⚖️ Wednesday weigh-in: "She eats too much" (Patreon)

Hey friends 👋🏼

Hoping that a smashing week has been had by all. Mine was pretty mixed. Things aren't too wonderful at work at the moment - it's a difficult time for a lot of businesses, I think, and it's all having a knock-on effect. The upside of this, though, is that I'll be pushing to try to make more money here: not with price increases; just by creating more to encourage more subscribers and possibly by offering a new tier with some additional benefits mid-March - about which more will be revealed next week!

Writing and creating wise, things have been going much better. Working on my Abby Valentine pic was a challenge that improved my Photoshop skills a fair bit, and I'm now in the midst of a couple of commissioned pics for KewlKidz, where I'm having fun with creating the character likeness he's after. I love challenges like this - ones that force me to learn new techniques and improve.

On the writing front, I've been tinkering with a short scene involving Sarah, Zoe and Lauren for last week's FA writing prompt: Haunt. I'm a few weeks behind with these prompts, but the soft accountability is really helping me to write a lot more, and I'm turning out some fun little scenes. I've got three now that are partially complete, and will have at least one posted here next week.

I've also made some breakthrough progress with the next part of TLWL! Collective sigh... Yeah Hal, you say that a lot. And it's true, and I do understand how frustrating it must be. I'm trying to think of more ways to post snippets and updates and drafts more frequently, along with some pic previews, but ultimately writing (at least for me) involves a lot of chopping changing, scrapping, altering, wailing, and hair-tearing despair and unbridled jubilance that can't be publicised (or can it?). All I can do is promise that I write for an hour and a half each morning now before work, and whenever I can in the evenings, and I'm confident that the results will be worth the wait. And, at least in this case, that barring any debilitating injury the wait will be over before 4th March.

In the meantime, here's a little real-life FA highlight from my own week...

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"She Eats Too Much"

It's Saturday afternoon, and I'm having a couple of drinks in a bar with a friend who I haven't seen for a few months. Having discussed football, work, memories and how other friends are getting on, I get around to asking how his wife is doing.

'Good,' he says. 'She's gone out for lunch with the uni girls.' And he sighs.

As sighs go, it's not the wistful, longing kind - the ones generally accompanied by a soulful gaze into the horizon. Peeved is perhaps a more accurate description. Even mildly disgruntled. A sigh with good deal of sufferance in it.

Enough, at least, to make me raise a questioning eyebrow.

Friend sighs again. 'When she goes out with her girlfriends,' he explains. 'She always eats too much.'

'Oh really?'

He nods slowly, apparently oblivious to the squawking pitch of my reply and the fact that the second word bumped into the back of the first. 'Yep.'  Another sigh.  'It's as if when they get together, they get excited, and they all say to each other..." he pauses to spread his arms wide dramatically "...let's order a feast!" '

Needless to say, it was with added enthusiasm that I accepted his invitation to go back to his house for some post-drinks FIFA. And after a few defeats very much befitting the real-life fortunes of my team (Everton) and a few more beers for good measure, the wife in question duly returns from her lunch.

Our hello hug is certainly a little on the tipsy side, from both directions, and then she plants herself on the sofa with a little huff. She watches the screen quietly for a while as we continue to pass and tackle and shoot and - in my case - get Doucouré sent off.

'You'll still be playing that game when you're fifty,' she says a little sleepily.

'Probably... imagine how good the graphics will be by then."

This earns us a little good-humoured snort. 'Right,' she says. 'I'm going to lie down for a bit.'

She presses her fists into the sofa. And out of the corner of my eye I see it... that little 'bunch and bulge' that occurs around the waist when a slightly out-of-shape girl gets up from a soft seat. The lean forwards as the fists sink into the cushion squishing the belly into two rolls in the middle; then when she stands and leans back to stretch, the shirt riding up to reveal that lovely inch or two of softly bulging belly - a comfortable swell over the rim of the jeans, indicating lunch was very good and that a wardrobe upgrade is on the near horizon.

A distraction well worth conceding that third goal for.

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All the best,

Hal x