My Journey To A Mystery Novel

YES!!! It's finally out!

The book that I've been toiling away at, and bothering everyone with my endless streams of author-babble for over a year, is finally released to the unsuspecting public. Set in a sleepy fictional country town with no name, coincidently located at the exact geographical area of the town where I live, this Aussie mystery/crime novel will keep you guessing till the last page. I know that, because it had ME guessing till the last page! Here's the blurb.

A week ago a local teenage girl went missing.

With half the town out looking for her, it wasn't going to be long before a local Private Investigator got wrapped up in the search. However, a midnight phone call from an old acquaintance was not what Jack Mullens expected. Thrust into a web of false trails and cold leads, he soon finds that nothing is secure, and nobody he knows can be trusted.

He learns the very Essence of Betrayal.

If that's enough to grab you, check it out at the following sites:

Smashwords.com/books/view/EssenceOfBetrayal 

Amazon.com/Essence-Of-Betrayal

Bookdepository.com/Essence-Of-Betrayal

Also in Kobo, iTunes and Google Play. Just search Essence Of Betrayal Damien L Malcolm.

Otherwise, stick around for the story of how it came about.

On the 2nd of May 2013, I had this funny idea of having a go at writing something different than the space adventure novels I'd been writing since turning 15. It was a couple of days after hearing a story on my local ABC Radio about what it's like to be a Private Investigator.

Honestly, the bloke they interviewed made it sound a little boring and not at all inspiring. But we all know how the mind can wander...

So this idea floundered into my head and started to germinate. But, I still had my mental brakes on at first. You see, some in the writing world say this innocuous little phrase that sounds something like:

"You should only write what you know." 

Which is a short way of saying don't venture off into fields and topics that you have no idea about, because any reader will see through that, and your book will fall flat. Fair logic. That's why I've spent 15 years writing sci-fi, because let's face it, I'm a bit of a nerd... space, aliens, buttons, holograms and starships are what I know. ;)

And while I've always wanted to branch out into something different, something a little more "contemporary" and "main-stream" to stop people looking at me oddly and moaning when I uttered the word "sci-fi", I was often held back by that phrase. But then I started thinking, "Hang on a second. If there's anything I know, it's being a Handyman, and at the same time basically leading a double life." By day in my real life, I'm Damien the handyman, an all-round maintenance bloke fixing door handles and tap washers, before coming home and playing happy families. But on some nights after the kids went to bed, instead of just doing plain old paperwork, I would slink off into the office and open my latest manuscript. From there I would be launched into my own personal universe where anything I wished could become reality.

Ode to the life of a part-time writer.

So, armed with this new-found interpretation of the above term, I started to apply my own life to that of another person, with a few tweaks here and there - like changing the second job from author to P.I. I started thinking, "Ooooh, what if a bloke was working a normal job by day, but at night would slip on dark clothes and do stake-outs with a night-vision camera and things." Fuzzy pumpkins!

That's when, for the first time in my life, it was like a door opened in my mind and some strange fella walked in. See up till then, while writing sci-fi, story and scene ideas had always just played out in front of me while I typed, like watching a movie. Somehow dissociated, observational only. But even contemplating the idea was like tuning into a different radio channel. It was almost tangible; this middle-aged bloke - dark-ish hair, bit taller than me - simply strolled up to my mind and said, "G'day mate. I'm Jack Mullens. Wanna write a book about me?"

I know that sounds crazy, but I promise I'm not. I've heard other authors describe similar experiences, so I'm not the only one.

I mean it was that simple. I knew his name, face, body description, history and living arrangements in a flash, just like a Vulcan mind-meld! That day, I mentally wrote the first few pages of Essence Of Betrayal while vacuuming a local Church. (Sounds even crazier, I know.)

It wasn't till a couple of weeks later that I actually decided to sit down, put aside the half-finished Winchester: Convolutions manuscript, and start a fresh story. I didn't have a title, a plan, anything. I just started typing what I had in my head and let the rest flow.

And flow it did!

I was averaging 10,000-15,000 words a week for the first few months. May not sound like much to a full-time author, but remember here, I only had a couple of hours every other night to do this. One night, with a mid-July storm raging outside, I laid down 3600 words in 2 hrs and left myself so worked up I couldn't sleep. That scene was so intense for me, the next morning I found myself staring at a dot on the wall while absently chewing my weetbix, lost in a deep thought stream. If it affected me that much, I so hope that the reader gets something out of it. (Chapters 29-30 if you already have the book in your hand and like to skip ahead to the good bits! Spoiler alert, though.)

By around December 2013, I had enough down for the book to reach up and show me its title. And I mean that exactly as I wrote it just then. I had not had to sort out, research or make up any main character names; Jack had given me all of them. Nor did I have to really think about what I was going to write next session. I'd just sit down at the keyboard and Jack Mullens would tell me what to type. Completely surreal. If I were being honest, Jack is about as real to me as anyone else I know. At one point a lady, whom I slipped a section of the manuscript to an early opinion, said, "Why on Earth did you have to call him 'Jack Mullens'? Of all the names in the world, why that?"

My reply? "Because that's his name. That is the name he said when he introduced himself to me." She looked at me like I'd just stepped out of a spaceship landed in her back yard. Evidently she has never performed automatic writing for a fictional character transmitting from the ethereal netherworld.

I have. And the result was this obscure, hopefully exciting, Aussie novel called Essence Of Betrayal. You know, since finishing the book last month, I've even found that I'm missing Jack a little. That hairy-chested, smart-mouthed larrikin with an odd view on the world has really grown on me over the last year and a bit.

I hope he grows on you too.

Till next time,
-Damien

I've got the POWER!

Last Friday one of my longest-held dreams finally came true. We got solar power installed on our new house. So far, the check-list of life is going pretty well: Wife, check; kids, check; own a business, check; become an author, check; buy a house, check; run off solar panels, BLOODY CHECK!

Only things left now, really, are add "kinda successful" to that author one from before, and get back on radio again. Hope my aspirations aren't too extravagant. Never really expected too much from life, and am thankful for whatever it offers up.

