I am temporarily homeless. I am without home. All of our worldly possessions were packed up and shipped off to Melbourne a few weeks ago. A city I have never seen. Well okay, I saw it once in 1995 but I think I was drunk for that entire year so it doesn’t really count. But as yet I am not in Melbourne; my wife and I are living in the little seaside town of Albany for a couple of months while she finishes off a contract for her work. We are staying in a nice little apartment on the seaside all paid for by the company dime. I have resigned from my job and now here I sit. So not only without a home, but without gainful employment. What a treat.

So I spend my time taking walks along the beach and around wind swept headlands where enormous waves from the Southern Ocean come crashing in to sweep Vietnamese fishermen off the rocks. It’s all quite exciting. The other thing that I am doing is attempting to finish off the second draft of my book as my editor is getting rather upset with me in a very American way. It’s all okay as I know just how to needle him. My preferred method is to remind him of my opposition to gay marriage. Shazam! And off he goes for some frothing at the mouth. If that fails I can always fall back on casting doubt on man-made global warming, but that’s less fun now as even he is beginning to realize that it all might have been a giant con to begin with. So I pound away at my book, and I walk around the sea, and when I’ve done enough of these I allow myself the luxury of playing Skyrim the Dragonborn expansion.

It’s really rather neat. Well, it’s neat now that I’ve worked out how to get it going. I actually adventured around the island of Solstheim for a good few hours before it finally dawned on me that maybe I was missing something. I saved miners from hordes of undead, (a quite excellent reiteration of a dragur tomb – who said that these things were boring? Not me!), pummeled the life out of ash monsters, killed hordes of little jabbering mutants and even got made their chief, saved the town’s leaders from imminent assassination, (oh yeah, spoilers), and ventured into the netherworlds by reading hideous black books with writhing tentacles spewing forth to wrap themselves around my face.

But all the while I was getting a tad frustrated by the fact that the obvious badass baddy on the island was whomever it was that had mind controlled most of the population and enlisted them to build giant phallic effigies with thrusting green neon lights. Now don’t go me wrong, I’m all for a good phallic thrusting effigy but the fact was that it was starting to gnaw on me that I was supposed to be able to do something about this. And yet, and yet. I tried many things but even killing every person in sight didn’t bring the big dark baddy out of his hidey hole. Things really got serious when my own follower disappeared. My faithful companion ended up mind enslaved. I had had serious plans for her too. Serious plans.

So I did what every player with half a brain does in these situations – I looked it up on the internet. And lo and behold it turns out that mindless cultists will attempt to kill me after I have completed the High Hothgar quest which I hadn’t bothered doing because this is my second character and I didn’t see the point. So off I went to High Hothgar and I shouted all the shouts, (thank fuck I had a few dragon souls stored away), and then whowouldathoughit, I get some bad dudes try to kill me and they leave a note. Which directed me back to the island where I had been walking around like an idiot for so long. Now I have a new follower who has some funky arse fighting moves and actually knows how to sneak. I’m in the temple and going to find the bad guy and …
Well I’m going to have to wait and see because today’s 1000 words for the book haven’t been done yet. And I don’t want to fall into the trap of spending my entire day playing video games. One does have responsibilities you know.