Once upon a time I was deep in the jungles of Kuala Lumpur looking for Solla Sollew when I was bitten on the arse cheek by a viper. Trembling like a cheap foot massager from Walmart, I ran like a teenage girl for help. I got as far as halfway to heck when I accidentally bumped in to someone standing in my path. Crashing to the ground on impact like two fat men in a collision to catch a falling donut. On getting up from our encounter I saw before my eyes a beautiful woman dressed in a nurse's uniform, it was Zona. By using my training from the Marcel Marceau school of pantomime, I explain I had been bitten by a viper by waving my arm in a slithering motion and pointing two fingers outwards to indicate fangs. Plunging my arm outwards, inwards and upwards I suddenly turn and thrust my fang fingers and arm, pressing in to my arse cheek in an effort to indicate where I had been bitten. I made slurping noises at that moment to explain I needed her to suck the venom from my bum. I cautioned her that not only was my life hanging by a thread, but that I had been having traveller's pain from a bad curry. She was faced with the a threatening dilemma. Does she risk being killed from methane and save my life? or does she leave me and go for for yum cha.

Clearly this is not how we met. I just came home from my screenwriting course and have a lot of pent up writing anger in me. Above is all the true errors and don'ts of writing.

How we did meet was at first online. I'll go in to detail later but I'll start from the beginning.

I had been reading a few blogs many years ago when I stumbled on to someone who wrote about Blogshares, a site that allowed you to trade shares in other blogs registered on the site in a virtual company stock exchange. It was a fun way to learn about how shares and trading worked in a fun environment. At some point early on, I receive or notice that another share trader had purchased shares in my site and had created a link to my site. The name was Think Deck. I went to the site and read the profile of this person, it was Zona. Reading about her life and career I thought it was interesting to have someone else so close to my own country and in a similar industry to what I had been working in. Reading the tales of someone experiencing the film and TV industry in Malaysia would be I thought quite interesting as I could relate and also learn about what it is like in another country and compare. So I linked back to her site from mine and I too bought shares in her website in the virtual stock exchange.

Over the years following, i read Think Deck sporadically as Zona would be writing on an irregular basis as much of us earlier journal site writers did. But Think Deck was on my bookmark list and would always be the first to spring up from the list when I would check my frequently visited list. Some visits meant I would read up on entries covering many dates and other times there were obviously not as many things to want to talk or write about. Blogging at the time was still unheard of in the way we see it today. But eventually as time went on and blogging took off I became a more frequent visitor, or Deck hand as such.

Last year in April I was reading Zona's latest entries when I realised I was feeling a sense of compassion for what she was going through. What she was writing about was what I had been experiencing for a while. I wished at the time there was someone I could have spoken to about it. Reading her entries, I chose to email her directly to let her know that she wasn't alone. I relayed my experiences to her and felt a connection to her. What also I had not realised was that I knew her in a much more personal way as I had been reading about her life experiences for years.

to be continued