I don't know about you, but I have always been fascinated by the astounding technology of the photo-voltaic silicon solar cell. And when I say always, I mean it. There is evidence of me marvelling at it while in the womb. Just ask Mum. 

And why wouldn't I? I mean, just look at this!

Pinched from Wikipedia. Thanks fellas. :)

That thin sheet of inanimate shimmery-blue stuff can make electricity just by sticking it in the sun. Pure unadulterated brilliance, that is. And considering that at any one time the sun is apparently supplying us with 174,000,000,000,000,000,000 watts of energy (I think I got the right amount of zeros in there) it just plain makes sense to borrow a measly 12,000 or so a day. The sun won't miss it, and it was only getting wasted growing that pesky grass anyway. Power free from an unfathomably big ball of super-heated gas in the sky that won't go out till long after we're gone? Or instead we could just keep burning coal and producing gaseous carbon so that eventually we will blacken the skies so much we won't be able to see the sun? And be choked and cooked to death as our planet becomes another Venus.... Solar power just makes sense from all angles, really.

Though, for some strange reason, not everyone sees it that way.

Coincidently, at practically the same time the blokes were thumping around on my roof laying down my solar power station, there was hot debate getting fired up around our local electricity providers deliberately causing friction when it comes to solar being installed on domestic houses. The claims seem to be that while people are rushing out and getting their own little solar plants, Ergon's expensive suite of state-wide infrastructure is slowly becoming obsolete as less people are needing to buy power. Ergon still have overheads to pay, and slackening revenue to pay them. $50 billion in total "stranded assets", apparently, is included in those overhead expenses. We're told they are beginning to panic that soon we'll all have solar and they won't be needed to generate power for us, thus will have no money to clear their debts and go bust.

In fact, there are even claims that while a person like me is getting solar to avoid rising power prices (and because I love it), my poor solar-less next-door neighbour is stuck paying even higher prices for his coal-fired power because Ergon is struggling with a market demand that's steadily dropping while their costs of maintenance and generation remain the same or rise.

Fair point, in theory. I mean, if Apple only sell 104 units of their latest version iThing, then those 104 people will have to take a share in the $32,203,483 in research and development costs. So that new iThing will cost each of those 104 purchasers approximately $300,950 plus retail mark-up rounded to the nearest obscene amount. That roughly equates to the cost of the Sony Playstation 4 when they first came out, for those crazy people willing to sleep on the pavement outside their local technology store to be the "first" to buy one.

On the other hand, if 12,365,210 people bought that innocuous little iThing, each would only pay $2.60 for the R&D component, plus retail mark-up of 2000%. See how that works? That's the "beauty" of a free market. So coming back to the power scenario, I could almost see where this "shrinking market" would cause issues for them. However, when I sit down and nut out the numbers in a rough sort of way, no matter how I arrange things, at least in the short to medium term and while they still have customers using their power, Ergon come out in front. Mostly because, while they may be paying me a small government-mandated amount for any power I make and feed into the grid, they are then turning round and charging my neighbour the full retail price for that power, as well as having to make less power at the generating plant. Please refer to these cute little graphics I made up for a much clearer confusing muddle:

The Standard Situation with both my neighbour and I drawing power from the grid. To protect his privacy, I've omitted his name and referred to him in the cockney-English vernacular of " 'im ".

 And now to the Solar Situation, where I have solar, using a bit less power, feeding my left-overs to the grid for my neighbour to use, and only drawing a little at night.

So you see where, in the new scenario, Ergon have reduced their output by 50%, down from 8Kw a day to 4; 1 for me and 3 for 'im. This should have halved their income, right? However, they are happily retailing at full price any solar power that I have sold them, which would normally cost them approximately $0.21c/Kw to produce. For this, they're getting away with only paying me $0.06c/Kw wholesale. At a current retail price of $0.28c, that's a mark-up on my power of 466% and, in our model anyway, a saving for them on generating costs of around $55 a year!!!

So all up, for the amount of power they are actually generating, Ergon are proportionately still making more than before - around 25% more in fact. They are saving $55 a year, and making a bonus $80 to boot! Somehow they have actually managed to increase their profit margin by 130%! It's like a Girl Guide failing to sell 100 cookies at $1, instead selling 40 cookies for $5 each. That crafty little entrepreneur is ahead by a hundred bucks and gets to eat her left-over cookies!!! 

Now I know that the actual system that they work to is most likely infinitely more complicated than my simple little scenario. And with a LOT bigger dollar amounts, energy wattage and customer numbers. I've probably got the wrong end of the stick in more than one sense of the phrase, but surely even my monkey-minded scuttle is barking up a tree pretty close to the true one. Wouldn't it all even out in the end, mostly in favour to Ergon?

Either way, if you put aside all the media spin and crossed-information to actually sit and think about it for a moment, it seems like a pretty damn good deal for the power generators. Surely their extra infrastructure costs could come out of that nice little profit margin, while they sit back and relax, only having to produce half the output as before because my solar panels are doing the work for them!

And in the long run, yes, maybe everyone will end up getting solar on their roof and battery banks in their carport. Ergon, and other power companies like them, may well become obsolete in the future. But guess what, that's called the ever-changing turbulent world of business. Technologies and trends change; it's a fact of life. If a business is not savvy enough to catch that train, they fail. Just look at Kodak and their camera-making department. Power companies will have to evolve or fail. Maybe Governments will end up buying back and running the network infrastructure, just taking those running costs in taxes, while we all make our own power and borrow their grid to share it round. Who knows what the future will hold?

But two things are for certain: 1. Our world is precious, and will collapse if we don't start really taking care of her. Finally the trend is moving toward renewables with a solid, sustainable momentum. Very soon we will have affordable electric cars, charged by your solar house, and every large company will power themselves with green energy. Apple gets a bit of credit there... Even if it causes short term economic strain now, the long-term benefits from stowing away on the renewable energy train will have massive repercussions for our race and this planet. And secondly, PV Solar is awesome!

Does any of this make sense to you? Is this unique to Australia, or have you had similar issues where you live? And exactly how right or wrong have I got it? It's ok to tell me; I'll only cry a little. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Till next time,

-Damien.

Put Aspirin In The Water!!!

