A few weeks ago, the Auckland Writers’ festival took place (funnily enough) in Auckland.

In between a busy schedule and a hectic flu I didn’t make along it to as many of the week’s marquee events as I would have liked to. But I did manage to see Ian McEwan (Atonement, Amsterdam) speak, albeit via a video call projected on a theatre screen from his lounge in the Cotswolds. I also attended an in person conversation between Roddy Doyle (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, The Commitments) and David Szalay (Flesh, All that Man is).

Holding one Booker prize apiece, these three men would surely provide me and my fellow readers/writers two valuable hours of insight, no?

I didn’t question this logic as I navigated my way through rows of University Students and the elderly to find my seat. As I sipped my beer waiting for the first talk to begin, I maintained my hope. Only after I’d watched two literary giants on stage sweat their way through three minutes of self conscious, mumbled small talk did I remember, oh right, they’re novelists not public speakers.

Why do we watch people answer questions in the first place?

Since a young age, I’ve been fascinated by interviews with successful and interesting people.

You might call this ambition - me studying how they move, what replicable habits allowed them to achieve what they’ve achieved? (A less sympathetic reading of this might liken such behaviour to a psychopath paying close attention to demonstrations of human emotions they’re incapable of feeling themself. But let’s not linger on that).

Is it really about gathering information though?

During my teenage Guns n’ Roses obsession, I used to scour MTV and the early 2000s internet for any interview I could find showcasing Slash, Duff McKagen and Axl Rose slurring through various states of alcoholism, addiction and pretentiousness.

I suppose there was some element of living vicariously in that. They have a life I’d have liked to live at the time and by watching them talk about it, I could perhaps taste a little bit of it. But whichever way you skin it, I was hardly cataloguing a strict list of successful traits to replicate.

Maybe I’m getting too caught up on logic this time, though?

Maybe it’s just entertainment?

In the same vein as a popular podcast or reality tv, could the draw of a celebrity interview simply be:

This person made a thing I enjoyed, if I listen to them speak, maybe I’ll get a little bit more of that thing?

Regardless of whether they’re actually good at the specific form of speaking.

Regardless of whether talking before a live audience has anything to do with the medium they’ve mastered.

Interviewing a Writer

Interviews with writers are a strange animal. These people have built careers out of their words, yet the thing that drew most of them to the craft in the first place was a shying away from being forced to talk out loud.

And as I touched on above, it’s quite hard to pin down why an audience actually turns up for talks when they attend talks of this kind.

I know from my limited personal experience of being interviewed, as the resident “writer,” there’s an instinct to talk about craft, the process, etc. That’s the thing the author is supposedly an expert in after all, right?

But an interview isn’t a Masterclass lecture.

In the Auckland Writers’ festival audience, I doubt a fraction of my fellow crowd goers were writers. I saw plenty of lifelong readers for sure. But I doubt most were there to hear Ian McEwan discuss his preferences around participial use.

The writer to writer format in the Doyle/Szalay talk took some engine splutters to get off the ground, but once they got chatting about their personal experience as winners of a top three most prestigious literary prize, it became genuinely fascinating.

Both of them cited how grateful they were to have already begun a follow up novel when their Booker win was announced. 1) Because the publicity and media obligations, meant that neither had any real time to write twelve months removed from the announcement 2) because the pressure of coming up with a follow up that lives up to that hype must be crushing.

I see this kind of pressure in play every time a new grading happens in my jiu jitsu gym. A person who has been given a new belt immediately gets 50% worse the sport than they were moments ago because they’re suddenly filled with all these false expectations around their own expertise, not to mention imposter syndrome. But let’s pull back from that tangent.

So maybe the draw of these talks is more about seeing behind the curtain? The author is a mythic mysterious profession and these talks promise a report from the “other side” regardless of how smooth the production value is.

When the interviewer doesn’t know why he’s there.

While the writer to writer format eventually righted itself, the McEwan interview was frequently stepped on by the journalist host who had clearly prepped extensive notes out of nerves for his big name interviewee, but failed to appreciate that this audience had paid to see McEwan rather than him.

When he eventually got around to asking the novelist a real question, the journalist pointed out how a distinct trend of trauma and sexual assault seemed to prevail as throughlines across McEwan’s novels —which would have been an interesting idea to muse on if he’d stopped there and left the novelist enough air to comment.

If you’ve read McEwan’s work (or even just look at the blurb of his top three novels) you’ll notice a trend in his characters yearning for a life they never got to live. There is this idea that every writer has one or two real stories in them that they’ll rewrite across their career in different ways, over and over, repeating those themes like a ghostly chant. In McEwan’s case, it seems that despite all his success there’s possibly some alternate reality that he feels was robbed from him by some unspoken event.

