Picture Post: Simon Nessman

Every once in a while, someone will come to my visual attention, and become an obsession; usually it is actors, but sometimes it's a model. In this case it is model Simon Nessman who has captured my obsessive attention.

Simon hails from British Colombia, Canada, stands 188 cm (6'2") tall, and is as of this writing 21 years old. He's one of the hardest working boys in the business, having appeared in a gazillion runway shows and dozens of magazines, frequently as a featured model.

Wanna see him? Of course you do!





















Isn't he just too cute for words? He has a wonderful balance between the pretty and the handsome, and those puppy-brown eyes just melt me!

What do you think?

Yikes!

The last four weeks have been something of a trial and a burden... but since I haven't been swept away by a tsunami, I'll just have to count my blessings.

My depression has been doing quite a number on me this season. And largely due to the depression, I've been getting sick a lot... my immune system, never particularly effective at the best of times, usually takes an extended vacation whenever my mood goes flooey. So I've had one cold after another, culminating in a flu so severe that it really should be called by its proper name of Influenza, which kept me prostrate for five days with fever, chills, head and chest congestion, fatigue, and nausea.

I haven't been that sick in years and years, not since I was in college. Fevers in particular freak me out, since the only time in my life I've ever fainted was when I had a fever and dropped out in my own hallway (note "fainted" rather than "passed out"... I used to pass out all the time in my drinking days), which scared the crap out of me because I was home alone and headed toward the bathroom when I fainted... if I had fallen in the bathroom and bashed my head on something, I might not be here talking to you today.

To fully illustrate how sick I was: I voluntarily went to the doctor because of it. Not gladly, of course, Caroline had to call the Advice Nurse for me and then the AN convinced me to make an urgent-care appointment for the following day. But I did show up for it, miserable as I was; the chest congestion was so bad, I was afraid that it might be pneumonia.

So I sat around Kaiser for half of Sunday, waiting for the doctor and then waiting to get my blood drawn and then waiting to get my chest x-rayed. It was very weird waiting around on my own account... I'm so used to being at Kaiser for Grandmother, I was startled each time someone called my name instead of hers. But Caroline stayed with me, keeping me company, so it wasn't all that bad.

It turned out to not be pneumonia, nor a pulmonary embolism (which sounded really scary), it was just a really bad flu; the urgent-care doc told me to go home, get in bed, stay warm, force fluids, and under no circumstances was I to go to work until the fever was gone.

Well, the timing couldn't be worse... glad as I usually am to stay home and play Second Life instead of doing anything constructive, I was actually reluctant to miss work last week: my office-mate and supervisor has been out on medical leave for some weeks, and I have been trying to perform her most time-sensitive tasks in her absence, as well as training our intern to do some of my tasks so I'd have the time, and trying to keep up with all my work that I couldn't transfer. So with both of us out, the office was in some disarray.

But it was only for three work-days, and our intern did an amazing job of stepping up to the plate and taking care of things. So though I am wildly behind on my work, I didn't come back to the disaster area I'd feared.

I still feel terribly out of my depth, doing some of my supervisor's work (particularly the monetary stuff, juggling with petty cash and requisitioning supplies), and am visited by a feeling of mild panic when I see all the forms I have to data-enter. But it's not too bad... it seems that while I was ass-out in the bed for five days, my depression decided that it wasn't going to hang around any more. Of course, it was due to leave sometime next week (the vernal equinox is my usual drop-dead date for the depression), but I'm feeling unusually positive and upbeat despite a lingering weakness and a voice that sounds like a bullfrog that's been on a bender.

And here I am back in the saddle, more or less, and ready to take life as it comes. And that's all I have to say today.

How Many Lives Do I Need?

So, part of this season of silence from me is my current obsession with the role-playing "virtual world" Second Life. It's always something with me, isn't it? If it's not the Sims, it's eBay, and if it's not eBay it's FaceBook, and now it's Second Life.

