So, the dust has settled on my latest incident of outright stupidity.
Am I wiser?
Stronger?
Permanently cocooned in bubble-wrap?

No – not yet, at least! I certainly feel like a bit of a plonker, though 😉 Here’s what they did to me:

Note the metal plates, which fixed the split down the middle of my jaw. This has caused some loss of sensation in that area, presumably due to nerves they had to cut, so a few of my more exaggerated facial expressions are now off the cards.

The two matching fractures on either side of my jaw, just below the hinges, they decided to let heal themselves – wiring my jaw shut just to be on the safe side! This led to my kitchen looking a bit like the bodybuilding aisle at the supermarket, as it’s incredibly hard to get a sensible amount of calories and nutrients when everything you eat has to come in through a straw.

It did mean that my daily dish-washing chores were dramatically reduced though…

And on the upside, although my jaw is still a bit swollen – and my chest needs a shave – if any of my Romance writer friends need some gratuitous abs for their next book cover, I’m available nice and cheap 😉

A total weight loss of almost 6kg or 13lb (from a starting weight of 75kg or 165lb) has left me in dire need of a new wardrobe. Luckily, Roo has set herself the task of fattening me up again – presumably to slaughter in time for Christmas…

My first eating experience after getting my jaws unwired was a bit of an anti-climax. It probably serves me right for having it at McDonalds.

But I’d been craving a Big Mac ever since Roo went away – not surprisingly, junk food featured high on my list of survival foods while she was off camping for a week. And because I broke myself less than 12 hours after she left, I didn’t get to eat ANY OF IT!

So, I settled into my plastic chair and eyed the fresh burger hungrily. It had been four full weeks since I’d eaten anything solid.

And… It was weird.

Turns out, if you don’t use your jaw for a while, it gets weak. Now Big Macs aren’t known for their hardness, so I figured it would be an ideal re-introduction to the world of solid food. Unfortunately, like the star of my favourite Kiwi cartoon ‘Beached Az’ (check it out HERE) – I can’t chew bro! In fact, every mouthful was such a mission – and the act of eating itself felt so unpleasant, so different with all the missing and broken teeth, not to mention painful – that I pretty much resigned myself to a liquid diet again.

A liquid diet has its compensations…

Luckily, it did get better – most notably after my first appointment with my incredible dentist Dr. Laura Hall. She had to use quite a lot of filling materiel – roughly a wheelbarrow’s worth – and she strapped the remains of one of my molars together with a metal band in a last-ditch attempt to save it. My pain level is already way down, and I’m starting to get used to the new alignment of my jaw and what’s left of my teeth.

All that remains is to keep on eating… Roo is super happy to accommodate this, and is on the hunt for softer options in the surrounding restaurants. I might even get to try this place, which I’ve been eyeing up ever since I spotted their hilarious sign:

However, the newly-opened authentic Chinese restaurant near us hasn’t quite got me tempted. I dunno, there’s almost something TOO authentic about that menu…

I will give you a fiver if you try the Pork Bung. Seriously.

So, I’m firmly on the road to recovery and starting to regain my strength. I hadn’t really appreciated how weak a full month of sub-1000-calorie days had left me, until I tried to walk up a few hills in Araluen botanical gardens. I managed though, and it was nice to be out in the sun. Roo took plenty of photos of the tulips – I think she actually managed to run out of storage space on her phone, which hasn’t happened since Dubrovnik! It was gorgeous though:

It’s tulip season!

Throughout this whole ordeal, I can honestly say that two things have really made the difference, keeping me going when I started to get despondent. One is coffee – my daily walk to the local petrol station to get my fresh cup o’ Joe got me out and moving, and I calculate that coffee alone contributed over a third of all the calories I consumed last month.

I even dug deep in the back of our kitchen cupboards to find some tasty treats I’d been saving… but for some reason, they didn’t taste as good as I expected.