Without getting into specifics, this idea offers a wealth of discussion and potential insights from a man who has evidently touched such a phenomena.

But this journalist didn’t stop there. He asked McEwan directly whether he’d experienced anything of this kind in his own life. Not exactly asking, “were you molested?” in front of two hundred audience members, but asking that exactly.

Bear in mind this is a man in his eighties and across a long, celebrated career has never discussed anything of this kind. What audacity to think you’re clumsy, read-off-an-iPad delivery is going to be the catalyst to pull this out of him?

Granted my personal writing process isn’t halfway as developed as someone of McEwan’s stature, but as far as I can tell, linking reality and the way fictional prose is constructed in such a like-for-like manner misses the point entirely.

Even if this host did manage to get his big scoop, let’s say McEwan put down his coffee, took one weary glance at his wife and said, “Alright let me share what happened that day, all those years ago…”

No answer he’s going to give will deliver you what you’re hoping for. He already gave it to you via the medium that he’s a master of. Any heart-wrenching real life account he might share over this zoom call has already been translated to the page and this interviewer has already felt it (or a least read accounts from people who have felt it). Shit even if you’ve watched the movie adaptation of Atonement, you’ve felt it.

That’s why the host felt compelled to ask the question in the first place. If not for himself, for thousands of readers. What is the source of that out of reach feeling?

But that’s one curtain you don’t get to peak behind. Certainly not as an audience member, but I suspect not even as an author.

Thankfully the answers can always be found inside his books.

If you’re interested in my writing rather than me talking about writing.
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Sometimes I go down to the train station just to pretend.

Pick any weekend this June. You’ll see me standing on platform four, grinning through small talk with the other parents, taking friendly shots at the transport service. “Do you think these old engines will ever run on time?”

Sometimes, I go down to the train station and I tell them my boy’s on his way, though, his train always pulls in late. When you’ve waited this long, even one minute after the scheduled arrival time is unforgivable, no?

The mothers smile at me, knowing exactly what I mean and knowing no part of it.

That’s the part I come back for.

They know my restlessness. They’ve waited an entire school term to reclaim their sons from the clutches of credentialled housemasters and the badge covered uniforms they all service second mortgages for.

As they step past the yellow line, I stand in limbo. As they squint and pray for the coat of arms of the day, I spot that familiar bitch waiting, though she comes dressed in different colours depending on which overcast Monday I choose.

Fickle colours undermine the parents, yet give the waiting something more. Another reason to come back and stand out here on platform four.

Up here on this ancient slab of concrete you’ll see hands rub together and shoulders brace against the wind. You’ll see the familiar bitch waiting but you also might see hope.

Relief is on its way for these people. Even if their boy’s train gets delayed, especially if it gets delayed, so long as they remain waiting, their hope remains inbound. While they wait, that feeling is suspended.

Another variety of waiting, sure. But it’s waiting plus something more.

Clutching a poorly packed suitcase, relief is coming to each of them. For them, the waiting is offset in ways, which, for me, it can never be. But at least I can watch it. At least from up here on platform four I can breathe the same oxygen as them and pray for a moment of forgetting.

Sometimes, I go down to the train station.

And I tell them.

My boy’s on his way.

The loudspeaker crackle informs me time is running short.

I swallow down a lump. Grateful. These days time is rarely taken from me.

My own private lunch ladies dole out minutes and hours by the ladleful. Daily, yearly, more than I could ever need.

There it is, my first glimpse of the too-short haircuts waiting behind carriage glass. You never got to go to this kind of school. The kind I’d never have sent you to. But I’d be more than happy to spot you among them today. If it meant you’d be climbing off in a few minutes, complaining about the food, the bullies, the new scars.

I always mumble out some excuse about coffee or my bladder and slip out before I have to explain the lack of you.

One day they’ll catch me out. Perhaps mistake me for a pervert.

But until that day comes I’ll go down to the train station.

Tell them my boy is on his way.

Just to pretend.

Last year Cultural Capital put out an article titled The Dawn of the Post Literate Society.

Click bait is a dirty word but talk about a high nutrition headline. Between the apocalyptic connotations and the ambiguity around who the article might have been referring to — our society? the coming generation —this title carried potential to get people upset or allow them to feel smug, but managed to get them reading regardless of which base emotion it appealed to.

On strength of title alone this article did the rounds and circulated the internet widely last year, but it also contained enough fibre to kick off an infinity mirror of discussions and commentary articles as well.