Of course, I have come to it rather later than everyone else. A quick informal poll at JUB taught me that Second Life is so fifteen minutes ago, as passé as MySpace and catching up with Friendster for moribundity.

Nevertheless, I am enjoying the hell out of it. Exploring new virtual environments is the most fun I've had, as some of the "sims" (for "simulations") are incredibly detailed and quite beautiful; then of course there's shopping, for body-shapes and skins and hair and clothes and accessories; and then becoming involved in a vampire clan has provided a certain amount of sociability, though I sort of wandered passively into the Renegade Immortals, which is predominantly straight, rather than shopping around for a LGBT clan.

The social aspect, however (which is very much like a chatroom... someone described Second Life as nothing more than an elaborately animated chat application), has been a little difficult for me. I mean, virtual life is supposed to relieve one of such impediments as shyness and low self-esteem; but I find myself feeling just as awkward and scared in virtual social situations as I feel in real social situations... my avatar alter-ego is much prettier and dresses sluttier, but still has all the neuroses of a doughy, introverted old queen.

But I am slowly becoming more connected with individuals, both in my vampire clan and in the gay sims I've discovered. I go to a lot of simulated clubs and "dance" to the music (allowing a local program to animate my avatar), finding songs and artists I really like and have never heard of before. But above all, I love the shopping for clothes and accessories, putting together an identity that is separate from my own and interesting in its own right.

When I first joined up with a free account, following a link from FaceBook on New Year's Day, I wasn't really plugged into the alter-ego concept of avatar creation, so I just took a standard avatar and played around with it a little, editing shape and hair and then finding freebies and adding them. On the third day of playing, after kicking up $20 for the premium account (so I could access adult content), I encountered a vampiress who inducted me into her clan and made me a vampire. At these early stages, I looked like this:


...so new I didn't even know how to hide my fangs! But within the week, since I was now a vampire and vampires can't go around looking like trash, I'd bought a new shape and a new skin and some nice clothes and hair, aiming at an aristocratic goth look that I felt became a newborn vamp. To do this I had to buy "Lindens" (or L$), the monetary unit of Second Life; and since the exchange rate is something like L$750 for $1 US, it doesn't feel like real money... though I managed to blow through another $20 worth of Lindens in a week.

But the results, I think, were worth it:



Then I sort of forgot about the whole thing for a while. Being a vampire meant that I had to bite people or other vampires in order to keep my vital blood level at full; and every day that passed, I lost a half a liter to "the curse." Since I was still too shy to go around asking strangers for half a liter of blood, I bought this medallion that would keep the curse at bay for thirty days; and since I had thirty days with no need to do anything, I let myself get involved in other things and didn't log on for quite a while.

So when I came back, I was very nearly dead, since my thirty days had elapsed and the curse had me down to a tenth of a liter. Knowing that nothing had changed with my shyness issues, I asked my liege mistress (the vampire who brought me into it) if I could become human again... but since I wanted to remain in the clan and didn't want her to lose any status from owning my soul, I became a "blood doll." That way, vampires could bite me with my consent and then I could go buy an apple for L$14 (less than a tenth of a cent) and be all better.

And of course this new status required a new look with new skin and new outfits. I was still in love with the formality, and had been buying rather formal outfits more than casual or sexy outfits all along; and so now I just went with something a little more modern, but still goth and rather sensual:




As I traveled around and met people and learned more about SL, I was introduced to the idea of playing out your own fantasies in this world, making your avatar into something you wish you were, or wanted to be once, or just completely different from what you are. And since I always wished I was cute and small and pretty, boyish and vulnerable, I started experimenting with "twink" and "femboy" shapes and skins and hairstyles. I changed my display name to "Sebastian" (I had gone in under my own pen-name originally) and started exploring the idea of being the pretty and vulnerable little man I am in my fantasies.




