Illustrated Shorts

Another comet (writing explorations for second novel)

Author’s note: I wrote this exploratory chapter a very long time ago, when it seemed folks had taken a break from stories of annihilation by comets and asteroids. Now that I’m picking up the frayed threads of years-old writing, the aim is to consolidate the material, edit, rewrite, replot, recaffeinate and carry on.

No one paid much attention. Not the first time anyway. Not even the second time.

Who could blame them? After all, the ‘Oh, my God, everyone is going to die’ routine had been done to death ever since the invention of sentences, and had since become the philosophical raison d’être of every survival nut, metal band, and loon with a camera and an internet connection out there. Ooh, pick us! We have have a brand of armageddon tailored just for you!

In fact, so saturated had the general public become with warnings of their collective death that they were all feeling rather bored with the prospect of extinction, or, at the very worst, a tad ill-tempered.

You are getting sleepy

Waking from a coma, so I’ve read, occurs in stages.

One may transition from the barely responsive vegetative state in which you cannot focus on what’s going on around you, to a minimally conscious state where your body starts to recognise and follow movement, objects and people.

For me, the (documented) process of regaining and rehabilitating consciousness is a neat literary analogy for the experience of easing back into habits that formerly preoccupied one’s time after a long hiatus.

Tales from Shelley Beach – To the floods

Short chapters inspired by my coming of age novel, Sandbanker, available at no bookstores near you

I shuffled up and down the carpet until my feet were dry then sat on my bed and looked out the window, out at the fat drops smashing against the grass.

It had been raining ribbons for three weeks, and everything we knew had been turned to wet – gutters overflowed, sopped birds cowered in trees, coursing rivulets fanned across the streets and lawns.

Outside, I heard the scuff of rubber on gravel, and a bike fall hard to the ground. Seconds later a glistening, yellow stackhat danced at my window, and Bo Ashford’s scrawny arm knocked on the glass.

Take 24

There I was: cloaked in Victorian coat and tails, in thirty-five degree heat and waiting for my sausage dog to finish squeezing one out under a tree.

All around me, thrashing like a school of tuna in a whirlpool, were makeup artists and their assistants, camera crews and their assistants, boys chasing tangled cables, girls driving racks of plastic-wrapped suits between trucks, small men in yellow caps who seemed to do nothing but run up and down the set with coffee cups; and us – the extras – standing helplessly in the broiling sun, waiting for instructions from the loudspeaker. Continue reading “Take 24”

On keeping things interesting…

…let no word unbolt this entanglement divine
no form define and cast our affair,
where hands have touched, they shall be unaccustomed
a constant beginning, unseasoned, unlaced
details reborn in each embrace.

let our canvas want never for fresh oil to paint,
each breath a dry brush on yesterday’s masterpiece
every ill-suited colour tomorrow’s inspiration
layer on layer,
moment on moment
here in your arms, never tired of revision.

should but our hearts beat with predicted accord
and our covenant entwined become dusty and framed,
hung on the wall,
familiar and fated
and the warmth of your cheek on my cheek like the sun
answers day after day without blessing or fame –

just whisper, my love, bring your arm over mine
caress with a cadence exotic and fresh
and like the zoom of a lens, a flood at the weir,
both shall we quicken, converge and re-bond
and, our intentions designed,
we refine our endeavour
for the here and the now and the there and beyond…

A bastard act

Papa had always enjoyed walks, especially the long, head-clearing kind.

Though he tolerated the meanderings we used to take together as a family, he was at his best after having lugged a heavy backpack over forest trails for days, tracing mountains and beaches with his hiking boots, drawing from the source of perfect solitude and silence.

It was only later that he began enjoying walks of a different nature: the unplanned, unattended, and unencumbered by compos mentis kind. On these he’d turn up at the side of highways with an axe, scratching his head and asking the responding constable where that expletive tree he had to fell was hiding, or asking for Nancy, my mother. Once he’d wandered off, leaving the tap running on the 22,000-litre tank. Days later he called to complain both about the lack of shower water and the length of green patch that had erupted on the paddock. Such things attract snakes, he’d said. From the cottage to the closest shop might have been seven kilometres, but he walked it. Blazing heat, not so much as a bead of sweat, not even when he commanded that responding constable to mind his own expletive business.

Continue reading “A bastard act”

Nonna’s Gnocchi: A Real Fucking Treat (A recipe)

Today I’m going to pass on a secret that’s been in my family for at least a generation or two, and show you how to whip up a batch of Nonna’s homemade gnocchi which, aside from being the cheapest gourmet-sounding meal this side of the poverty line, is the only thing I ever learned how to cook with conviction and mild success; apart from scrambled eggs on toast, which I still fuck up on occasions.

But before we get started I want to give you a bit of background info. First of all, I swear. A lot. A gift from my father before he went the way of all alcoholic diabetics with a monumental appetite for refined sugar. I also have a birthmark on the back of my left thigh shaped like the Eiffel Tower, or an ice-cream cone; it depends on how far I bend over.