I've written on this topic before here, but having it niggle at me once again now, I decided to write another little letter to the local papers in an attempt to hopefully change a few perspectives. Apparently our local council recently abstained from forming a binding opinion on the requested removal of fluoride from our local water supplies, instead opting to put the decision out to the public. An acceptable choice, considering the alternative would have been a "no". But then again, at the cost of a survey, post-delivered to every house in the region, one could consider it yet another bureaucratic waste.

Anyway, here's what I wrote:

I'd like to present you with a hypothetical situation. Migraine Headaches have been on the rise; a worldwide epidemic. A study shows up to 60% of the 36,000 local population are suffering from debilitating headaches, leaving them bed-ridden. It's resulted in a local productivity downturn of an estimated $1 million per month. Businesses are failing and the regional economy is on the verge of collapse. After investigating every possible cause and solution, the local Council accepts the advice from state health minister; place low amounts of soluble aspirin in the local water supply. It has been used in other countries with mixed success, but it has shown to be effective in most cases, is cheap and simple to administer. The dose proposed is very low, only 1mg per litre of water, but the state health minister insists that it will make a difference in our plaguing headache problem.

The final decision whether to put it in is left up the population. Every ballot paper is supplied with an information pamphlet, showing both for and against arguments. Here are the facts, as supplied to them:

1. Hundreds of cities and towns worldwide have been dosing their water supplies with aspirin, and no credible health issues have arisen. Headache levels are half that of non-aspirin-water towns. It is proven that aspirin has a positive effect on headaches at the dosage prescribed.
2. The dosed water will be supplied to every house on town water, or approx 50% of the population. Smaller towns will not, due to cost restraints.
3. Some people should not drink the aspirin water. These include people with allergies, chickenpox or influenza, kidney or liver disease, and pregnant women. These people simply need to purchase a filter, at their own cost. Only effective filter available costs around $300 to replace every year.
4. The side-effects of regular aspirin ingestion can include ulcers of the stomach and duodenum, abdominal pain, nausea, gastritis (inflammation of the stomach), and even serious gastrointestinal bleeding from ulcers. The aspirin-water may also, over time, become toxic to the liver. However the dosage is so low, side-effects will be minimal, if seen at all.
5. The cost of the supply and maintenance will be approx $40,000, but will add only $5 to the average rates bill. Every rate payer will pay, even those living outside of the supplied areas and in excluded towns, those not wanting it, the 40% or 14,400 not suffering from the headaches, and those drinking tank water.
6. Only 2-5% of the aspirin-water treated will be consumed by the population, with the rest going down drains, toilets, used in industry and on the gardens. Though up to 400kgs of the dissolved aspirin will enter the waterways every day region-wide, there have been no credible studies to show any environmental impacts.

Based on this information, which box would you tick? Is aspirin in the water good, or bad? Or would you rather just take some aspirin yourself for your own headache? Right now, we are drinking water with fluoride added, not aspirin. But many of the points above could be applied to fluoride. Did we get an information pamphlet before our water was dosed? No, in fact the only point told to us before fluoridation was point 1. The other points matter too, don't they. We may soon have a choice, please make an informed one.

Reminiscence: Radio And My Car Accident.

The other day I got to reminiscing about my radio days. Yep, that's right; I used to be a radio announcer. Shock Jock! I've never written of it, or the horrifying events of the time, and spoken very little. The radio work was nothing major, just held up a show on a couple of community radio stations. For those not in the know, working at a community radio station generally means that rather than them paying you for your talents, you pay a yearly "membership fee" to work there voluntarily.

It feels now like a lifetime ago. Before marriage and kids, the business... before being who I've now grown to be, really. And it's not like the radio gig ever helped me out, or showed any prospects for a future in the media. Instead, it was my time in radio that resulted in almost losing my life in a terrible car accident, at just 20 years of age.

It was 2001 in Redland Bay, Queensland, on a community radio station called Bay FM. I had been doing the Sunday night graveyard shift, midnight to dawn, with a middle-aged friend named Allan for about four or five months. It was often arduous, not least because I was working a full-time job at the time. (I'd finish up the six hour radio gig at 6am, go home for some breakfast, then toddle off to Brisbane for my paid day job.) But I loved every minute of it. Besides writing the Winchester Series, radio had always been one of my dream careers. I had already done work-experience at a commercial station, completed a private on-air media course and helped out at various OBs (Outside Broadcasts) for a couple of stations.

So when our chance came up to do a show of our very own, Allan and I jumped at it. Even if it was the graveyard shift. It eventually came at a cost, however. Over our time on-air, Allen and his fiancée had bought a house in the country and were commuting to Brisbane. I had bought my first car and got my driver's license. Stress was getting a bit much at the factory where I worked—multiple shifts back-to-back, one day off in three weeks, mongrel management—and Allan kept offering me to come up and stay at their new place for a holiday. I couldn't get any time off work, though, because the boss was a narcissistic prick, intent on running his staff into the ground. (No different from any other boss, really. Hehehe)

Anyway, I remember it like it was yesterday. For a bloke that for most of his teen-hood had gone about suppressing emotion, (I had convinced myself I was a robot, or maybe Vulcan, as a coping thing. That's another story!) it was a new experience for me to be "feeling" so stressed and generally crap. That Friday afternoon, I snuck into the boss's office and placed a note on his desk which said something to the effect of:

You have been working us too hard, sir. If I don't do this I am going to crash. As of this afternoon, I am on 2 weeks break. Fire me if you want. Otherwise, see you in a fortnight. -Damien.

Then I drove to the beach at Victoria Point, sat on the bonnet of my car and watched the sunset illuminate the islands across the water, while eating fish-n-chips and contemplating what I was going to do. Looking back now, it is obvious to me that it was a corner in the path of my life. But you know, even then at the time I think I knew it. It's only once in a blue moon you get to stand back and take a look from outside yourself, standing there on that forked-path deciding which direction to take.

