How does this sound for a plot?

The wife has been looking around town with her husband for a new house for investment. They search high and low and keep looking until he finds exactly what it is that he's been looking for. It was not bad. Not bad at all.

She asks about the settlement on it, but he's very vague on details. But he's a busy man. Very very busy.

And suddenly he announces to her that he's decided he and the wife will have an 'amicable separation'. Oh? says she. Amicable? Look up dictionary. This doesn't describe the situation at all. So what can be used instead? And he swears on a stack of bibles that under no circumstances is there another woman.

Wife is only one to believe him because she always has. Everyone else is exchanging glances. He starts decorating house with a joyful pride which is almost indecent. Is the wife that awful to live with? After all there hadn't been any complaints up until that moment that could be discussed. Nor indeed ever discussed on any meaningful level. Just a wham bam, he's gone ma'am.

Well, at least give the wife a key since she owns half of the darned thing. Key willingly given. A couple of weeks later the house is entered by some nefarious burglar, but strangely the burglar hasn't taken anything. Ooooh. Very spooky. Is this going to be a suspense novel? But the locks have to be changed since there were no signs of a breakin.

So confounding as this is, the husband is assumed to be going through some sort of midlife crisis. Then through a calamitous set of circumstances the wife finds out quite accidentally that there is a mistress. And that a woman had moved in to live in the new love nest. The very same little nest he and his wife had been looking for investment purposes.

Caught! So the plan had been all along to live in it with the mistress and still to look like the good guy. But he got caught with the proverbials. (oh how this plot is thickening along nicely)

So the wife gets very angry and shoots off emails then collapses in total grief. This is, after all, worse than being a widow, no dead body to mourn. No self esteem since she's so ghastly to live with.

So in self defence he shoots back an email which is so nasty it upsets his hitherto very closely knit family. And he's like John Wayne shootin' from the hip. Bang Bang Bang. Ah'm gonna keep ma little woman. She's my trophy. She's closer to his eldest son in age than she is to him. In fact had fate been different it could have been her that could get to keep the son as a prize rather than the father. He tells us how we all going to get to know each other and play ball in the park and that things are going to be just fine and dandy. We might even have a Penney family day picnic. Spend Xmases together under the Xmas tree unwrapping pressies, hugging each other with so much love and understanding.

This plot is bubbling along nicely. Lots of little nuances here and there to play with.

But his children are very upset and write back what they really feel. And tell him that they no more believe he'd only just met the woman, than fly.

But clues start to build, like little pieces of jigsaw puzzle. Turns out he's been having an affair with an employee while he's been off in foreign parts, and that it has been such a cozy arrangement. She's been on a posting overseas but you see, she's due back and he has to find a little love nest for the love birds.

And now they live and work together every day. Off goes a little alarm bell in the morning and out of bed they hop. Kellog Cornflakes and coffee then skip off to work. Then at the end of the day it's dinner and bedtime.

And they live happily ever after.

I do so love a romance. I wonder if I can turn this into a comedy?

My best friend - A sorry tail...

Yes. I have a sorry tail to tell. I waved goodbye to it not too long ago and I ache. The tail belongs to my ex best friend.

The one with the tag in the front of the book that claims him as my rock. The one to whom I dedicated my first anthology story.

The tail end of a marriage full of love 35 years of total love and dedication.

But I have two new best friends.

My darling children. I've discovered what a beautiful bunch of people my ex-best friend made.

They are bewildered and as skittled as am I. We were such a tight little family and now we've been skittled by a huge bowling ball.

It hurts like hell, it sure does. Hurts so much that I think I have writer's block for the first time in my life. I can't do it at the moment, partly because I am basically a writer of comedy. And I can't really find anything funny in life at the moment.

How long will this take to get over? I don't know. My dreams are horrendous. Loss of self esteem is so big I never knew it could get to be this big. Are the days long? Yes. Am I forever beginning to jigsaw things into one piece? Dunno, but little bits of evidence of the lead up are beginning to fall into place, and I can sort of work out about what time the ex-best friend was buying the bowling ball.

Do I hate the woman who took him? Yes I wish she'd fall off a mountain or get crushed by an avalanche, or that if she is on a boat it will sink, but it's not really her that I know I should be angry with.

Have my children got huge issues to deal with? A huge yes...on what is a relationship, since their whole belief system has been crushed. OH YES! To them we were almost an institution. Like a building that could never fall.

At the moment if you asked me what I feel like - I'd cryptically tell you like Pompeii.

If you understand that then you are on the same wavelength as me and you understand.