As for the recipe, it all came from my Nonna—a stringy old bird from the north of Italy who, like many folk after the war, found herself on a boatful of other white-looking immigrants bound for Australia to work their arses off and get called a bunch of ‘good-for-nothing wogs’. She was the only one in those days who’d bothered to learn any English, which made her pretty popular around the markets and hospitals and courthouses and anywhere else where monolingual Italians used to turn up with any frequency.

Nonna was of the old school of cooks: she could march into any kitchen, sift through the shit on the shelves, and with nothing but a handful of flour and a stern look, cook a decent family meal, or a snack for passing Nazis, and by three-thirty in the afternoon she’d have the whole house licking their lips and loosening their pants asking where the nearest couch was. Depending on which day you caught her, her skills in the kitchen were either a talent, a gift, or a wicked burden. But whatever her mood, she’d never tell you to do up your fly and get up off your bloody culo until at least the coffee had been served. And no one, except my mother and sister, had to help her do the washing up. Thank Christ for that. And no matter who you were—friend, neighbour, dentist, rude man in line at Medicare—she’d touch you on the cheek or on the shoulder when you spoke to her, because she knew that everyone needed something extra, something tactile, to show that other people were listening to them, and she’d leave you with some nugget of wisdom or down-to-earth advice, even if it involved the best way to take up a pair of men’s trousers.

Okay, so I’m painting a pretty rosy picture here—she might have whacked her kids around a bit, and shot a few of the neighbours’ dogs because they pissed on her azaleas—but she was generally alright, and I have never understood how, from such a sweet lady as my Nonna, came the rancorous crab monster that is my mother.

A Welcome Visitor

A battered car door leaning against a highway sign announced in spray-paint letters Hugh Singh’s arrival in the EXTRATERRESTRIAL OUTBACK.

After crossing the invisible border, he eased his foot off the accelerator, lowered his window, and gazed across at the ochre and khaki ensemble of hillocks and flats, low bushes and grasses. Nothing in the landscape moved.

The town was a collection of one-story buildings and windless treetops huddled along a single, tarred road. Heat shimmered from the roofs of parked cars, a bright sun offered no respite for shadows. Hugh stopped outside the pub, consulted the map, checked the time, ran his hand over the ventilation outlet as he leafed through a loosely-bound folder of photos and hand-written notes. He threw the folder onto the back seat as a man approached the car. The man’s eyes were lost in his dark face, and his lips were blistered.

“Welcome, brother,” the man said, revealing a trio of milk teeth. He wiped a patch of dust from Hugh’s bonnet with his hem of his shirt. “Nice to get visitors in town. Wash your car for five bucks.”

Continue reading “A Welcome Visitor”

Sandbanker: a novel (or, I wrote a book)

It’s a moment to savour, the day you drag yourself from your quotidien torpor to finally achieve that thing that’s been gnawing at your brain for the past several years; a thing done, not for fame or glory, but for enjoyment and tortuous self-satisfaction.

Sandbanker is my first attempt at a novel, and, like many first attempts may prove to be the worst, the hardest, the most enriching, anxious, educational and boring trial the craft of writing will put me through. And it may not.

Self-publishing they say puts control back in the hands of authors. That seems true. It certainly obliges them to take marketing and social media seriously (which I don’t) not to mention become their own worst critic in the absence of any grizzled editor. It opens your eyes to life-long relationships with ungrammatical structures, swings your resolve between ‘Yeah, screw it, it’s okay to publish’ and, ‘No! It has to be perfect, every letter, every pixel!’

Pick up a copy

Sandbanker is available initially as an e-book on Amazon.

Hey, if you don’t decide to buy it, or hate Amazon, or are just tight and still want to read it get in touch, and I’ll send you one for nichts!

If there are inconsistencies, mistakes, and other could-have-done-betters, then I ask in advance for your understanding, and, if you have time, your feedback. In the latter case, future drafts will be yours for free if you can stand it.

Bash It Out

When the charge relates to my literature-related activities, if I can be convicted of anything, it’s that I postpone diving into my daily writing routine like a vertigo sufferer at a Procrastinators’ Anonymous skydiving meet up.

My claim is that I’ve always produced my best work under pressure, when in fact, whenever the hammer of time has descended just to the point where it’s about to flatten my eyebrows, I’ve produced ‘work’, and nothing more.

So in an effort to procrastinate even further, I set out creating a WordPress plugin to provide a little friendly nudge to the slovenly.

It’s called Bash It Out. To use it, you set a word goal, a writing time limit, how often you want to be nagged, and it will provide you with the overbearing pressure you need to bash out that word count.

Installation instructions

Get the plugin
Install and activate

It will be in perennial beta, so please create a Github issue and I will try not to ignore it. After I perform sufficient dogfooding on the thing, I’ll try to push it to the WordPress plugin directory.

Now, back to procrastinating!!