Turns out it was a tad past its use-by date…

And the other thing that’s kept me going? Well, that’s a no-brainer. It’s my gorgeous, wonderful, and infinitely supportive wife, Roo. Although I probably shouldn’t have introduced her with the words ‘thing’ and ‘no-brainer…’ Oops! Sorry love!

This week, along with celebrating my return to a solid-food diet, Roo and I also celebrated our anniversary. Not of the wedding, which I purposefully arranged to coincide with my birthday so I wouldn’t forget it… (I still forget it every year – along with my birthday…). No! This was the anniversary of that magical moment, twelve years ago, when we first got together.

In the shower.

Bless her, Roo hasn’t stopped blushing about it since. Of course, she’s thrilled that so many people have now read about it…

Just another fringe benefit of being married to a professional idiot!

I LOVE YOU FOREVER ROO!!! 

Guess what? It’s OUT! I’m now officially a sci-fi author!

But DON’T PANIC! As the legendary Douglas Adams would have said. If you’re not a fan of science fiction, you don’t have to buy it. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t! Here’s why:

Amazon is pretty much SkyNet. It knows what you’ve bought, and when – and it uses this to predict what you’ll want next. Then it throws that stuff in your face as often as possible, like the worst kind of enabler.

What happens when a huge bunch of memoir readers buys a sci-fi book is, Amazon starts recommending that book to other memoir readers. And when those people don’t buy it – because why on Earth would they? – Amazon deems the book a failure, and stops recommending it to anyone.

But for anyone who does have at least a passing interest in exploding spaceships and the like, the book is here:

Earth Warden on Amazon

And it’s currently available for just 99c/99p!

Now, I’m not gonna lie – there’s a lot to like about this being-a-fiction-author-malarky. For starters – and I can’t overstate how much easier this makes life – you get to MAKE SH*T UP!!!

Book getting boring? Roll out a car chase! Need more explosions? Why, there’s a hidden stash of C4 just around the corner…

Instead of having to live through a whole bunch of incredibly harrowing life experiences, survive them, and then spend a year re-living them whilst desperately trying to scour my failing memory for every detail… oh, and at least TRYING to make them funny! Also, much as I hate to admit it – making sh*t up is a hell of a lot cheaper 😉

Don’t worry though – I haven’t quit writing travel memoirs for good, I promise! I’m just taking a break. A break which rather sneakily aligns with a potential shift in my personal circumstances… Yes, that’s right – I’m becoming a woman.

WHAT? But… (sigh!) No, you’re right. My nose really IS too big for that. Here’s what’s really going on:

Despite looking (and acting) like a twelve year old girl, in fact Roo is rapidly approaching that age where, if she were a horse, I’d be paying someone for a jam-jar of stallion sperm and a two-foot-long syringe.

This may be the only time in her life when she’s glad she’s not a horse.

But she’s started dropping random, casual hints, like, “I think family is very important,” and, “My biological clock is ticking,” and, “I’ve decided we’re having children next year.”

It was either this, or a pic of her dressed head to toe in My Little Pony gear…

So… My new career as a fiction writer ties in quite well with this development, as it doesn’t require vast amounts of extended travel. If all goes according to (Roo’s) plan, we’ll be able to travel quite a bit once we do have babies (twins, she’s already decided). At which point, I feel another crazy memoir is kind of inevitable…

But until then, there’ll be a bit of a gap on that front. And I do feel bad about it. I know there’s a whole bunch of you eagerly awaiting a new travel book, so I’ve been thinking about how to fill that gap.

As you know, the America trip didn’t result in a book, for a whole bunch of reasons. Basically, I just didn’t feel that there was enough material for a book, and I didn’t fancy spending a year stretching and padding it out, struggling to make it funny, only to release a steaming pile of drivel that readers gave up on after five chapters.

BUT – the trip DID produce SOME materiel, and whilst it’s not enough for a book, it IS enough for a whole bunch of blog posts!

Oh yes… this happened!

So, my plan over the coming months is to get a whole lot more active with this blog.

