1…2…Testing
Once upon a time I wrote stories like you comb your hair – dumb habit. A reflex of the hand. Going one step further, over in England, I defected from a rugby tour to find a bedsit with a coin-operated heater, just so as I could scribble some characters into life.
While few of those adolescent efforts ever saw daylight, they helped attune my voice. I learnt to take blind chances on where a plot may lead.
Since then, I’ve crafted maybe 20 stories, less than one a year, which isn’t a fact I’m trumpeting from the gables. One or two have won some nice prizes, including a junket trip to Ireland and China, jumping on the James Joyce gravy train, but still that hasn’t reinstalled that short-story mania I obeyed as a younger self.
Trained in fiction, my excuses are as legion as they are half-legitimate. Two kids, say, who are legitimate, plus the assorted benefits of salaried work. Hardly idle, I’ve massaged some twenty thousand puzzles into life, written two novels, not to mention Offbeat and a true-crime romp. Life in other words, the whole reality saga overshadowing the shorter fictional versions.
But then came an invitation over the wire, a stone-cold chance to read some new work at a Visible Ink fund-raiser in the cosy Empress Hotel, North Fitzroy. (Visible Ink is the creative anthology that RMIT students compile every year, and always worth a plunge.) Bearing the title Read You Bastards II, the event should be a lively soiree with music, open mike and possibly a cupcake raffle.
The fact that I’ve toiled on a story all week, preparing for my moment on the sticky carpet, suggests I may be less a writer, than a partygoer. There are worse crimes. If only every week the catalyst was there, an stern voice inside my ear saying ‘Write You Bastard.’