Check it out here.
And please buy a copy!
Page 4 of 10
Way back before her current controversy.
Have a read here.
From the bunny army.
- Does your oven have at least one umlat in its name? If not, you’re some kind of prole.
- Chefs refer to table salt as “shit salt”. Behind your back, they probably refer to you as “shit customers”.
- Three glasses of white wine – also known to chefs as “bitch diesel” – will aid your fine motor skills as you chop onions.
- Cous cous was invented by the Nazis as a cheap, barely edible alternative to rice.
- Chef: “You’ve touched worse things than that.”
You: “My God … how does he know? He is some kind of SORCERER.” - No, it is not just like a TV cooking show, apart from the comparable levels of shame, fear and ostracism.
- Your “hilarious” gluten jokes will die a horrible death when someone says they’re coeliac.
- When someone says your spring rolls are “fatty boom-bahs”, remember to scream “Don’t you fat-shame me!”
- Have you added pine nuts to everything? Go back and add pine nuts to everything.
- No matter how many movies you’ve seen featuring buxom Tuscan peasant women blissfully serving elaborate, time-consuming meals to grateful hordes, no meal tastes better if you’ve cooked it yourself.
In fact, they taste worse.Laugh at any of these jokes? Go on and buy my ebook military thriller The Spartan.
I know you probably won’t but I always ask anyway.
Inspired by the excellent story in The Guardian about how Wyl Menmuir wrote his first, Booker-longlisted novel, The Many, I offer you the uncensored diary of writing my own, unpublished, second novel, The Last Newspaper On Earth.
Enjoy.
Day one: Bursting with ideas. This will be the best book ever!
Day two: Put in a killer second sentence: “And then the murders began.”
Day three: Drink four coffees in quick succession. Manage to pound out 2000 words. And they said Graham Greene only wrote 500 words a day. Slacker!
Day four: Reduce the 2000 words I wrote yesterday to 500 as the rest are mostly caffeine-infused gibberish. Wonder if Greene had it right all along, seeing how he wrote Brighton Rock, The End Of The Affair and The Quiet American.
Day seven: Ask a friend to act as my editor. He says he’d be honoured, as long as it doesn’t take up too much time and that I know how to take criticism. “I’ll show YOU criticism,” I mutter to myself, an instant ball of rage.
Day 10: Wonder about padding out the plot with copy from 19th-century horror novels out of copyright. Laugh like a maniac. “This secret will remain between you and me, Bram Stoker,” I cackle as I hit control “c” and “v”.
Day 11: Friend/editor wonders whether aristocratic vampires have any place in a tale about the decline of newspaper publishing. “Of course they do,” I reply.
Day 20: Read a story, possibly apocryphal, about an author who shot himself in the foot so he would be forced to finish his novel. I stare down at my foot, wondering where would be the least painful place to shoot myself. Also wonder where I could get the least-painful gun.
Day 40: Friend/editor says the main character isn’t likeable.
“Is he based on you?” he asks impertinently.
Day 50: Spice up a dull scene where journalists are sitting around a table at a news conference with a sudden explosion.
Day 55: Make my character visit an orphanage so he will seem more likeable. Friend/editor loves it.
Day 60: Filled with sadness as I glance at the Amazon ranking of my last book. Is this new effort also destined to end on the scrapheap, next to the biographies of sporting heroes who have fallen out of favour due to sex scandals?
Day 61: My main character interviews a sporting hero who has suddenly fallen out of favour due to a sex scandal.
Day 65: Up to 20,000 words. Celebrate by throwing in a spicy sex scene for my unlikeable main character.
Day 75: Reward myself with a digestive biscuit.
Day 80: Wonder if Tolstoy also had days where he thought everything he wrote was crap. Day 85: Friend offers to install a social media blocker on my computer to remove distractions. “Hemingway never would have agreed to that,” I tell him.
Days 90: Wonder if it’s too late to change it into a children’s book. Anyone can write those! Just look at all the celebs who do it.
Day 125: Editing a particularly dense piece of text, my friend/editor says: “You should consider the reader’s point of view.” “Why would I want to do that?” I reply.
Day 145: In my novel, the internet is starting to affect newspaper sales. The fictional newspaper editor shows the staff a website that is eating into our classified sales. “As the editor hits ‘return’, the computer suddenly explodes,” I type.
Day 150: Break the 50,000 word mark. Huzzah!
Day 170: Friend/editor whittles the 50,000 words down to 40,000. Leave an anonymous one-star review of his own book on Amazon, accusing him of being a “pulpy hack”.
Day 171: Friend accuses me of writing the one-star review. I deny it. When the review is mysteriously deleted, we both mutually agree to never bring it up again.
Day 180: My character is disturbed by the number of redundancies in the newspaper industry. I go down to the harbour and stare moodily at the sea for a few hours.