Relax! I’m not gonna be posting every day or anything! I reckon I should be able to squeeze something out roughly once every two weeks (still talking about blog posts here). There’s the USA trip, and a load of random things going on here in Perth that I wanted to write about…

And then there’s a threat I’ve been making for years now – ever since ‘That Bear Ate My Pants!’ was released in 2011. You see, in order to make that book saleable to the agents and publishers I was courting at the time, I had to cut about a third of the chapters I’d written out of the book.  The traditional book publishers just won’t touch long-winded rambling nonsense like I write. For some reason.

So, knocking around on various hard drives are those missing chapters – the ‘cut scenes’, if you will – for not only that book, but for all of them! Because for some reason, I seem incapable of writing a first draft under 150,000 words…

A few to be going on with…

So, my plan is to tweak those chapters one at a time to make them readable, and publish them on the blog as I go. Between them, the USA trip and other random stuff, I reckon we’ve got enough to keep us occupied for a bit. And who knows? If it turns out there’s more material than expected, perhaps another book will emerge from the melee?

And if not… Well. Just imagine what’s going to happen when Roo and I have kids. It’ll be absolute carnage. And I’ll definitelyget a book out of that!

Meanwhile, I’d like to take this chance to thank you all, so very much, and from the bottom of my heart. Without readers like you, I couldn’t do what I do. Hell, without you kind folks, I couldn’t eat! Not without getting some kind of ‘real job’ anyway, and you’ve seen what happens to me just standing around in a garden, so… Yeah. Probably best I don’t find myself working in a factory. Heavy machinery and me do not mix well.

So thank-you, once again, for everything! For your emails and Facebook messages, for blog comments and book reviews, and most of all, thank-you so much for reading my books. When I started with ‘That Bear,’ I had high hopes – but even so, I never dared dream of how well it’s gone. To have books I’ve written, in the hands of people as far apart as India, Japan and Brazil…

Granted, I’ve only sold one book in each of those countries, but that counts, right?

And that officially makes me an International Author. I reckon. And you did that! You lovely, lovely people.

Thanks again!

This… also happened. Unfortunately… 😉

Hi folks!

So what’s going on with you? I’m sorry, that was rhetorical, what with this being a blog post and all. Feel free to answer it in the Comments though!

What I meant to say is, here’s what’s going on with me.

Yup, you guessed it! This is a progress update on Life, the Universe and Everything – specifically as it pertains to one particular idiot living in Perth, Australia.

First: the news! (Hang onto your lunch.)

I considered doing this as a video blog, but chose not to because a) Roo is away metal detecting with her Dad, so I haven’t washed in a week, and b) I’ve broken my jaw in three places, and am currently eating all my meals through a straw.

Wait a minute – how???

Well, because I’m an idiot, I managed to fall over at a party. “But people do that all the time!” I hear you cry. Alas, never one to settle for convention, I did it around 8pm, after just one drink. Amazingly, Roo had been away for less than 12 hours at this point! I also fell over in the garden – which is what makes the damage so impressive…

I told you to hang on to your lunch:

How hard was that grass?

Yes, that IS bone you can see in there! Nine stitches (my first) and two metal plates (ditto) later, I have braces on what’s left of my teeth, and a load of elastic bands holding my jaw shut. If you’re wondering what the mucus-like substance in the picture above is… well, it’s mucus. The hole went all the way through you see, and whilst the bleeding stopped after a couple of hours, saliva from inside my mouth kept dripping out through the hole in my chin. Which is delightful, I’m sure you’ll agree! DAMN that grass…

Silver lining: I can’t talk (Roo will be overjoyed when she gets back!) – and I’ve already lost more than 4kg in my first week of an all-liquid diet… Read the rest of this entry

It wasn’t a complete disaster.

We spent our second night moored alongside the idyllic Blackmere Lake, which Roo had been looking forward to photographing. She wasn’t disappointed – the leaves were turning for Autumn, making for some gorgeous pics. They were also falling into the canal by the bucketload, fouling our propeller and slowing our already agonising crawl to the speed at which dinosaur turds fossilize.