For an outsider, unless you have been in a similar situation yourself, the scene I describe doesn't seem too big. However for me it really was, and still is, a massive life changing moment. There was no going back, only forward. Looking back now, everything I knew was to change after that day. I rang Allan on my mobile brick (Nokia 5110; best constructed mobile phone known to man) and told him I was coming to visit.
He said, "What? Now? It'll be 10 o'clock by the time you get here."
"I know, Allan. But I can't wait. I have to get out of here now."
"Ok then. I'll keep an eye out for you. Drive safe."

And I did. I got there by paper map, 3.5 hours out of Brisbane, in the dark at 9:45pm. The next morning I woke up to the sounds of strange birds chirping, wild kangaroos and wallabies bounding outside my window. The smell of bush and the company of friends. I could feel the life-force re-filling me. I spent a relaxing week far away from the world I had stagnated in, and felt new and refreshed.

The following weekend we went down to Redland Bay in separate cars to do our radio show. I decided to swing past home the next morning and grab some things, seeing as I had left on a whim with practically nothing the week before. On our way back up the mountains, around 9am October 22nd 2001, we both pulled over for breakfast at a small café. We all felt fine and fit, so off we went again. I followed Allan about ten kilometres past Cunninghams Gap, then fell asleep at the wheel and ran off the road. I rolled in the ditch, end over end, at a hundred Ks an hour, the car coming to a rest about fifty metres from the highway, crushed and upside down in a paddock.

I remember only snippets. The sensation of the car rolling, being flung half out of my seat belt. Glass, everywhere. And the sounds. I'll never forget the sounds. I have never known if I was unconscious for any length of time, but I do remember coming-to with my head pressed against the roof, fragments of glass cutting through my hair. I was bleeding badly from my forehead. I grabbed a floor mat and pressed it to my head, got untangled from the seat-belt and crawled out through the window.

Now I know why I've never written about this; I'm having trouble keeping it together. Just taking a minute...



Ok, I'm back. Sorry about that. Anyway, I remember I couldn't actually see because of the blood in my eyes, so I don't know how far away from the wreckage I had managed to get myself. But I heard several voices of people running up from the highway, one of which was a woman that I'll never, ever forget.

"Oh my God! He's alive. Someone ring the ambulance? Hey, hey, are you ok?"
 She rested my head on her knees; I never saw her, only heard her voice. She kept me together until the ambulance arrived, asking me questions to make sure I hadn't lost it or gone into shock. I was fully lucid, and could recall my name, family names, addresses etc. To this day I regret never getting her name or finding out who she was. Maybe she was my guardian angel, I don't know. I didn't even get to thank her for being there for me. (If by some freaky twist of fate you are reading this ma'am, I am forever grateful. Please get in contact so I can tell you in person.)

Only memory of the ambulance is the rough suspension, nice paramedics and the FLIES!!! Bloody hell I must have been covered in the little buggers. I still can't stand a fly on my face; it just sends me right back there! Strangely enough, there was little in the way of pain. It's been like that with most major traumas in my life actually. Small cut or scratch and it'll sting like anything, slice a half-inch into my big toe with a sheet of glass and I barely feel it. Maybe you're like that too... or perhaps I'm just a freak. No idea. I'm pretty sure my head throbbed, but honestly there was no real pain to speak of. The ambos still made me suck on their darn pain-relief thingo, though, which delivered some sort of dry powder medication. Every breath of it made me cough, which DID hurt everything!

Would you believe, though, despite the horrendous conditions of that accident and the clear odds that I should have died, I walked out of that hospital on the same day. Still can't believe that. I saw photos of my car, a twisted crumple of metal. If I'd had a passenger, they'd have been killed by decapitation as the passenger-side roof sheered away from the frame, and there was so much flying debris from my possessions flinging loose from the back seat, that it's simply impossible that I survived intact.

Yet here I am twelve and a half years later, writing this out for the first time with goose-bumps and cloudy eyes. Husband, father to four, and in a business that helps people everyday. I'm not religious, but damn if that ain't some sort of miracle. The only scar with me today is one across my right shoulder, where I had two surgeries in the following years to re-attach my clavicle, but that's a story for another day.

And you know the one thing that really has stayed with me, and what I'd like to think outlines my core values as a person now? I asked that lovely lady something at the accident scene. Lying in a paddock on a strangers lap, bleeding from the head, surrounded by the wreckage of my car and not knowing how badly I was injured or whether I was going to live, the first thing I asked was, "Did I hurt anyone else? Please say I didn't hit anyone else." Thankfully, I hadn't.

Now, I'm not saying that as if to be all high and mighty on myself. Honestly, I sort of find it difficult to correlate myself with myself, if you know what I mean. The whole incident was so unworldly that I feel like it was another person that had the accident, I'm just seeing his memories. But it was me, and my primary thought, as a 20 yr old boy involved in a horrific car crash from which I should be dead, is for someone else. That's a moral to live by, and young Damien taught it to me. I'm so proud of that kid. He had no idea of what lay before him at that point, but someone or something had a hand in him coming out of that accident alive. Maybe, just maybe, an innate sense of caring for others had something to do with it.

That's the motto I still live by now. I've used it to guide the way I interact with others, and how I run my business. With any luck, my little light is making way for a better world. Shine yours with me, will ya!

Thanks so much for reading. It means a lot.
Till next time,
-Damien.

Repeat Sexual Offender or Biological Misfit?

A rather serious subject under discussion in this post; one which has often surfaced in my mind along with a passing intellectual curiosity. I'm an opinionated bloke, though generally not without first educating myself with the basic facts surrounding a subject.

Recently here in Australia there has been a paedophile/murder case going through the courts subject to substantial media coverage and public discussion. Out of respect to the family involved I won't mention any names or even the specific case, but I'm sure that even if you live halfway to Timbuktu you would have caught a snippet of the case and results on your local world-news broadcast at some stage over the last week or so.

This particular case has sparked much talk about a proposed Sexual Offender Register, mainly fanned by the Australian "Human Headline" himself, Mr Derryn Hinch. (Google him; he's a tripper!) While I personally think that on the surface the idea holds merit, I believe that if one looks just that little bit deeper into the possible outcomes of such a register, you'd find something like that would quickly turn the society to mush.