Day 200: Italicise the name of a book, but don’t bother unitalicising the comma next to it. No one will notice it – or the gaping holes in the plot.
Day 201: Friend/editor notices the gaping holes in plot.
Day 210: My character has an Aaron Sorkin moment, standing up on a table in the newsroom and lamenting what will happen to the world if quality journalism continues to decline. Pathos!
Day 220: Up to 80,000 words! Friend says more needs to be cut. I remind him of a story from my days in magazines where a company actually sold their magazines by weight. “Is that what you plan to do?” he asks, incredulous. “Sell your books by weight?” “Why not?” I reply. “It works for chocolate.”
Day 250: Near the end. I wonder if I really need an end. Can’t it just end abruptly, like in The Sopranos? Maybe even mid-sentence? Or with an explosion?
Day 265: Hurrah! I finish the final sentence. Light a Cuban cigar, then choke as I remember I hate smoking.
Day 270: Friend/editor yet to get back to me. Does he love the ending? Or hate it? I can’t bear the almost Hitchcockian suspense.
Days 277: Friend hates the ending. “It’s simply not believable that our ‘hero’ goes back in time, destroys the internet from ever being created, and thus ensures the survival of newspapers forever.” “That sort of thing works for Doctor Who,” I reply meekly.
Days 278: Friend gets back to me. “I know how to rewrite your ending – and realistically save newspaper journalism forever!” he says. The simplicity and brilliance of his subsequent idea astounds me. I wonder why no one ever thought of it before.
My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.
Because we just can’t wait to see what he’ll do with it.
I’ve been a huge fan since his days on The Mighty Boosh.
If he’s anything as surreal and witty as he was in 2012 when I interviewed him, viewers are in for a real treat.
Gothic bun cake, anyone?
And yes … Julian Barratt MUST make a cameo.
Check out the interview here.
My ebook thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.
It used to be a cake shop.
In the years Before Gluten (BG), in the years Before Gentrification (B$), long before the median price for a Sydney home was $1 million, it used to serve the type of giant, triple-decker desserts and pastries that would’ve made the Country Women’s Association proud.
There was only type of bread (white), the type of wonderbread our ancestors fought and won two world wars with. Kids also ate the crusts because otherwise you’d grow up with curly (or even possibly ginger) hair.
There was only type of sugar (also white).
There was only one type of coffee (unknown).
And everything was packed with glutens.
Later, in a nod to the times, it started serving sandwiches along with cakes, scones, lamingtons and Chiko rolls. If you ordered a salad sandwich, it only came with lettuce (not “cos” – cos didn’t exist yet), onion and beetroot. No one wanted the beetroot, but it was reassuring to know it was there. It was a touchstone of cultural consistency every bit as valid and reassuring as the gherkin in the Big Mac. Sure, no one wanted to eat the gherkin either, but somehow, it was important that it was there.
It was the sort of unpretentious place beloved by tradies and sparkies and labourers and mums with their kids: more school tuckshop or canteen that sophisticated café.
A simple place harkening back to a simpler time before iPhones and property portfolios and MasterChef teaching five-year-olds to expect penne alla arrabbiata in their school lunchbox.
A place that had perfected the bacon-and-egg roll and large coffee as its signature takeaway dish.
A Café for Old Men.
It was the bottle of pink Himalayan salt that first alerted me to the irrevocable changes in my Old Man Café. It rested on a metal table that looked like it had been crafted out of the wing of a Boeing 787.
Looking up, I realised that my Old Man Café has irrevocably morphed into a Middle Class Café.
Gone were the tuck-shop types, replaced by younger, better-looking waitstaff.
The menu was partially in Italian and full of dishes I barely understood.
For instance, the Caesar salad had become a “Contemporary Caesar Salad”, as if Caesar, former ruler of Rome and conqueror of Gaul, no longer cut it in a world where Asian slaw was served on cement slabs and watermelon juice came in mason jars.
I looked enviously at the kids’ menu – which served all the delicious things that were once on the adults menu like fish and chips and spaghetti and meatballs – knowing I could now never order off of it.
I imagined there was some kind of detector at the door that loudly went off if it detected anything with glutens in it.
I stared around at the young, hip types enjoying what I assumed were Bonsoy cappuccinos.
This was clearly a suburb in the throes of gentrification.
The mothers with their kids now wore activewear and lived in million-dollar houses and drove 4WDs.
The men were younger, bearded, aspirational, one eye on their dining partners, the other on the iDevices upon which they were furiously tapping.
The well-behaved children nursing babycinos were probably in Advanced Reading Classes and knew the difference between a tortoise and a turtle.
It was no longer a Café For Old Men.
I imagined all the tuck-shop-volunteer mums, the labourers in King Gees and checkshirts and even the roving pigeons and ibises all being bussed away to a less-salubrious suburbs to make way for the new customers.