But something didn't quite feel right... there was something a little too childish about the looks I was putting together, and if I dressed my boy avatars in anything especially slutty, I worried about the taint of pedophilia... in fact, I was booted out of one sim because I was too small: the engine assumed my dimensions meant I was role-playing as a child, which was strictly forbidden in the adult sim.

Well, there's this fine line between pedophilia and ephebophilia, but not a lot of people observe that line (one wag of my acquaintance put it: "An ephebophile is a pedophile with a thesaurus"), and I did not want to make people uncomfortable or attract actual pedophiles to myself, so I went back to that first bought shape that I have liked better than any other shape I've bought or was given since.

And thus in a twinkish and creamy-skinned but unmistakeably manly form, I started dressing like a complete and total slut. And it is in this guise that I changed my display name to "Robbie" (another fantasy, nobody has ever called me that in my life) and was actually able to flirt gently with people I encountered. And I find I like being this kind of person in my virtual reality: scantily-clad with a bit of a hard rock edge and apocalyptic, goth, and steampunk overtones.



The Robbie avatar, as I said, has cured a lot of my shyness. I feel, when I'm wandering around SL in his guise, a lot more confident and attractive, and can strike up conversations with people I meet in various sims with greater ease... still not completely gregarious, but a lot more outgoing than I was in my goth or boy guises.

Although, interestingly, I feel more comfortable with the straights in my vampire clan than in any of the all-gay sims I've encountered. They've accepted me as-is, and several even seem to like me (or Robbie, or both) but they don't get so sexual with me that I become uncomfortable. Like this one time I was wandered around a gorgeous Ancient Roman sim that turned out to be part of gay "Gorean" fantasy realm, and was approached by a slave who knelt in front of me and put his hands behind his back, then "smiled beguilingly up" at me (according to the little "gesture" chat)... I got so flustered I just teleported out without even apologizing for my abrupt departure.

So anyway, that's what I've been up to lately: no writing, very little reading, just dancing my pixel ass off and spending Lindens all over the place. And so, if you don't hear from me again for a little while, you know where I'll be.

I can be found under the name RobertManners if you want to meet up with Robbie in your own virtual persona. But now I have to go get ready for the Red & White Pre-Valentine's Party at The Renegade Club, and I have to buy something schmexy to wear... something like this, perhaps?

Writing In My Head

Despite all resolutions to the contrary, I seem to have let my blog slip for a few weeks again. Ah, well, the best-laid plans and that which paves the road to Hell, et cetera...

The thing is, I haven't been feeling quite up to writing. The NaNoWriMo really took it out of me, and then I've been experiencing a depression that I am not sure is seasonal or cold-induced or what but has been sapping my energy bigtime; and then I've been pretty busy at work, and I have been putting a lot of energy into another writing-project idea; so, you put all those things together and you get a very non-blogging Robert.

This other writing project is actually two writing projects, which were inspired by the rush of satisfaction I felt after finishing The Math Teacher is Dead; I've never actually finished a story before, and the thrill was pretty amazing. And as with all pleasurable sensations, I wanted more, and I wanted it NOW.

But I didn't want to write another Danny Vandervere story, for though I have lots more storylines for him, I'm kind of sick of him right now... I wanted to try something different; I started thinking about what else I'd like to write, if I wanted to write pure erotica or some other genre like adventure or fantasy or romance.

Due to some influences from online novels I've been reading lately, I suddenly decided to write a supernatural romance. But what kind? Vampires are kind of overdone right now, and I wasn't sure I could create a more compelling vampire than the characters I've already read from other authors. So what about ghosts? Well ghosts, being incorporeal, aren't very sexy as a rule. Zombies? Werewolves? Wizards? No, no, no: gross, boring, as overdone as vampires, in that order.

So I put the question to Caroline, and she gave me a really good idea for a ghost story... or rather, she suggested some unpleasantly scary things and some things that she found compelling but didn't interest me as plot devices; and as we talked it over, some other stories I've read came back to me, and some ideas were born from the confluence of Caroline's ideas and the romantic ghost-stories I've read before.