If you’re interested in diving down that rabbit hole, you don’t have to go far, but I’m not tossing my own delayed opinion into the hot take bucket today.

Instead, I want to focus on the other part, the post-literate part.

What does that mean?

It sounds like it’s implying a society that doesn’t know how to read. No?

Illiterate.

Isn’t that the first image that comes to mind? A squinting, stuttering adult struggling to order lunch off the jumbo sized menu above the McDonalds counter?

There’s enough chatter in the air about diminishing attention spans and the reliance on A.I. to make this angle seem feasible. Maybe we aren’t so far removed from a day where we let the robots dictate text to us rather than engaging our brains.

This article didn’t tackle material quite that dramatic, but what it did explore was no less interesting..

The article that supports this headline was based on an OECD survey that came out in 2024 which measured the skills of around 160 000 16-65 year-olds across 31 countries, concluding that adult skills in numeracy and literacy are on the decline.

Sounds bad. But again, what does “on the decline” mean?

You can read the survey here which includes a breakdown for every country involved. The New Zealand results were as follows:

“In literacy, 26% of adults (OECD average: 26%) scored at Level 1 or below, meaning they have low literacy proficiency. At Level 1, they can understand short texts and organised lists when information is clearly indicated, find specific information and identify relevant links. Those below Level 1 can at most understand short, simple sentences.

At the other end of the spectrum, 13% of adults (OECD average: 12%) scored at Levels 4 or 5 in literacy and are high performers. These adults can comprehend and evaluate long, dense texts across several pages, grasp complex or hidden meanings, and use prior knowledge to understand texts and complete tasks (see Table 2.4 in Chapter 2 for a description of what adults can do at each proficiency level in literacy, and Figure 2 for the proportion of adults at each level).

26% of the population with low literacy proficiency isn’t a shining result, but it’s not the same thing as a population of illiterates, and it does beg the question…

How well do you think you would do?

The assessment used the opening section of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak house,”— a book that was once considered “good reading material for children”— to determine the literacy of those tested.

The test was a verbal, think-out-loud format where an assessor would intermittently stop the student at points in their reading and ask them what specific points or images they thought the sentence in question was trying to get across and how this fit into the wider point being made.

The link I included above gives some terrifying (and quite funny) examples of the specific answers given by the test subjects.

But here I want to offer up an opportunity to test yourself. I’ve included the first few extracts of “Bleak House” below. Have a go for yourself. See how literate you really are, You don’t have to tell anyone how you did.

I’ll warn you, it’s trickier than you would think because the style is dated and the terms used are often specific to the time it was written, you definitely can’t get away with skimming. There’s an early dinosaur metaphor that had me reading and rereading to get the point.

But as an exercise, it’s interesting to consider whether you as a functioning adult would pass this test.

Bleak House

Chapter 1

In Chancery
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

At the end of this study, all 85 participants claimed they they’d confidently be able to finish this entire novel, yet the results indicated that based on the answers given, less than 50% of them demonstrated sufficient understanding or retention of important elements of the prose to follow the story’s plot let alone take away broader themes and meaning.

Which group do you think you would fall into?

Are you confident you could get through this entire novel and understand it if not enjoy it?

I read a lot, I write a lot and think about words and metaphors a shitload more than your average bear, but I’ll confess this extract of Dickens had me squinting and pausing and backtracking more often than I’d like to admit.
Which says what?

That children were more tuned in to literature back in the day?

I don’t think this survey is a terrible indictment of our society going to the dogs. The skills required to comprehend literature are quite specific and we’re clearly out of practice as a collective.
I don’t think technology has atrophied us beyond the point of being able to learn these skills.

They’re simply less common on the whole, which won’t be the end of us, but it will make our experience of reality less rich, which is a little bit sad.

Feel free to share how you did. Did you struggle? Are you baffled that anyone might find this novel difficult?

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“Most of the stories feel like a desaturated fever dream, where everything appears normal but feels far from it.”

- Keith Long.

“lyrical, haunting, and unafraid to dig deep into the psychological abyss.”

- Jodalita

Share The Sudden Walk

2026

“That’s where he stood.” Dad shapes his fingers into a pistol and points them at a set of shoe prints moulded into the footpath.

“Na.” Mum shakes her head. “That’s where he fell.”

I nod, pretending I know the story well, ‘cause Dad’s already told it to me ten plus times since we booked our flights. Pretending it makes perfect sense why such a big crowd of Chinese, Middle eastern and European folks are all gathered round taking photos of a pair of feet.

Dad sees through this though and stands in front of me so I’ve got no choice but to look at him rather than the tourist attraction. “And why did one man’s death cause the slaughter of so many, Josh?”

