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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”

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

A RAMON JAMES Novel
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!’

girl-02Pick 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.