My idea is about a young man living in an old house that his parents are renovating; they do this for a living, moving into an old wreck of a house and renovating it and reselling it, so the young man has had a life of moving around and social and emotional disconnect. The house is older and larger and more elaborate than any house they've been in before, and it is of course haunted by several ghosts; one of the ghosts is a young man who'd been murdered by his father a hundred years earlier, who starts visiting the protagonist in dreams and later becomes visible to him awake... and it goes on from there.

The point of the story will be multifold: there will be stuff about coming out and coming of age, but also about family dynamics, questions of immortality at a price and the intrinsic value of mortal life, and a lot of architectural porn... after all, the first thing I did when I thought of this story was to design the mansion in which it would take place.

Another idea for a story came to me as I toyed with the above: I was thinking about vampires and the different kinds of vampires there are in literature, and I came up with a different form of creature than any I've read so far: not a mere bloodsucker, but a predator of the human race who has developed language and abstract thought as a hunting tool but who is still essentially an animal, amoral and simply not human, who never was human and has only experienced humanity the way domestic pets experience it... as an adaptation rather than as a natural imperative.

This predator meets a boy who is perfect prey... the sort of boy who attracts predatory humans, who is always a victim because he naturally appeals to essentially bad people. And since the predator is not human, he doesn't see the boy as prey, but rather as the perfect bait for "big game." And they become quite attached to each other, for various reasons that I'll go into when I write.

I got the idea for this pairing thinking about one of the few poems in the world that I like, William Blake's "The Tyger"... which I once had to memorize for a college public speaking course, chosen because of its use in Anne Rice's The Tale of the Body Thief (my favorite of her novels). That poem is frequently paired with another poem of Blake's, "The Lamb," which I don't like very much but, when paired with "The Tyger," it makes for an interesting image... "The Lamb" is overtly Christian and rather syrupy, but the punchline of "The Tyger" (which has an amazing and I think rather sexual rhythm) is "did He who made the Lamb make thee?" I really liked the concept of a natural (rather than supernatural) predator, something of the earth, God-made and/or an evolutionary adaptation of a canine or feline instead of a primate.


Anyway, I can't even imagine a full plot for this story, so I'm thinking of making it a series of short erotic stories instead of a novel. But the point of the story, aside from sex and gore, is going to be the nature of humanity itself, what it means to be human, especially in terms of good and evil... about which I think I may have a few things to say.

Of course, this is all still in the cogitation stage, I haven't got any words down yet, no outlines nor even names and characterizations mapped out. I have floor plans and elevations for the haunted mansion, though! They're still in sketch form, but I just got a new design program that I'm going to try and use to make proper CAD models.

So that's kind of what's going on with me right now. There's probably more, I could talk about Christmas and how great it was with Suzie and Matthew doing almost all the work, and then there is my recent outing as emcee for my company's staff party (though I'll post pix anyway), but I just ain't up to it. Hopefully I'll be back to speed soon.





The costume was one of my more harebrained ideas, which started with not being able to fit into my dinner suit and not being able to find my black dress shoes and culminated in me going out at lunchtime and buying a top-hat; but everyone enjoyed it, so I guess my dignity can take the hit. And the caricature (we had caricaturists at the party, which was a huge success, consider hiring some for your next event) is rather unflattering but somehow catches my expression oddly well.

And finally, to cleanse your palate after that silliness, I offer the following as a sweet and tangy sorbet:

Picture Post: Rhapsody in Blue

Weekly Check-In

The cold I was suffering at last writing has been lingering, as my colds tend to do... I have a crummy immune system. And the depression that cold sparked has lingered, as well. And along with those two things, I have also experienced this weird let-down after completing NaNoWriMo: after the first few days of tweaking around with the formatting (and fine-tuning while I was at it) on The Math Teacher Is Dead for inclusion on the SmashWords website (where you can download my novel, and zillions of other fine novels, in any number of formats, from online reading to Kindle to Palm to Sony Reader), I have been suffering the literary version of the bends, depressurizing much too fast.