A couple of the tourists around us look at me, listening in. I want to swear at them for making me blush, but knowing I’ll get a hiding from Dad if I did that, I turn to face the bridge the assassin was meant to have driven over, hoping it might help me think.

“It was ‘cause, ahh…” My brain hurts as I strain to remember. “The bloke they shot was a kiwi and these people are ahh…Bosnians and ahh–”

Mum snorts. “Does Franz Ferdinand sound like a Kiwi name to you Josh?”

I wince and look towards the river for answers. I spot a bullet hole in the bridge’s concrete which doesn’t help me think at all, and I start spotting bullet holes in all the buildings around me and this only clutters things further.

“No he was German…that’s right…he was German and Germany was New Zealand’s enemy at the time and–”

I don’t know why Dad’s smiling.

I stutter out a couple more ands.

“And why were we enemies with Germany?” he asks.

Mum punches him in the shoulder.

1915

A Maori bloke with a moustache stares proudly from the flyer. He’s in uniform and is sketched in lead and looks nothing like me or any of the boys in my unit. We’ve all got the same haircut as him though and we all try to hold our guns the way they taught us, the way he’s holding his, too relaxed to be real, too sure of himself to be relatable. My hands still shake every time I pull back the bolt and loud a fresh round into the chamber. I learned to hide that part, but haven’t had time to learn much else. They need us over there.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud to help. Half my shaking is on account of excitement.

We’re fighting for the Queen, man! Imagine that? A boy from Waiouru travelling the world to fight for the Queen. Just wish we’d had more time. Was gonna join the army anyway. Just thought I’d have a few more years under my belt before they shipped us out.

My neck’s been screaming rashes since I first pulled on this wool uniform, “shawn off the very shoulders of a Rangitikei ewe,” they told me, “a piece of home to take with you.” Haven’t told them how much I hate sheep. She knows though. She grinned when I turned up outside the house, dressed like a killer. She cried when I left.

“We get to do this.” That’s what my bunkmate John always insists.

“Off fight the Turks on behalf of her majesty.” I nod away and fight the urge to scratch.

They told us it would be a different hill. Who am I to argue? That’s well above my rank.

Shit, I told her we were headed for Berlin when I first showed her my papers. I’ve since learned to keep my lips tight.

Facts were never my friend. That goes back to the schoolroom. You should see the scars on my hands from the ruler. Shit. There’s a lump on my head from a blackboard duster that never went away. Na. Facts and logic never squared in my head. So I learned to stay quiet.

Still. That doesn’t make it any less confusing.

They played lots of songs before we left, lots of chat on the gramophone about “boys like me” that made me feel like a thousand pounds whenever I heard them in public.

But they did say it would be a different hill. And I did think we were supposed to be fighting the Germans.

1916

A trumpet pulls the sun over the horizon and pulls tears from the ranks of uniformed men and stonefaced women before rows and rows of crosses.

“Lest we forget.” Passes over their lips.

They speak sincerely of pride and sacrifice and deep tragedy, worthwhile or otherwise.

They tell no lies as they describe gunpowder and fear and bleeding out organs and bodies yet to be salvaged from the mud. Yet the parts in between are left among the rifle shells.

A widow’s words break midsentence, voicing the one truth all the other speakers have been resisting till now. Many acknowledge her with nods, thought her efforts never graduate to full words.

None of the pride that has post-humously been draped over the graves behind her is able to break through her bone structure. She can’t cry anymore. All this talk only reminds her of the inspired glint in the eye of her husband. The glint that took over his worry. The glint that steadied his shaking hands and stopped him itching the rashes from his uniform. A boy turned man at twenty one years old by trumpet toots, gramophone speeches and a recruitment poster clutched between his fist, declaring his hunger to do his part for the crown, with a proud stabbing fist.

It’ll be a few more years before poppies symbolise their sacrifice. It’ll be a few more years before London’s War memorial museum will tell this story to foreign visitors. There will be a section on the Turkish campaign. Whether it tells the story of the boys lost there is another question.

Finally the widow speaks. “Lest we forget.”

2026

We take a gondola over Sarajevo in pursuit of Olympic rings. Mum and Dad take photos while I mull over the walking tour tales that are going to follow me into my bedroom tonight. The bullet holes make more sense now though they’re a long way from making sense.

We take more photos as we walk down an abandoned bob sled track, the remnant of a nation expressing its pride. At the time, oblivious to the thinness of that unity.

