Let’s start with what’s been happening in the past year and how, no matter how hard one may try to prevent it, companies like to use your information for advertising.

This is the thing about advertising. Advertising is used to sell your own product and interests back to you. You don’t make anything out of it. I know I certainly didn’t.

‘Harry? Harry…?’

‘Oh Connie,’ he whispered brokenly. ‘You’re old.’

Things seemed to happen rather quickly after that. We were both shuttled back down the corridor. The security guard was to escort “Mr Blackman” back to his room, wherever that was, and had been given strict instructions to return to mine afterwards. Why, I didn’t know, but assumed I was some kind of security risk.

The above is an excerpt from the original manuscript.

I have an unpublished manuscript. Over the years I renamed it a few times. The starting story, a complete fiction, was called “The First Door.” Its beginnings were published on another WordPress website, and I expanded on the idea in an app by Scrivener called “Literature and Latte”. This app was taken from me when it was “noticed” that someone else was looking at my manuscript at exactly the same time I was. I supposedly lost all my work on That Day… Unfortunately for whomever it was who tried to take the story away from me, though, I had copies. After all, I had been working on the story by this time for many years. I knew exactly how the story, and its following stories, went.

The story behind that story was used from my own life experiences (but perhaps a little before the time I had actually become what a much younger generation might consider “old”). This is how we write stories. We use “what we know”. It is a given. If we do not use what we know, we need to research. If we cannot research truths in a library or in a book, we use the internet. Sometimes, this can go terribly wrong. It can go terribly, terribly wrong when the story one has written, a fiction, gets repeated back to that person again, and again… and again. If one does not have a strong mind, nor a strong heart, nor a strong soul, one can get lost in these lies and believe them to be truths, or, as the case may be, a vengeful, nasty person might decide this is a great way to send a person completely insane. I have some very succinct words for people like that and surprisingly, not so many of them have only four letters.

So, we invent stories. But we label a story clearly as a fiction when it is a fiction. When it is not a fiction, well, that’s not my department when it came to the particular story of which I speak.To invent means something must have a certain element of truth and experience. If one does not have the experience, or the truth, the lie is almost immediately known by those who have experienced the truth, or the experience. If one does not understand the difference between the truth and the lies, one is either too young to be given a fictional story, or too ignorant to understand the difference.

To create fiction we expand on truth, on history, and on experience. This is how a good story is formed. If one does not know, one can also ask the people who have experienced these things, to get an idea of what the truth is. If one does not ask, one does not learn. If one does not learn, one has chosen to be ignorant. We learn throughout our lives, and we listen to those who have come before us to have truth. The concept of “this is my truth” is dirtied by so-called “reality TV” and the calling out of a lie, so I will not use that catchphrase.

This is the start of my story to you — Kate (AKA Catherine) Capewell. Author of “Ambrosia Honeybun Polka Dot” and “The Top Secret Guide to Australian Slang”. Writer of “The First Door” AKA “That Day”, “Demented”, “Strange Bedfellows” (not the same as the original story at all) and “Out of Time”, a body of work that had its name changed many times over many years, but ending up with the title “Temper” or “The Temper”. This story remains unpublished, but sections of the story have been presented to you (in truth and in fiction), the people, in many forms over Twenty Twenty Four (2024). This story was written in Two Thousand and Fourteen (2014).

My personal or real–life story began in 1969.