Firstly there's the vigilantly factor. In every town there'd be some meat-head that would round up a posse and go around stringing these sick buggers up. While I wouldn't necessarily want to put a stop to that, I'm sure we all agree that is not the way a "civilised" society such as the one we think we uphold would want to act.

Then there are other issues like where does one draw the line for and define a sexual offender? Is the 17yr old fella that has sex with his under-age girlfriend in the context of a loving relationship considered a sexual offender? Should he be listed forever and shunned by society? And there's the not-in-my-back-yard thing, where these supposedly rehabilitated sexual offenders can't find a place to settle back into normal life because nobody will allow them to move in next door.

Now don't get me wrong. I've got four children, and if one of my neighbours was a released sexual offender, I'd want to know about it. However, it would create a conundrum. While it may allow me to protect my kids, it would also have me wanting to toss a half-litre of petrol over the fence, promptly followed by a match! I don't want someone like that living next door any more than you want him next to your house. But is knowing that they are there a help or a hindrance to a normal society? Is it both?

I just can't see how a register of sexual offenders would work. Really though, if you really sit down and nut it out like I have, you may eventually come to an even bigger question that negates the first.

If they just stayed in prison, would a register even be needed?

You see, my argument would be: how is it that these people are allowed back into society at all? And before you human rights people jump up and down at that comment, first hear me through. There's a very simple thing that everyone seems to be forgetting when it comes to the way we, as a society, look upon repeat sexual offenders and paedophiles.

Just like you and I, they a living breathing biological beings. The Human, or Homo Sapien, are a species of mammal and part of the animal kingdom. Just like any other animal, the major driving force of the Human is to survive as a race. In case you weren't aware, to survive involves in simple terms the acts of eating, breathing and reproducing. For the purposes of this blog, it's that last one I'd like us to focus on... or at least the further verbs brought up when one thinks about that very innocuous verb, "reproducing."

Let's do an experiment. When I give the signal, there's something I'd like you to do. I need you to close your eyes and picture for me your favourite partner; the one person in your life that you have been most physically and sexually attracted to. It can be the girl you lost your virginity to twenty years ago, your current boyfriend, wife or lover, or some movie star that you've always secretly had a crush on. For me, it's my wife of 11 years. (That's why we got four kids, dude!)

Imagine that person standing very close to you; the lights are turned down, or off, with a soft moonlight flowing past the curtains and a gentle breeze caressing your bare skin. There's a low, rhythmic music wafting from the room next door where, after the last hour or so of flirting, talking and teasing each other across the dinner table, you have both now retired to the bedroom. As your partner wraps their body around yours, your skin pressing together, you draw a deep breath. Their scent surrounds you, as the tingling stroke of their fingers sliding down your body brings fire to your senses. Slowly, you both move onto the bed...

Okay, here's the signal. Close your eyes now and imagine all of that. Really get into it; imagine you are there right now with that person in that room.... I'll leave you two alone for a minute.

Done? Goodo. Now if you did it right, you may have found that your heart rate has just lifted slightly, breathing has increased and you're feeling just a little warm. A mirror may reveal a flushed expression with flared nostrils. Hormones are bouncing forth all over your body. If you have a FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine handy, quickly stick your head in it for a second and then have a look at the results. They may look like this:

Coincidently, I've heard that some people have a similar response to eating chocolate.

Now you want to hear something scary? When a paedophile stands across the road looking at a child playing in a playground, or a rapist is picking his next victim on a park walkway, he is having these same reactions. I've seen it in a documentary, so it must be true. While in no way do I condone that, I do recognise that it is a basic biological reaction called arousal, working the same way as in you or I. Only difference is, their biological reaction is sparked by the wrong thing. We are not naturally built to be aroused by a young child's appearance, no more than a tom-cat is going to be aroused by a kitten. But for some reason, in these people, things aren't wired correctly.

You see what I mean? That right there is the fundamental reason why we all need to open our eyes and recognise that a repeat sexual offender, especially a paedophile, is not just your average run-of-the-mill criminal. If a bloke steals a car and goes to prison, he can be educated, rehabilitated and given a purpose in life. In an ideal world, when that bloke is released he is free to lead a fulfilling life, without the stealing of cars. Same theory for a convicted fraud, drug addict or gangster. Even a murderer. Now, if the car thief gets a hard-on every time he lines up a BMW to steal, you may have a problem.

I'm absolutely no Neurologist, but from what I've heard and read in my meagre 30-odd years, I would think that a man's sexual urges and arousal triggers can't be changed too easily. Yes the brain is "plastic" and can be modified, but when it comes to the things buried very deep in our primitive brain, how pliable are they? I mean, can a person's neurological make-up be altered to, say, no longer need food to eat? I hear your argument, that it's not just the brain that needs food; it's the whole body which would eventually drive the fasting nutter to eat something. True, dear, but it's the same thing with sex. Your body needs that as much as your brain. Why do you think the Catholic church is having such issues? No person is naturally able to abstain from sexual interaction. It goes against everything that makes us a biological being. We may think we are all high, mighty and can control nature, but in the end Human's are still just a type of animal, subject to animal urges and needs.

With this view in mind, when I hear that the perpetrator in a serious sexual crime against a child has a history of such acts, but was released from prison previously with the aid of a Psychiatrist's advice that the offender had "rehabilitated" while incarcerated, I can't help but shake my head. The ignorant futility of it all is, at the least, frustrating.

For a game, let's say there is a law against eating chocolate. It's considered the worst crime known to man. I did it a few decades a go, got caught, and have been in prison for half my life, on and off a rehabilitation program. My parole has just come up. I'm not a bad liar (comes with being a story-teller), and I reckon with a bit of work I could convince a shrink that I had changed, seen the error in my ways, was born again, and from this day forth I was no longer going to eat chocolate. And blow me down if I wouldn't give it a bloody good go at staying away from it. But you know what? Eventually, and despite all the consequences, I'm going to give in to the urge and eat that chocolate again. Just once.

If society really wanted me not to eat chocolate, they should have just kept me in prison where I couldn't get my hands on the stuff.

