
other passengers by their books/laptops/phones/ear buds

There is half an hour until I head home
away from one family and back to another
I have created a life and a home – a settled little
nest. Friends have flown to create new nests with
new lives and young lives in tow. No one to greet me
at the airport this time, just long-term parking and
the promise of sleep in my very own bed.

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A Worthwhile Life

25 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by toearlyretirement in Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Family, Inspiration, Poetry, Writing

27 minutes
is how long it takes my father to reply to my
happy birthday email.
He says his friends, ‘the great unwashed’, came to
sing around the piano to celebrate
the eightieth year he’s been alive.
I don’t send anything back.

75 minutes
is how long it takes to catch up
on the life of a friend. He nearly cries twice.
Money, and moving, and relationships.
‘I haven’t written much lately,’ he says.
I know what he means. His feeling is real and
mine is imagined.

50 minutes
is how long I spend with my therapist
once a month
because I can’t afford to see him more often.
I condense my problems into chunks
That fit into our allotment of time.

In 80 years, a person will live 29,220 days.
9,733 of those days are spent sleeping.
78 days waiting for a reply email.
217 days having coffee with friends.
About 20 days talking to a therapist.

A life cannot be distilled into accounting.
Sometimes it feels like the only way
to put one foot in front of the other.

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What if?

28 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey, Writing, Writing101

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Tags

Art, Artist Date, Bad days, Career, Conflict, Family, Feminism, Feminist, Inspiration, Loneliness, Melbourne, Mentors, Motivation, Nurturing yourself, Relationships, Self Esteem, Success, Writing, Writing101

Today is a free writing day. Write at least four-hundred words, and once you start typing, don’t stop. No self-editing, no trash-talking, and no second guessing: just go. Bonus points if you tackle an idea you’ve been playing with but think is too silly to post about.

 

I identify as a feminist. Usually I’m completely happy with this, but sometimes, I find myself wanting things that are decidedly unfeministy. Like a boyfriend and a baby and a house in the suburbs. I’ll turn 30 later this year. It keeps feeling like this should be a big deal, like I should have sorted my shit out by now, but it is pretty clear to me that I really, really haven’t got anything sorted out.

I’ve just left a perfectly good, if soul-crushing, permanent part time job for nothing. I haven’t really got another job to go into. I plan to study full-time next semester, but without Centrelink/welfare payments I’ll have to get a job of some sort to survive. I have been in a romantic relationship for a total of four weeks out of the last (nearly) three years. I’m generally not doing well in the ‘being a grown-up department’.

The difficulty for me with these conflicting desires is that I know, intellectually, that I’m capable of being happy without a husband, baby, house and white picket fence. I also know, intellectually, that having these things does not guarantee happiness, and that many people would look at my free, arty farty lifestyle with envy, but I still want them. I guess there’s that part of me, having grown up with all of those expectations of normality, that wants to fit in.

I always saw myself as a parent, a mother, and the idea that it might not be a reality for me is kind of hard to fathom. I’m not so invested in the idea for a baby that I would have one alone, I don’t mean any disrespect to single mothers/parents, but it seems like a lot of hard work, and I’m not up for that.

On the other hand women who don’t have kids are supposed to be focussed on their careers. In a lot of ways I am focussed on my career, my aims to be a writer, but that’s not usually what people mean by career. I don’t want to climb the corporate ladder. I don’t want to work really hard so I have lots of cash and no time. I often feel like a massive failure on lots of different societal measures of success, although I seem to be pretty good at academic pursuits which is supposed to be desirable, but usually only on the way to career or babies.

So how do I make peace with myself, with my path, if I won’t achieve ‘success’? Even if I don’t want to. How do I tell the part of my brain that wants money, husbands, babies and houses to be quiet so the other part, the part my heart knows is right for me, can guide me? And what if my chosen path is never ‘successful’? I might get a few things published here and there, but I might never be a full time writer. Maybe I’ll be working in admin a few days a week and churning out writing that no one will pay for and hardly anyone will read when I’m 75. I really want to be ok with this. I will always have ambition, and that’s great, but I want to be able to be happy without those things.

What if I’m a bad feminist because I want those things? What if I can’t achieve the things I want? What if the things I want aren’t socially acceptable? What if I’m a failure as a human being? What if I want things that won’t make me happy?What if… What if…

But what if I just stop worrying and start living? How about I try that and see how I go from there.

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Watching Movies: Happy Families

21 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by toearlyretirement in Watching Movies

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Abigail Breslin, Adventure, August: Osage County, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Cooper, Cinema Nova, Dermot Mulroney, Ewan McGregor, Family, George Clooney, John Wells, Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Melbourne, Meryl Streep, Movie review, Psychology, Relationships, Sam Shepard, Tracy Letts

Today’s movie review will be of ‘August: Osage County’, an intense drama about the difficulties of living in the Weston family. Written by Tracy Letts, based on his Pulizter and Tony Award winning play of the same name, this story follows the relationships in the highly dysfunctional family as they try to deal with the death of its patriarch, Beverly.

August: Osage County poster

August: Osage County poster

From the outset this film is confronting. The women in this family, Violet (Meryl Streep), Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale), Barbara (Julia Roberts), Karen (Juliette Lewis), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and Jean (Abigail Breslin) are complicated, flawed, and extremely believable. While the film is an excellent ensemble piece, the mother-daughter relationship between Violet and Barbara is the centrepiece. Violet is a mean-spirited, bitter woman who has a tendency to abuse prescription medication, and Barbara, her eldest daughter struggles with a sense of obligation to care for her mother, and a need to escape her destructive influence. Trying to explain the intricacies of the relationships without giving away some of the story is going to be difficult, so I’m not going to try. Suffice to say that the relationships between the family members are complex and filled with betrayals and misery.

