Random snippets: An update #dommelife

I had a full-on self-care day on Friday since I’ve still been feeling rather flat.

My hair was freshened and super-swished at my regular salon, my lashes darkened for more effective fluttering, then I had an hour-long luxury foot treatment with hot stones, foot massage, and pedicure and polish with my favourite go-to blood-red colour, I ate delicious sweet things from a quality bakery.

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I turned up an hour early for the spa treatment because there is a time difference 15 minutes up the road and I forgot to check what timezone they were in (*shakes fist* frustrating), but it resulted in me buying a new dress (top left in the photo), so I’m adding that to my ‘well-deserved self-care’ list.

There was another woman in the dressing room with me: “Excuse me, can I just ask you: Is this dress too ‘blackie-black-black’?
Her: “Ooh, THAT DRESS LOOKS SO PRETTY ON YOU! :))”

We had a really lovely exchange about the various clothes we were trying on, giving honest opinions ‘no, too floofy’, ‘that colour isn’t so flattering’, ‘yes, THAT ONE, GORGEOUS!’

Ahh, women <3 <3.

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This time of year always heralds concentrated time with family, which I usually find quite stressful. It always involves shared accommodations, and having to be pleasant and polite and engaged with people 24/7 is exhausting. This is true even though there’s only four of us and they are sweet and considerate people.

Waking up and just knowing there are ‘people in the house’ is enough to make me want to burrow into my bed and hide. Doesn’t matter how nice they are.
Them: “Do you want a coffee? :)”
Me: “OMG I JUST WANT TO GRUMP AROUND AND NOT TALK TO ANYONE JFC!”

It’s not them, they’re lovely. It’s totally me.

At the moment, I’m looking at 4 days up in the mountains with them next week, then 4 days with two of them here in my house. I’m cautiously feeling okay, not too stressed thinking about it, which is surprising. This, even though I just learnt that there is no wifi in the mountain home we’ve rented *gasp*.

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Related to the above, I have to do a ‘proper clean’ of my apartment before I head off to the mountains. I hate domestics, so instead of, you know, getting in and DOING THE THINGS, I made a spreadsheet of all the things I have to do, by room, so I have a handy reference for anytime I have visitors *dusts hands smugly*.

It’s NOT a stalling tactic*.

*totally a stalling tactic

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I rebuilt my ex’s laptop which had a failing hard drive. That all went great, but in the process I dropped my external backup drive and it’s toast. While that should really be no big deal if I was someone who used it like you’re supposed to, but noooo… I had saved ‘things to keep’ on that drive and nowhere else because my laptop drive was getting full.

Some of it is not really a big deal (e.g. schoolwork, personal documents and photos that I haven’t looked at in a million years), but some of it IS a big deal. I had painstakingly scanned old family photos, and created a couple of beautiful presentations for my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, and then for my mother’s funeral, so I’m a bit heartbroken. They feel like more than just ‘mine’, as if I was the caretaker for shared memories.

I know I can take the drive to data recovery specialists and pay them lots of money to have a go at bringing it back, but I’m trying to see if I can recover anything from my own hard drive (where I had it originally) first.

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I’m not doing much in the way of trying to find submissive men to date. My head is not in the right space for it.

I have had some ‘gird-my-loins’ type false starts where I logged into Collarspace (it’s still stumbling along, barely) which triggers a bunch of ‘hey’ emails from submissive men nowhere near me, and then I’m tired. I tried to reactivate my Bumble profile, but my photo didn’t pass moderation and I wasn’t interested enough to figure out why.

Because I was happy enough entertaining the (remote) potential of champagne boy, even if it was a long shot, I’ve not really been actively looking for possibilities for a while.

My tolerance for bullshit is even lower than usual.

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Related: I lightly scratched the surface of a few men and found the squirming maggots underneath (#NotAllRedPillers / ‘well, some women lie you know…’ / ‘…and anyway feminists, amirite?’) and that confirmed my trepidation about engaging. It’s exhausting and depressing to discover that I’m not wrong when I really really want to be wrong. It’s not a positive place to come from.

Part of how I feel about this is that if I don’t see it, I can believe it’s not as bad as I fear. I want to believe that. Truly. And seeing it over and over makes that impossible.

I’m not sure what to do about this malaise. I keep hoping it will pass and I’ll be able to brush off those interactions with a quick ‘*eyeroll* Ugh, jerk’ like I’ve done forever. But it feels different now, personal, ubiquitous. I can’t change anyone else, but it seems like I need to set up new defences for myself.

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Rage: Retribution has attracted some 5 star reviews on Amazon and I’ve had some very positive private feedback also. I’m SO grateful. I was really conflicted about the content, so there’s a flavour of relief to it.

I think part of my ‘flatness’ has been that I’ve been amped up with this book (the anger, the writing, the work, the rework, the publishing, the talking about it, the high-level angst over the content), and now that it’s out, I can let most of that go and it’s left a bit of a void. Is there such a thing as ‘book-release drop’?

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On a really positive note, I love love love hearing that people have enjoyed anything I write, and I’m always super thankful for Amazon reviews: It really helps small indie authors like me to get some traction, and I know that people are (understandably) nervous about writing public reviews on the kind of content I write, even though you can anonymize the review. So thank you :).

Snippets:

“Fast, violent venting, well-written, keeps you engaged.

“Stephen King wrote that every so often we need to lift “a trap door in the civilized forebrain” and feed the “gators” lurking beneath. It’s true this story features a dominant woman as the lead, but it’s more about chucking bloody chunks of meat down to those gators.”
–DW, Amazon US

“Fantastic and engaging story”
–Amazon customer, Amazon US

“A violent and engaging Tarantino-esqe fantasy. Wonderfully vibrant word pictures, the mood starts dark and only gets darker.”
–slapshot, Amazon US

“An extremely engaging read. I’d consider it a work of art”
–Goddess Victoria Black, Amazon UK

“Well written and very well put together”
–Coug, Amazon UK

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On a related note, I’ve now discovered that I can put non-Amazon review quotes into the ‘Editorial Reviews’ section of Amazon. I’m not sure if they’re going to have a go at me about what I’m putting in there, but until they do, it allows me to reference feedback that people give me on twitter or here on my blog and of course, I’m totally doing that.

Amazon on ‘Editorial Reviews’: “Reviews should consist of transcribed text from reputable sources. The name of the source should be credited after the quotation. For example, “A fantastic read.” -The New York Times”
Me: “Some anonymous person on my blog said this lovely thing…”
Amazon: “That seems perfectly legit.”

:D

Thank you to everyone who has bought it, and those who have given me such wonderful support and positive feedback! :)

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The folks at Tabu Toys kindly sent me this We-Vibe Tango Pleasure Mate collection for review in October. I was motivated to review it by Epiphora’s glowing review where she said she had her very first hands-free orgasm with it (her first! And she’s been reviewing toys for a million years). I was all ‘yaaaaassss!!!’ eager to try.

But after first use, the Tango vibe got stuck in the Glow dildo. I asked twitter and also contacted We-Vibe about it (is it faulty? Is there a trick to getting the sucker out? What the hell?) and they never got back to me, so I let it lapse.

We-Vibe are a quality company, so I don’t understand why it happened nor why their customer service ignored my email. BUT I’m determined to have another go at getting that sucker out and believe you me, that struggle will be part of my review!

So, dedicated wankery is on my to-do list if I can get that thing out of that hole :P.

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I’ve downloaded a bunch of music lately. Let me leave you with this Australian artist with a quintessentially Australian video. It makes me happy.

“Do you ever feel like just getting drunk
to deal with what’s been going on…”