Now, eating chocolate is not paedophilia. I have no intention of diminishing the abhorrent nature of such a crime, or belittling the hurt that such cases have caused the families involved. But I think you get my point. These people are not as much criminal as they are mentally ill. There is a condition you may have heard of called Object Sexuality, where a person can exhibit "a pronounced emotional, often romantic and even sexual desire towards developing significant relationships with particular inanimate objects." (Wikipedia)

While that's not considered a crime, it is not natural/normal, thus subject to clinical treatment. Could not the same be said for someone exhibiting "a pronounced emotional, often romantic and even sexual desire towards developing significant relationships" with under-age children? That is a crime, and should be severely treated as such. But from an initial pre-crime point of view, how is it any different from a man that is only ever aroused by a redhead woman? Or a woman turned on only by a short man with dimples and a bald spot? Or a person that has intimate dreams about their teacher, boss or a toaster?

In my opinion they simply need to be kept well away from society, indefinitely, hopefully until medical technology advances to the point where their brains can be re-wired at the touch of a button. In doing that, a Sexual Offender Register, and all it's related problems, would then never be needed. What do you think? It's a big deal, either way, but I reckon before governments go making any knee-jerk reactions after one of these cases, there needs to be some changes in common thought. We can't keep putting these people away, then letting them out in a few years with this naive view that they're all better for being behind bars, only to have them go out and victimise some other poor innocent child.

Fix it, people! The world is full of experts that know a million times what I know. Why haven't these incredibly learned people found a solution to this problem (and many others)????

Anyway, nothing I can do from my living room chair. But I do feel better for ranting. Feel free to agree or disagree, and comment to such ends below.

Till next time,
-Damien.

First Time Home Buyer... Finally

Things are so exciting right now in the Malcolm household. After a decade of fighting for it, we have finally been able to purchase our first home. And the weirdest thing: it's the shortest move in human history. Why? Because we have bought the very house that we've been renting for the last 2 years!

It all started years ago, when I was still a part-time s*#^kicker at a local caravan park earning a measly $24,000 a year. May sound like a lot to readers living in a third world country, (or maybe even the USA as I hear proportionately your wages are low compared to ours),  but ask any Aussie and he/she will tell you that, "that sort of dough ain't buyin' ya squat in Austraya, mate. Bloody oath, bonza ripper. Bar-B. That ain't a knife... this is a knife." E-hem, sorry about that. However, my wife and I both grew up in poor families, so when it came to money we are both as tight as a badger's sweat pore. Anything that came in, we saved.

Then, when I got laid-off from that job and took up a night shift gig at the local fuel servo, things got a little hairier. (Is "hairier" a word?) I was only working 3 days a week, pulling approximately $340, while my lovely wife was about to quit work to give birth to, and look after, our first child. Things were about as tight as they could get. We'd not long been married, at 21 and 22, we were still running two cars, and were about to move from a tiny two-bedroom flat into a tiny three bedroom house half a block up the road. That was quite funny actually, the move. We had the best removal vehicle our money could buy... a baby pram. Don't worry, the baby, only a couple of months old, wasn't in the pram at the time. That'd be irresponsible. She made him crawl behind on a leash.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, things were tight. But somehow, we still managed to squirrel away a little money every fortnight. Then I got asked to come back to the caravan park full-time. Apparently the crazy-lady they had taken a punt on when they chose who to lay off 8 months earlier was more crazy—and less of a lady—than they'd anticipated. So there I was back s*#^-kicking with a small pay-rise (about $6000 a year more than my previous employment there). That was around about the time that child number two was coming along.

Wasn't long into that stint that my wife and I started investigating the option of buying a house. There came a couple of times that our position in the current rental looked perilous, due to house sales and such, and the idea of having a house ripped out from beneath my family was not what I'd call good. Back then, house prices in our town were pretty low, around 145K, and we thought we may have been able to crack it. Apparently not.

Fast forward almost ten years and two more kids, and things were looking a little more rosy, financially. (What? So we've had 4 kids under 5. It gets cold where we live and there's not a lot to do of a night-time. And before you say, "get a TV", we had already tried that and it didn't make a pinch of difference. Maybe it had something to do with the way I sleep...[insert subtle throw-back to an earlier blog post]) A few years before we'd had a neat little nest egg saved up, just a titch over 12K, but when the forth kiddie was about to come along, we realised that we weren't all going to fit in the car we had at the time. Down goes the bank balance. But we'd whacked the loan and rebuilt a bit of savings again. We started trying the banks to test the water and see if they'd give us anything. "Just can't get the servicing to work", they'd all say. I hate that word now. No, not work; I've always hated that word. Servicing is the one I dislike.

So we gave up trying, just focusing on saving every cent we didn't have to spend. Around the same time, I had started my little handyman business, which to my surprise had taken off like a seagull and defied all expectations. I made a turn over of $43,000 in my first year. First year! Blew me away. And I wasn't ripping anyone off to do it, either. Just working bloody hard. The second year went up a little bit, then again the next year. I past with flying colours the two year threshold where they say half of all small businesses fail.

A couple of years later we had a nicer little nest egg stowed away, and we decided it was again time to try for a home loan. We had just moved from a squishy three-bedroom brick thing on a block of land big enough to run around forty-three times in under a minute, into a five bedroom (one for each kid!!!) ex-queenslander on 1300 square metres. Heaven. By the way, for non-locals, a "queenslander" is a mid-late 20th century Australian home design. Ask Mr Google and his mates at the Interwebs. Anyway, I knew the owner; he was a customer through the business. To sweeten the deal for us, he took the house off the market, but said he was still dead keen on us buying it. Basically as an investment property, it was a bit crap. It had cost him a bit of money and was only likely to cost him more, so he wanted it gone. I said, "sure mate, we'd love it. I'll go down to the bank and see what they say."

It was a no go, still. Despite making more money running a business than I'd ever made working for someone else, ironically it was the running of the business that was stopping the numbers from checking out. I asked if he could just wait a little while until we saved some more and see what the banks said then. He said, "sure", waited six months then promptly put it back on the market. Thanks for the tiny bit of back-stabbing there, old mate. Real honourable. So we had to deal with weirdos wandering through our house, looking in our kids' cupboards and being asked to perform changes to make the house "more appealing" to prospective buyers. Blurgh. But luckily, the owner had far too much on it and it never actually looked like selling.

