I’ve been mucking around with a bit o’fiction this week. Like this poor guy.  Ever felt like him? …From The Ashers xx

He remembered the days when his nightmares were not things of imagination.  When every night he fought with slippery, skittery things that lurked all day, carefully at the edge of his vision, and who came out once his guard was down, on the precipice of sleep.  He fought them every night and eluded them every day, just as he skirted around the edges of the playground, keeping out of notice of Johnno Barnes and his followers.

If he came into the thoughts of Johnno it wouldn’t end until there was either blood on the asphalt down by the monkey bars, or the yard-duty teacher was summoned by the circling chant of “fightfightfightfight.”

These days it felt like his body was permanently switched to ON, sympathetic nerve system ramped up on high alert, always ready, always ready.

These days he drank and smoked to fill the holes and turn down a mind that didn’t know how to get out of overdrive.  These days the nightmares were of different substance, Can I pay the mortgage, When will my wife leave me, Will I get prostate cancer and be up pissing all night without any chance of getting any joy out of this appendage?  Still slippery grey monsters, on the periphery of his view, but now with names: Job, Mortgage, Wife, Health, Kids.

So he treated them like he always treated the enemy- he refused to look them straight in the eye, in the silent hope that they wouldn’t notice him, as he slunk by in a haze of smoke and foggy alcohol fumes.  He evaded and evaded until eventually he fell, exhausted, into a fitful sleep, always careful not to let his leg stray from the bed, lest that thing beneath grasp his ankle and drag him down.

That monster under the bed.

So the bloggers from The Remarkables have been in town.  My town.

Initially,  I was all full of bravado and I told Nath that I was going to do some funny shit: stalk them (God knows they’re easy to stalk- they post something on one of the socials roughly every seven minutes), wearing a Woogsworld t-shirt that I once won, and carrying a teapot that warm-hearted BabyMac sent me when my mate died.  I planned to run up to them, possibly squealing, and get them to sign my memorabilia.  Nath was going to be the papps, and snap pictures that would be on this blog.  I know Styling You, so she would probably calm everyone down, and explain that I’m not completely mad, just mildly strange.

Except I didn’t do that at all.  I stayed home and thought about how funny it would have been, so now you have this blog with no pictures, just my sad, shy little heart.

You see, I’m a fan of the bloggers.  They are my One Direction.  Once, when normal chicks my age were fan-girling over Duran Duran or Prince, I was imagining meeting JRR Tolkien, or in my more lascivious moods, Judy Blume (Remember ‘Forever’? Hot stuff indeed).   As my reading tastes evolved, so did my crushes.  To Stephen King, Nick Earls, John Birmingham, Joe Hill.  I can’t tell you how amazing Twitter is for a book nerd, as authors tend to reply to your tweets.  Be still my dorky heart.

And now I’m onto blogs.

The chicks in The Remarkables are some of the superstars of what is known as the blogosphere.  There are others, sure.  Beautiful, wonderful, writers like Eden Riley, Biance Wordley, Anna Spargo Ryan, Kelly Exteter, Allison Tait, Lana Hirschowitz, and Kerry Sackville (and many, many more) who aren’t in that visiting blog-club, but The Remarkables Group are some of the ones who have been at it for years.  From back in the days when I’d never even heard of a blog )and then when I did thought it sounded like a pile of shite).

Now I’ve seen the light, and I love blogs so much we have this little thing here.  I had a great idea to get to meet my heroes, and then I chickened out.  And now they are gone, far, far away to the hills of Maleny (at least 40 minutes away) and my hopes of meeting them and becoming new best-friends-forever are dashed, dashed like seashells against the first groyne at Main Beach, and I am left with thoughts of what might have been.  Sigh.  Oh for the courage to have approached their famous-arse table at Berados. Sigh.

Fare you well, bloggers.  May our paths cross one day.

Did you know the bloggers were in town?

Have you ever met one of your idols?

…From The Ashers xx