Go West, Young(ish) Man

Anyone who's mentioned the word 'blog' to me in the last few months will remember me saying I would never, ever start up one of my own.

And here I am, starting up one of my own.

So what's changed? The short answer is: 'geography'.

Oh, alright then, here's the long answer.

For the last nine years I've lived in Sydney, NSW. I worked there, got married there, had two kids there. Then, four months ago, my wife was made an offer she couldn't refuse: move to Perth, Western Australia, and take a job light years ahead of anything she was being offered in Sydney.

And so off she went, taking the kids with her, to start work on the other side of the continent, while I remained in Sydney to tie up loose ends. That kicked off fourteen weeks of rushing about - redecorate the house so we could sell it, work out my notice period for my day job and clear the decks with another, significant writing project I had on the go. All before my own departure date of July 1. I don't think I've ever been so busy.

Now I'm in Perth, with no job, no decorating (although I'll be happy never to see another paint brush again. Ever) and that other writing job off being edited.

I'm bored senseless.

So there are a couple of reasons for this blog. The first is to keep my writing muscles from atrophying while I look for more work. Now, the population of the entire state of Western Australia is less than half of the population of the city of Sydney, so the publishing industry is ... well, smaller. It could be a while before anything crops up. If I have this to mess around with, though, it'll help keep me in the discipline of writing.

The second reason is that I'm widely known for being rubbish at staying in touch with people. There's a raft of mates I left in the UK nearly a decade ago who are completely convinced I have been abducted, Wolf Creek style, purely because I'm so bad at letting them know what's been going on. Now that there's also all the friends I've left behind in Sydney, I'm really going to have to try harder. It'll be so much easier if people can pop in here and see what's what - that way I may still have some friends in a couple of months time.

So I'll try to keep this regular, interesting and free of the blind venting that you see on a lot of other blogs. I'll even try to put some pictures up, once I've overcome my deeply entrenched Luddite tendencies and figured out all this computer code business.

http? fum8!