Until late last year.

A young couple came through, going on how they really liked it, planning where their dogs would sleep and which room she was going to do her hair in. They put it under contract, and it looked like my four kids, wife and I would be out on the street in less than two months. Wouldn't have been the first time for me, as I've been homeless before... twice. But with kids, that's a scary prospect. However, they asked too much of the owner in the contract, and he wasn't willing to come to the party. Then they wanted a lower price; he wouldn't come to that either. Like a miracle, the contract fell through and we were once again safe.

All while this had been going on, a mate of mine gave me a call out of the blue one day and suggested I waddle down to a particular local bank and have another go at a loan. He'd just got one, and by his calculations I was in a better state that him, so I was a shoe-in. So I did waddle down, and the young girl that was there filling in for the holidaying regular loans manager brought us in and went over our financials. She said she reckoned it'd go through at $150,000, with a weekly repayment of $208/week. I said to her as we were leaving the room, "if we don't get that at such a pathetic payment amount, I'm going to cry." At the time we were paying $280/week in rent.

We bloody got it, didn't we? I couldn't believe it. And the lady on the phone that gave me the pre-approval, said that the amount she had cleared was $170,000. I questioned the difference, and she explained that she thought 150 was too low, so she bumped it up to see what would happen! Amazing. Especially when only a few weeks before, we'd been in the loans office of another major Australian bank that have a name beginning with "Comm", and the woman on the tele-conferencing computer screen told us, "well, I'm not even going to bother telling you the number you qualify for with us. You can't do anything with that." Cold that was. Bloody cold.

So, after getting pre-approved for a purchase price of 200K, we spent a couple of weeks looking for anything with in our budget, thinking that pretty soon these peoples' contract was going to go through and we'd have to move. Do you reckon we could find anything that was going to fit our voracious brood? Not a chance. Small, small, tiny and cramped. Did I mention small? It was frustrating, to say the least. There we were with the first home-loan "possible yes" either of us had achieved in our lives, and there was nothing we could do with it. Our eldest son has Asperges, and there was just no way he (therefore us) was going to cope living in any of the houses that we looked through.

Christmas 2013 came and went, with us still floating in limbo an not knowing what to do. The contract for the other people had fallen through, but we were still lost. Should we buy a dump and try to make it work, or just let the pre-approval slide and keep renting? Until one day, I reported a small maintenance issue to the Real Estate and received a note that the girl was going to come around and have a look at it, and that the owner wanted to come too. We thought that was weird. Then the owner turned up ten minutes early, shook my hand and started the conversation with, "So, when are you going to buy my house?" "As soon as you drop the price to two hundred thousand, mate," I replied. He started stammering and mumbling something about two ten. I popped inside to get some photos of the house to show him, thinking I could bolster our case, and when I return my wife says, "We can do two five, can't we? Well, shake his hand then. We've just bought the house."

Bloody wow. The final approval on the loan came through, and now today six weeks later, I'm sitting on a couch writing this in the very first home I've ever owned. I've already been up and started painting the roof. It's fibro and needs a good covering to buy us time till we can rip it off. She's going to look sweet! We've got a few more changes to make, and the place is old, which means maintenance. But hey, guess what? I'm a handyman, so that bit's kinda sorted.

I still just can't believe it. I suppose it will feel more real when I hold our first rate bill, choking on bile through gritted teeth as I hand over a cheque for around $2500. Till then, I'm quite happy to be only half in reality. Nothing I have has been given to me by anyone, which is the way it should be. No value in a hand-out. I work for everything, both physically and mentally, and I'm ok with that. With that philosophy in mind, I look back to before I was married, when I was sleeping in the back of my car at a camping ground, and then peruse the journey between there and here... Well, it just makes me smile, really.

And the moral to this story: if you have a dream or goal that you've been fighting for, please don't give up on it, even when it looks like you'll never get there. Because just at that point when hope fades to fear and hopelessness, you too could be just six weeks away from holding the figurative key (spare key, in our case, obtained from the real estate because we already had the full sets) to your metaphorical first home. You'll get there. Just keep at it.

Thanks for reading. Till next time,
-Damien.

My take on the Social Media Circus

I've been using a couple of different social media platforms for a while now; long enough to have a reasonably good grasp on what's hot and what's not. If you're interested in my view, read on and feel free to leave a comment below.

Now first of all, allow me to clarify which minimal number of sites I use and have an opinion on. It may be obvious from the side bar to your right that I use the basics, Facebook and Twitter. (If you're not viewing this on the actual blog, then you can't see what I'm talking about. I took the liberty of placing a link to here below, as well as links to me on Facebook and Twitter. Bookmark them for endless streams of my brain-dribble.)

{ http://www.damienlmalcolm.blogspot.com }
{ http://www.facebook.com/damienlmalcolm }
{ http://www.facebook.com/WinchesterSeries }
{ http://www.twitter.com/damienlmalcolm or the handle @DamienLMalcolm }

Anywho, I mainly only use these two because, well quite frankly, nothing else measures up. And when I say "measures up", I mean exactly that. For me, Facebook ranks about a 9 on the usefulness scale, with Twitter toddling behind at around a 6. I'm also supposedly on Google+, which sits at more than zero, but less than one on my scale. I'd place you a link for my page on there, if I could find one. Like the rest of Google+, it's pointless trying.

In fact, while we're on the topic of Google+, may I state the obvious and say that I find it incredibly crap. Google, God bless 'em, really did try to drag themselves into the social arena. They just didn't cut it, I'm afraid. I signed up for a "+" page because all the experts said it was the thing to do when you're an author looking to make headway in the big wide world. Now I find myself wondering why I did it. I "circled" a couple of people, shared a couple of posts and "+1'd" a few things (Seriously? +1? Who the hell came up with that???) but it just never grew on me. Every now and again, I drop back and check the page, only to find a disjointed, odd-coloured stream of random things from various people I don't know; presumably things that are "trending" in the magical world of +es. I don't know. Just seems pointless.