The performances by each member of the cast are spectacular. With so many central characters, each with rich back stories filled with hardship, it’s hard to pick one or two who stood out. What makes this more difficult is that each actor’s performance is as reliant on the way they react to the actions of the others as with their own actions, something which is a basic tenet of acting, but which is rarely seen so clearly on the screen.

The men in the film, Beverly (Sam Shepard), Charlie (Chris Cooper), Bill (Ewan McGregor), Steve (Dermot Mulroney) and Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch), are shown largely as counterpoints to the Weston women, and each gives a beautiful, nuanced performance. The stand out relationship among the men is between Charlie and his son Little Charles; there is a tenderness there that doesn’t exist in any of the other relationships, and this contrast makes it all the more striking.

Throughout the film the script writing struck me as being incredibly tight. Each scene was carefully crafted to add tension to the film, and while the events in this family are extreme, there was no point at which I found myself disbelieving them. I did find it interesting that in a film that is built upon difficult familial relations, the romance between Ivy and Little Charles (who are first cousins), which remains a secret for the majority of the film, is never overtly shown. The furthest they get is hand holding and making moon eyes when they think no one is looking. I find it intriguing that the producers chose not to show a kiss, it’s likely they were worried it would be too much for the audience, but for me it seemed a bit contrived (or maybe I’m just a perv for kissin’ cousins). Not having seen a stage production, I would be interested to know whether or not they kiss there.

All the family around the dinner table

All the family around the dinner table

Visually, the tone of the film is heavily in the brown spectrum. The house is dark and brown, the rolling Oklahoma fields are yellow and dry; even the costumes are browns, beiges, muted blues, and blacks. Nothing escapes the oppressive pallet except Steve’s bright red sports car. The use of colour is particularly strong in evoking the feel of the house in which most of the film takes place, and in conveying the stifling heat of an Oklahoma summer. At one stage we see a neon sign telling us it’s 108˚ (Fahrenheit, in Celsius that’s 42˚, a temperature which for us Melbournians is still a fresh trauma).

If I were to criticise the film it would be to say that I was disappointed with Benedict Cumberbatch’s American accent. Some of you may understand how difficult that is for me to say given how much of a ridiculous uber-fan of his work I am, but I say it with love, I say it because I know he can do better (case in point his Australian accent as Julian Assange). If I were to justify this less than his best performance I would suggest that given the size of his role, fairly small, and the amount of screen time he has to spend crying, disproportionately large, the fact that his accent is passable, but not brilliant is probably fair enough.

My overall impression of this multiply nominated film (Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, both well deserved) is that it manages to balance serious, hard truths about life in this family with some black comic moments and the result is a thought provoking yet enjoyable cinematic experience. I was left wondering how they all got on after the end; I wanted to know what happened next, which is always a good sign that you’ve identified with the characters. I think a lot of the patrons at the Cinema Nova where I saw this walked out feeling much better about the interesting family scandals in their own lives. A thought provoking, authentic exploration of family dysfunction; I give this film 4 out of 5 stars.

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Hard days and nights

11 Saturday Aug 2012

Posted by toearlyretirement in My Journey

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Tags

Bad days, Depression, Family, Friendship, Loneliness, Nurturing yourself, Psychology, Self Esteem

This last couple of days have been particularly hard for me. In addition to being cooped up inside for the second week in a row I’ve been going through some pretty heavy self-reflection.

I had a run in with my estranged father. He came across this blog and I was horrified. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was about it that really bothered me for a while. Once I’d thought about it though, I realised that it was because I don’t want him to see me like this; exposed, vulnerable, open because I don’t feel like he deserves it. Because I think he will hurt me if he knows what’s happening in my life.

We had a very strained relationship when I was growing up for several reasons; the most salient for me was the way he approached my chronic depression. My father doesn’t believe in psychology/psychiatry or indeed in depression and so when asked to participate in family counselling sessions to help me he was sarcastic and dismissive. He was effectively saying “pull yourself together, it’s all in your head and you just need to get over it.” Not super helpful sentiments in terms of my recovery.

After my parents separated a few years ago my contact with my father has been limited to emails for birthdays and Christmas and I was happy with that. Each time we had contact I remembered why I didn’t want to be around him. I came away from those interactions drained, my soul heavy and unable to relate to his outlook on life.

I have been looking at some of my habits, friendship groups and lifestyle choices for the last few years and seeing how destructive they are and in some ways how much they are not authentic to me anymore.

When I was at uni I had several different groups of friends; some of whom mixed and some of whom were not compatible with the others. Over the years I have let most of these slip by the wayside, reducing my social circles to just one. Without realising it that one circle had told me that I was different, that I didn’t deserve to have ‘normal’ friends, and that I had to stick in only that circle because it was the only one that could truly understand me. It was almost like having an abusive lover who wants you only to hang out with them.

Now I don’t want to imply that any single individual within that group was saying this, because they have always been open and welcoming. Merely that this is how I chose to interpret my membership to the group and my own identity within it. I no longer feel like that group is where I want to be, and that makes me sad in some ways but also relieved.

I have started the long and slow process of developing new groups of friends and new social circles. I am impatient though because building up friendships takes a lifetime and I don’t want to wait that long.

I’m also a little lazy and a little afraid. I don’t want to have to put myself out there, to be vulnerable to rejection by groups/people because I’m new. It’s emotionally draining to try to make in-roads into groups, most people my age have got pretty solid, well defined and long standing friendships. But it’s either that or become a lonely hermit, which is not really what I want. So I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and get out there and hope that people are welcoming and open to someone like me trying to find her way.

Next week my job is sending me to Adelaide for a training course so I will hopefully be able to get some photos of the city of churches to post here.

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Melbourne, Australia
fleurblum@hotmail.com

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