Learning to crawl

My little girl is learning to crawl - or at least, she’s trying to. She’s desperate to do it; she knows there's a whole world waiting for her, she can sense the freedom that's within her grasp...

But she can't quite get there. She hasn’t got the co-ordination: her arms move and her legs don’t, or her legs move and her arms don’t, until eventually she gets frustrated and cries for Daddy to help her get to where she wants to be.

I can’t help feeling there’s a message here somewhere…

Interesting debate

Looks like there is some interesting debate going on in parliament about lads mags...

I for one would be glad to see the back of them... I blame them in no small part for leading me to where I am, and on the whole I don't think they make any useful contribution to society (discuss).

A game of two halves

And with England now through to the quarter finals, I'd love to extend the footie metaphor, but I don't think it's match fit.

Last week was a bad week. It's just one of those things. Friday I was tired, which made me short-tempered, which meant I had a row with my wife, which meant I had to take out my frustrations with a bit of monkey punishment. It sucks. I'm useless. It's passed. My bad moments are a lot less bad than they once were. It's all relative. There is improvement.

Saturday I fought off the temptation. Just ignored it until it passed. It feels good to do that.

Sunday: I don't know if I was paying attention in church - possibly not to the sermon; maybe God had his own agenda for me - but I remembered a lot of stuff. How God will not let us be tempted beyond our ability to resist. How he's always there for us in the hard times. How he wants me to grow through this whole miserable experience, and ultimately come to a place where I can help others. How I am not, in fact, useless, whatever anonymous commenters might think :-P

And I got a fresh inspiration for the novel. Things started to fall back into place.

Things are looking up. I'm looking up.

Still tired.

The lack of sleep did lead me into a little slip last week, but I am pleased to report that it seems to have passed, and for the last few days I have been busy enough not to be troubled by the temptation to return.

Today I'm working at home again though, and am already vaguely troubled by occasional stray thoughts. I think I can build on a few good days, and playing some Christian music while I work usually stops my mind from straying too far in the wrong direction.

That and, of course, staying busy. So it's back to work now!

Novel ideas

Few people - certainly few porn stars - have had as much impact on my efforts to get free as Shelley Lubben, who wrote this powerful piece on what really goes on in the porn business.

When I first read that piece, I was shamed into quitting (again) and promised myself I wouldn't go back. But after a while I forgot what Shelley said, and went back. Every so often I would remember it, and feel I had let Shelley down, and all the potential Shelley's I was helping to keep employed in porn.

But what does all this have to do with the novel? Well, not much, except I was wondering whether to have our hero confronted by the truth of the porn world from the other side. Of course I only have vicarious experience of this side of things, so it wouldn't be 'writing about what you know', as such, but it may be powerful. It may be necessary. It may be a really bad idea. But it's an idea that's floating around the creative ether at the moment.

One thing I definitely want to tackle, because I do have experience of and I do believe it's a major problem, is the modern open-minded wife.

The open-minded wife says 'I don't care where he gets his appetite, as long as he comes home for dinner.'

Which is all well and good until he stops wanting dinner. Until his life becomes one long succession of unhealthy, unfulfilling snacks. And it happens so gradually that the open-minded wife may not realise anything has happened, until it's too late. (The metaphor dies at this point, sorry!)

I think the modern open-minded wife needs to be in my target audience along with her husband.

So tired!

I cannot sleep.
I am very tired.
It is making me not want to do my work.
That is making me want to randomly surf the net instead.
That way lies porn-filled madness.
Aaaaaaaaaaargh!!

Ways to waste time: a novel

When I first started this blog, it was after a particularly heavy binge, I'm talking three days straight on porn sites. I've never got quite back to that depth, but it has made me all the more aware of the hours that I am wasting looking for porn, downloading it, deleting it, then tracking it down again, downloading it, deleting it...

I wanted to stop wasting that time. I guess I thought I could spend that time with God, but I never really put the effort in to doing so. That is what I realised today. I need to spend the time I save by not porning with God.

Also, that novel I've been trying to write - I need to do that for the Lord. Not to become famous, not to make a bucket of cash, but to glorify God through my experiences.

And this is tough; I really, really want to be a novelist. Let us assume, for a moment, that I finish a novel about porn addiction. Let us assume that it gets published, and meets with modest success.