I couldn’t fault the food and the service. But this café was no longer for me. Yet another sanctuary of my youth was no more.
This Old Man’s Café was heading the way of the Old Man’s Pub.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” I muttered.
But there was no longer anyone old enough – or interested enough – to understand what I was saying.
My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.
9am: Arrive at the newspaper. Disturbed that someone has parked their horse in my space.
9.30am: The accounting department queries the number of horse-drawn Cobb & Co carriage vouchers I’ve used. Apparently carriage voucher fraud is rife in journalism.
9.45am: Would I like to do a first-person story about a “nude bicycle ride on George Street in protest against the Iraq War”? No.
10am: Sub-editor asks if I’ve ever thought about changing my name to Patterson. “You know, to spare future generations from spelling it wrong.” I take my horsewhip to him.
10.30am: Feel scandalised by the number of bare female ankles on display. I do my best to avert my eyes.
11am: Another editor wants me to rewrite The Man From Snowy River to The Man From Potts Point to help with real-estate advertising. Again, I employ my horsewhip for the second time that morning.
11.15am: Head of the website wants to change my copy to “there was movement at the station, for the word had passed around, that the colt from old Regret had got away … and you won’t BELIEVE what happened next”.
More “hits” and “clicks” that way, apparently.
Once again the horsewhip comes out.
11.30am: Am enraged to see my story about a rough diamond drover living in the bush has been changed to “a banker from Kirribilli looking for an investment property in the city”.
I point out that, in fact, wealthy landowners are the villains of my poems, but the editor scoffs.
“Not in this red-hot real estate market they aren’t, mate. We need all the AB readers we can get.”
Apparently shearers and drovers can’t afford properties in the city and don’t read the paper anyway.
In fact, I am told, these rough diamonds no longer represent the quintessential heart of Australia. I am asked to picture the “quintessential Australian” as an aspirational tradesman who votes conservative and has at least one investment property.
I suspect it will be difficult to write quality poetry about such a person.
11.45am: Readjust my hat. Am alarmed that so many of my male colleagues are hatless. Surely a sign of moral degeneracy?
Noon: Am I interested in writing a yarn entitled “Whatever happened to the Hare Krishnas?”
The answer is most emphatically no.
12.15pm: Editorial meeting. What, am I asked, are my recommendations for the new transport plan for Parramatta Road? More horse lanes, I respond, to unexpected laughter.
12.30pm: Lunch is served. My sandwich is served on what appears to be a roof tile. Am reliably informed that this is acceptable – nay, even encouraged – down Sydney way.
City folk.
12.45pm: HR phones to say that “horsewhipping is forbidden in the office”. Truly, we live in an officious, rule-heavy, interfering state governed by overzealous, matronly-like figures. (I wonder if there is some shorter, catchier way of saying that?)
1pm: Editor wants me to broadcast my latest story over “social media”. I tell him I have no idea what social media is. I fail to understand his subsequent explanation.
1.15pm-2pm: Have a crack at this social media palaver. Stand on a hilltop painstakingly transmitting my harrowing accounts of the Boer War using semaphore flags. My arms are exhausted after trying to transmit thousands of words via this flag-based method.
3.15pm: Secretary tells me the switchboards are lighting up. “At least one person saw your semaphore,” she says.
3.20pm: Enjoy a refreshing pinch of snuff.
3.30pm: No, I am not interesting in reviewing a band called “The Coldplay” or whatever barber-shop quartet is currently in vogue on the gramophone charts.
3.45pm: Case study message received on the electronic mail system: “Ever been held for ransom by Filipino insurgents? Eaten a guinea pig in South America? Paid $20 for an ice-cream in Rome? The travel editor is on the hunt for disaster stories that aren’t too grotesque to print for Saturday’s cover story, entitled ‘Terror Australis’. Anonymity guaranteed.”
4pm: Sub-editor asks if he can change the words of Waltzing Matilda to “once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong … and you wouldn’t BELIEVE what happened next”.
I deliver the sort of right cross worthy of an outback bare-knuckle boxer.
4.30pm: Reach for my pipe, only for a boon companion to point to the “no smoking” sign. Next I will be forbidden to drink gin at work. Once again I am reminded that we truly live in an officious, interfering state governed by overzealous female domestics (note to self: find shorter way of saying that).
4.45pm: As an expert on the bush, would I be interested in contributing to a weekend supplement entitled “regional Australia real estate liftout: why it’s never been a better time to buy”?
I shake my head so much my hat is in danger of being dislodged.
4.50pm: Down a schooner of brown ale in one go to the cheers of the newsdesk.
5pm: Someone tells me that vaudeville is dead. Dead! I have endured too many outrages this day. I retire to the local pub to play two-up and share stories of the bush until the publican throws me out.
My ebook military thriller The Spartan is out now on Amazon.
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