Twitter on the other hand, does fill a small gap in a person's social media requirement quota. Though I'm not sure if I use Twitter in the same way as everyone else. To me, Twitter is a great method of speaking, in short sentences, directly with a person, whether it be someone you know, or a person somewhere up in the ethereal wonderland. It's almost like having a phonebook with the mobile phone numbers of anyone remotely famous. You can send little text messages to celebrities just like you would your best mates.  I've tweeted to ABC radio presenters (they reply), movie stars and musicians (they don't reply) and even other authors (sometimes they reply). It gives me a little tickle when someone even mildly famous tweets back to me directly, favourites or retweets something I said. It shows their human, and respecting their audience, which is nice. Only a few years ago celebrities where sooo distant from us down here, and the only way you could contact them was to write to a fan club. On paper! Now the world of twitter brings many of them down out of that unreachable cloud, and allows an everyday bloke like myself to send small compliments and opinions to them, and have the sometimes respond. It's nice, and does a lot toward bringing us all together that bit more.

I made the mistake when I first signed up for Twitter of following quite a few people and re-following anyone who followed me, then treating the newsfeed the same way I treat Facebook. It was a big mistake because if I didn't check that newsfeed in a day, I'd have a stream of literally hundreds of tweets to scroll over. And they'd be everything from "I have a small spot on my left buttock cheek" retweeted from some cracker in the US, to a traffic report of a local car accident four hours ago, to a Youtube preview of the latest Dr Who episode, to the twenty-fifth repeat of a tweet about an author's kindle page, or a beautiful picture of the Aurora Borealis. The record on my feed for one 24hr period is 262 tweets, with a ratio of around 70/30 crap. You see, one vast difference between Facebook and Twitter is where the Facebook newsfeed sort of picks out the best things to show you from your various friends and liked pages, which means you may miss the odd thing, Twitter gives you EVERYTHING.

In other words, there was enough important or interesting stuff to keep me scrolling and actually reading, as well as enough rubbish to just make me want to close the account. I've since learned that apparently the way to truly use Twitter as a news facility is to have an app like Tweetdeck or something sitting open all day on your office computer so you can see the feed in real-time, as opposed to exhaustingly scrolling it on your phone while brushing your teeth at 11pm. In such a way, I can understand how Twitter is a massively useful service for news producers and media. Only problem with that is, being a mobile Handyman, I don't work at a desk all day. So using Twitter in real-time for me is unobtainable, even if I wanted to. Just means I get a tweet from an ABC Radio host saying, "an interview with [insert famous person or politician] is live on air right now", five hours after the interview occurred. But as I say, it is still very useful for chatting to people directly, which can be fun... if maybe a little annoying for the recipient. (Sorry Belinda. I tweet because I care. :) )

By the way, I once did a "Know Your Promotional Skill Level" quiz on the Interwebs, that basically asked me questions to suss out how good I was at selling myself and my books. I got most of the questions right, but one of the ones I got wrong was one relating to Twitter. It said something like, "How frequently should you tweet? A: Every hour? B: Once a day? C: 2 - 3 times a week?" I answered 2 to 3 times a week, because at the time I was completely over being bombarded with other people's tweets about nothing, and as a rule that's the rate I'm comfortable tweeting at. I was wrong. Apparently, the correct answer was A: Every hour.

Every bloody hour?? No wonder I was getting bombarded, if that's what the experts are telling people to do. There are people following me that have 25,000 other people that they follow. If every one of those nutters did that quiz and decided to ramp up their profile, that would amount to a total of 500,000 tweets a day! A bloke would do nothing else but sit at a computer all day reading tweets about how cold some lady's toes are because of the snow falling in Istanbul. That's not a life. And the bit that got me the most was, the thing gave me advice at the end saying that I should consider purchasing a third party app that can automate my tweets for me to "boost my market penetration". So I could send out a tweet saying "Buy my book here https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/259889?ref=damienlmalcolm " over and over again, every single hour, 24 hours a day. Wow, I'm sure my followers are going to be right into that! I've had that sort of thing in my newsfeed before, and it sucks. In fact, now if I get that, I report it as spam. And I've since un-followed most of my Twitter-friends, the ones I actually don't find any interest in, and thankfully reduced my feed down to manageable levels.

Facebook, on the other hand, ticks every box. I keep my friends down to only people I actually know, I run a page for my first book, another for my local Handyman business which gets great response from customers, and I leave most of my private page open to the public as a bit of an author thing for followers. Facebook's newsfeed scrolls at a comfortable pace, allowing a busy bloke to just pop in once or twice a day for five to ten minutes at a time while hoeing down some lunch between jobs. I can whack up a photo easily (not of my lunch!) and it keeps me abreast of the goings-on. It's great for funnies. Of course the peaceful harmony I speak of can also be abused by some, which leads to addiction. The average young person seems to have around 800 friends on Facebook, and I once saw a profile of a fella that had 2,500 friends and liked 27,000 pages! What's the point in that? If I post something on my page, a bloke like that is never going to see it. My post would be buried under a mountain of who knows what, and unless he checks his feed literally every single waking minute of his day, he'd simply never keep up. Bloody nuts!

From a promotional point of view, Facebook is good in the way that I can rig up a small ad and target it directly to my audience, who then receive a small box at the side of their page with a pic of my book in it. The ads are, for the most part, unobtrusive but focused, meaning my meagre advertising budget is being spent efficiently and it's not going out to people who would only be annoyed by it. Like Twitter, Facebook also lets you talk directly with some people, though if it's a famous person you're wanting to chat to, chances are they're actually paying someone else to manage their page for them and you're not really taking to the stars themselves.

I've never tried out the other social networking sites that seem to be springing up like weeds in a farmer's paddock. There used to be Bebo, there are old narrow-band ones like Myspace and Linkedin, and there are all these new weird little chat things I keep hearing about. But really, there's no point  me checking out any of them. Between having a family, running a business, writing books, keeping up with current social sites and occasionally scribbling out something on this blog, this bloke's just a little too busy to need any extra commitments right now. Speaking of which, it's time I nodded off.

Please feel free to let me know what social networks you use most, and what you think of them. Agree with my views? Disagree? Tell me how you feel in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

Till next time,
-Damien.