My current thinking is to take this energy and start another new novel. I am a little bit sick of Worst Luck (actually, a lot sick), and don't want to start the next novel in the series, which will take place while Danny is at Stanford... partly because it needs a lot of research (I've never even been to the Stanford campus), and partly because I want to outline it so I can use the story for next year's NaNoWriMo. So I'm thinking of starting the fourth or fifth installation of the series, tentatively titled Death and the Vicomte. It will be set in the Northern California chateau of Valerien's grandparents, and will encompass the murder of Valerien's father during a weekend party.

Of course, I don't even have a plot in my mind, just a vague idea of a nice tidy country-house murder, and some ideas about what the chateau looks like. I will need to develop a number of characters, but will not need much research: that's the beauty of the country-house mystery, it's self-contained in a geographical and architectural miniverse of one's own invention. All of my research will be involved in French etiquette, forms of address, cuisine, and viniculture... in much of which I am already somewhat knowledgeable, and all of which I can get from books and the internet.

So that's brewing away in the back of my mind right now. But I'm also trying to gear up for the labor-intensive resentment-fest that is Christmas with my family... there's an enormous naked tree in my living-room, and boxes of ornaments and decorations; my challenge this week is to get the contents of the latter properly draped over the former. Then I need to clean some house and do some shopping. Fortunately, my nephew Matthew is staying with us and is a great help, especially in terms of running errands and doing the heavy lifting.

It's all going to work out, I hope. I find that I often get really down this time of year, I'm not sure if it's the lack of light or the likelihood of catching cold or my dislike of Christmas or some cyclical thing having to do with my birthday, but this has long been a very difficult time of year for me.

MOOD

The depression has been pretty bad this last week... I'm assuming due mostly to the cold I had, with an assist from forgetting my Wellbutrin a couple of times, and overlaid with the cold and dreary weather and everything else as detailed above. The suicidal ideation has been especially strong, and I really had to argue with myself a couple of times to remind myself that it's my serotonin-deprived synapses talking, not my rational mind. I was particularly obsessed with the idea of overdosing on my mood stabilizer... after learning how sleepy it makes me when I accidentally took it in the morning instead of at night, I started thinking that if I took enough of it, my heart might stop. Dying in one's sleep always seems like a peaceful way out.

But it's letting up, now. I've felt pretty much normal the last two days, no suicidal thoughts or unexpected tears; I haven't been going to sleep early enough to get my full eight hours before going to work, but I feel positive and productive at work, despite being painfully sleepy and a bit headachy.

I just realized it's been a while since I did a Picture Post. I'll get to work on that now, and in the meantime I offer you the following taste of things to come:

"Weekly" Check-In

So, I'm slowly recovering from NaNoWriMo... I finished my book with six thousand words to spare, and am so proud of myself I could bust. Though I've written quite a lot over the years, I have never finished a story before, so this is quite a feat.

And just when I finished that, I came down with a particularly virulent and debilitating cold, so severe that I missed three and a half days of work. And this after finishing my book, so I didn't have anything I could do laying in bed all day, and have been bored out of my mind. I guess I could have worked some more on the story, editing or expanding as the case may be; but after thirty straight days, I couldn't look at The Math Teacher is Dead anymore. I tried working on Worst Luck instead, but the prose all looked clunky and stupid -- I guess I'm just all wrote out for the time being.

Also, as usually happens when I'm sick for more than a couple of days, the illness triggered a depression, so I've been feeling unspeakably miserable the last few days. But I'm not dead, nor apparently dying (or at least not any faster than usual), so I guess I'll muddle through somehow or other.

Hopefully I'll be back into my weekly swing here on Swellegant now that the novel is finished. In the meantime, if you haven't already, go give it a read: I really could use some feedback about the story, the prose, what works and what gives trouble.

Cheers!