In that event, I may have to accept that it is the only novel I will ever have any success with. At the very least, I may have to use a pseudonym and not claim any links with it when seeking publication for any subsequent books. I may very well have to give up any royalties it makes. And the scary thing is, this last thing, right now, is something I feel able to do - to donate any money it might have made me to a charitable organisation in some way connected with porn addiction. But I still can't shake the feeling that I would do that in order to get my name out there as a novelist, for self-publicity, and ultimately self-gratification.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, of course; I'm talking about the hypothetical success of a book that is currently nothing more than a vague outline and one or two odd lines of prose. Even if it gets finished, the chances of it being published, never mind finding any level of success, are, realistically, slim.

On a more realistic note, following my first day on the Way of Purity, my mentor picked up on the fact that I'm not feasting on God's word (which I knew) and suggested that I journal my feasts for a couple of weeks or so...
so guess what my next post is going to be!

Next step: Phase Two

Phase Two in my attempt to get closer to God is to step up my writing about this problem, and make a serious start on that novel - a novel about porn addiction. I'm not going to get autobiographical - there's a perfectly good blog for that! - but my experiences, and what I believe could have happened to me if this went unchecked, will certainly be my primary source material.

I have tried to fictionalise this in the past, but things have always ended up heading towards sleaze and cheap titillation, just the kind of things I'm trying to avoid.

What I hope to achieve is to use the medium of story to highlight the issues of porn to the wider world.

Exactly how I do that I'm not sure at the moment; I have some vague ideas about structure, and a half-formed character who is, of course, addicted to porn... but I can't get around the feeling that I need a story on which to hang his descent into, and recovery from, porn addiction. I guess it's just that stories that centre on character growth with little in the way of action are not what I normally read, never mind write.

I think it is reasonable to assume, at this stage anyway, that my target audience would be primarily male (addicts, 'casual users' or potential addicts) and, in view of the subject material, adults (although I acknowledge that this takes out the teenage addicts who could probably do with knowing about this stuff, so it may well change depending on how the thing turns out).

So if there are any adult males out there who read anything other than sci-fi, fantasy or horror novels, I'd love to hear what it is you do like to read in the way of fiction.

Next step: Phase One

OK, I have said before that the next step in my attempt to get this back under control is to get back my relationship with God.

Phase One in that is to sign up to a Setting Captives Free course. I still have some reservations about this - specifically about confessing all (or any) to my wife at the moment - but I've given it a lot of thought and decided, what the heck, it's not like they're going to come looking for me if I refuse. (Incidentally, I'd like to say I've given it a lot of prayer, but that would just be a lie. My prayer life is rubbish at the moment. But I do feel a definite calling to do this, or something like it.)

It will take me longer than 60 days; I know that I at least won't log in most week-ends, and some days I will be out on business, but I'll give it a go, starting tomorrow, and post occasional thoughts, no doubt, here.

Like a dog to its vomit...

Once I've slipped once, I keep doing it. It's not always a conscious thing (though often it is); it's just that, having spent even a few minutes skimming the porn pages of the internet, a stack of fresh images are crowding into my mind. And they keep surfacing.

Sometimes they'll lure me back into the world of porn. Other times they will just lead me to mb, just in the hope it will get my mind off stuff. But all the time they are corrupting my mind, distracting me from what I should be thinking about, and just making me a big fat lust-monster.

What I'm trying to say is, that since slipping last week, I've struggled hugely to get back on the straight and narrow. And I have failed repeatedly.

The annoying thing is, I know that I can do it. I know I don't need this crap; I definitely don't need to keep coming along here to tell my faithful readers I've been doing porn again. But the part of me that wants to do it seems stronger than the part that doesn't. And the part that doesn't want to do it is struggling to find its focus again.

I know what I have to do next.

Like falling off a blog

Well, it might just be the natural aphrodisiac effect of the summer, or it could be that I was feeling too confident when I last posted, but by the end of Friday I could stand it no more. I forget, now, what triggered it, but I slipped. And, annoyingly, again this morning.

Still, that at least means I now have an immediate target to aim for: 17 days.

But that's just an incidental. The main thing is that as my year progresses, the amount of red on my calendar becomes steadily smaller.

Desperately Seeking Somebody

Somebody, from somewhere (he of the Porn War blog) has been missing in action for a couple of months.

Most of the strugglers whose blogs are linked from this site have been absent for some time, but Somebody was always a lot more regular (so to speak) than most. That may mean he's run out of stuff to say, I suppose, but I am a bit worried.

Mainly because I know that when I've gone AWOL for some time in the past, it has often meant I was too busy wallowing in porn to blog about its evils and my struggles with it.

So here's hoping that the same (or worse?) hasn't happened to Somebody. Check in, bro!

Still clean here, btw. :)