Bad Luck

Me, aged nine, sitting on Father Christmas’s lap at Primary school. I think this was the Christmas Bonanza that lead to the inspiration for one of my earliest pieces of creative writing, Bad Luck. If you can make it out in the photo, I won a green plastic ring with a red Santa on it, and I became convinced it was cursed. In 1996, I was admitted to hospital with suspected meningitis. I wrote all about it, gave it a fictional twist, and called it “Bad Luck”. I ended up writing five more stories, all involving Tony AKA Me! In celebration of the thirteenth episode of the podcast, recorded on Friday the 13th, I am sharing with you the first three stories, fresh from the recesses of tomsbrain (they’ll be twenty-years-old, this year).

Better L8 Than Never!

Sometimes, I never know what I’m going to talk about when I start a new podcast episode. I think I’m going to discuss one thing, and then I end up going off on a tangent and discussing a completely unrelated topic. I know I teased last week about one such topic, but I was swept away in the momentum of talking about my writing process.

The Crystal Maze

So, this is a thing now! Seems every Thursday, I’m going to be reminding you all that I have a podcast. It’s just me at the moment, recalling events from my life and sharing my creativeness with you. In this week’s episode, I’m sharing a spooky story that I wrote when I was ten-years-old called The Secret Box. In the future, I hope to have different people from my life asking me questions and getting me to open up about topics that I might not have thought of.

I found this week’s topic difficult. No, not the reading my story out-loud part! Or the part where I reminisce fondly about watching The Crystal Maze on a Thursday! The part I found hard to discuss was going into detail about how it came to be that I go into hospital so often for Blood Transfusions. I’ve never talked about it, and I was a bit worried about it all sounding too clinical and off-putting. I am weird, but my hope is to make the weird things in my life seem as normal to you as they do to me.

An Affair To Remember

It was on this day, ten years ago, I loaded The Sims 2 onto my laptop, and after a few minutes of playing, snapped my first ever snapshot. Unbeknownst to me, this snapshot was the start of one of my biggest ever writing projects: The Caliente Affairs.

Though my original series chronicling the fictitious lives of the Caliente sisters and their Pleasantview neighbours became lost on the internet (as the official Sims 2 website shutdown for *cough* maintenance), I fought to keep its memory alive. I rewrote the entire first volume (over 73,420 words) on a story sharing website called Movellas, as well as re-uploading the original snapshots on this website. This is what I wrote five years ago regarding the future:

I have experienced a lot of changes within myself these past five years – thoughts and feelings and events I had no control over. Yet throughout it all, I could turn to those lives I created on this day five years ago and take back that control I so desperately sought for my own life.

But there came a time when I could no longer ignore the amounting changes in my life, and I had to venture out into the real world. However harsh it may have looked, it was my time to come out.

As I stayed away from creating their world and focused attention on my own, the thoughts and feelings I once had no control over were now in my power, and I began to realise a world existed in reality that I never thought possible. Acceptance, understanding, and most importantly love.

That still stands to this day! I hope to complete future volumes of this story, as I have lots more to tell.