Having reached the southernmost point of our journey, we now had to turn the boat around. Canals being somewhat narrow, this can only be accomplished at specific places, called ‘winding holes’. Apparently this is not a place you ‘wind’ like a watch (which would make sense), but rather a place you ‘wind,’ like the stiff breeze that we’d been battling since Llangollen. This one was a semi-circular bite out of the opposite bank, into which we guided our nose. Between the boat’s somewhat delayed reactions and my Dad’s instinct to do exactly the opposite of what was required, I think we turned that boat around by the power of swearing alone. Read the rest of this entry

This is Part Three of our Canal Boat Odyssey. Parts One and Two can be found HERE and HERE respectively 😉

We spent a total of four nights on board the Henley.

In hindsight we probably set ourselves way too big a journey, because we wanted to go all the way from the hire place in Trevor to the picturesque Black Mere, and then return back past Trevor and go all the way to Llangollen in the other direction. It didn’t seem that far on Google Maps… But we hadn’t reckoned with the boat’s average speed of around 2km per hour. At one point we were overtaken by a mother and daughter, out for a casual stroll along the towpath. They moseyed past us, and disappeared into the distance, leaving us in the dust. Over an hour later we finally caught them up – but only because they’d turned around and were coming back again! I think on our biggest day, we managed a staggering 12 miles…

Read the rest of this entry

Before we get started, here’s some rules about canal boat conduct:

• Always pass other boats on the right.
• Always pass other boats at walking pace.
• Do not intentionally ram other boats at top speed.

And while we’re at it, here are a few facts about the boats themselves:

• They are long and narrow. Kind of ram-shaped.
• They are bastard impossible to steer. Impossible!
• They have absolutely NO BRAKES. NONE.
• They hate you.
• They want you to die screaming.

Putting all that together, you might gain an insight into the first few minutes and hours of our boat stewardship.

Read the rest of this entry

Four adults on a relaxing, 4-night canal boat cruise. What could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately, when three of the adults are Slaters, things are bound to get interesting…

It’s always been a dream of ours to try living aboard a narrow boat, and drift along the English countryside on the canals, occasionally winding a lock up or down. It all sounds so relaxing…

Read the rest of this entry

A picture tells a thousand words, right? Well, let’s hope so. Because I’ve run out of words! I’ve been talking so much these last few weeks that I am literally losing the ability to expel new words from inside of me.

So what I’ve decided to do is dazzle you all with the photos we’ve been taking – ones that have missed the cut so far, and not made it onto Facebook or the blog. Partially this is because I don’t post photos as often as I should, and partially it’s because I take pictures of really weird sh*t that amuses me, and somehow it doesn’t seem nearly as funny five days later when I find the photos…

It’s a context thing. That’s my excuse.

So in celebration of that, I will attempt to give you a brief context for each picture. You may even gain some insight into the inner workings of my mind… in which case, BEWARE! It’s not a particularly wholesome environment in there…

I’d like to begin with a salute to the sheer amount of paperwork I brought with me on this trip…

Read the rest of this entry

Right, where were we?

Next stop was on our grand USA adventure was Death Valley Junction. We checked into the only motel anywhere near there, finding it delightfully knackered and ‘quaint’. The ladies who ran the place were very friendly, but as we were leaving the next day they were reporting a guest to the police. An older man, staying in one room with a young girl – when the cleaners went in, they found her long hair had all been cut off and left in the sink… Definitely something strange going on there!

Read the rest of this entry

Hi folks!

So, some of you may have noticed that I have a new book out!

I know, I know. FINALLY! Yes, well, after taking me almost a year to write, ‘Shave My Spider!’ turned out to be a monster at over 180,000 words. That doesn’t seem to have deterred people though, and at the moment, over a month after its release, ‘Spider’ is still hanging in there at no.1 in all its Amazon categories.

Read the rest of this entry