The guide on our tour spoke of the nineties with all mythos of the Genghis Khan’s hordes. While my Dad takes photos of graffiti, my thoughts twist themselves up in the history that doesn’t seem to have untangled itself from the city we’ve been visiting now for three entire weeks.

“You know there are people in the next town who insist to this day that the U.N. should be charged as war criminals.”

My dad frowned at the tour guide in a way that made my stomach writhe in second hand embarrassment. “Na mate, that can’t be right? What about the facts?” He shook his head. “No one can believe stories like that after they’ve heard the facts.

The guide scoffed in the way only people from this part of the world seem to be able to pull off. “Facts? What do facts have to do with stories people will believe?”

We carry on down the hill. There are bullet holes here as well. I’ve stopped trying to picture the kind of day it must have been when all of these shots were fired, who was shooting who, why they believed they were right to do so. The more pock marked buildings I see, the less any of it seems to matter, yet that, that part there seems to matter the most.

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Where do you stand?

Outside of it.

Outside of what?

The window.

What window?

Last Saturday, I walked into Unity Books on High Street to pick up a birthday present. Unity is a landmark, independent book store with the kind of display window that will have you stumbling out of the exit three hours poorer, balancing a stack of novels taller than a new entrant, if you’re not careful.

Unity’s thoughtfully laid out store is the polar opposite of an airport newsagent, yet on this Saturday I found the aisles no less stuffed than those of an Heathrow W.H Smith after the intercom has just announced the Newcastle to Bonnaroo flight has been delayed by two and half hours due to a Seagull flying into engine three.

Initially, seeing a bookstore so busy in 2026 put me on edge. It wasn’t even drizzling outside, yet in place of garden variety book worms, Unity’s clientele had all brought friends with them and they were talking openly about literature—

I buried my eyes in book spines and scanned surnames for the one I’d come for.

They’d brought their friends. They were talking about literature.

Somewhere between Proust and Pynchon curiosity licked my earlobe. I snuck a second and third glance towards my unlikely company and found these silhouettes, who’d been shuffling past with polite ‘xcuse mes, were certainly dressed as readers, but hadn’t managed to shake off the last dandruff sprinklings of whichever alias their carefully selected “plain” clothes were designed to disguise.

I covered my nose and mouth with a stray Murder on the Orient Express and ventured glance number four. Each of them had coloured between the lines a touch too precisely, every overlong sleeve and beagle eared shoelace felt “decided,” a few of them had let their facial hair grow out, yet not even the sloppiness of a neck beard could fully outrun the potent stench of intention.

I briefly shelved my judgement to ask one of the staff if they stocked the book I’d been struggling for weeks to find. She said, “yes, but it’s sold out, so no,” which briefly hijacked my assessment of the imposters around me and replaced it with the question, is this a sign of a good book store or “good” bookstore?

The trance this thought spun me into was thankfully snapped by a pile of Tom Clancies who shoulder checked me as I paced past. The pile came off second best mind you, tumbling across the carpet with the librarian grade hand-eye-coordination I’d been expecting to encounter ever since the bell above the door announced my arrival.

I blinked and bent down, rising again with a copy of Rainbow Six in hand only to find myself in another kind of loop. I blinked as if this tactic hadn’t already failed me once, but regardless of which angle I stood in relation to the Unity Books clientele, I couldn’t escape a clear view of whichever recognisably esoteric title each of these wool knit kids had had picked out for later exhibitionism when they ventured IRL. I took a step to the left and tried to beat the rule, but a Joan Didion poking out of a Burley Fischer tote bag forced me to notice her with vicious insistence.

By the time I’d navigated my way past Raymond Chandler’s discography the busyness surrounding me bled out the last of its mystery and dimmed the lighting to a David Lynch shade. I wasn’t in a bookstore. I was in one of those those Record Listening Cafes, I was in a Fontaines DC music video where the 90s are now and the latest fashion had better resemble the resurrected polaroids that mortified your older sister at her twenty first birthday party, or else.

I rushed for the exit, the coming afternoon still in my possession, no stack of books, let alone the one I’d come for. I bent over, wheezing like a smoker after a five k, only half noticing the empty street, fully expecting to hear the jangly chords of post punk guitar but instead got hit with the smug voice of a stranger who clearly didn’t want to remain a stranger for any longer than he had to.

“Taking shots at marionettes, hah?”

I searched the one way street for puppets but found only a man with a bundle of records under his arm and eyes that might have twinkled if not for burning out two or three festivals back a number of decades ago I was too well raised to ask about.

“I see you judging it—” he said.

Asking who he was referring to couldn’t have been more redundant.

His moustache traced a grinning mouth. “The exhibitionism, the inauthentic adoption of an aesthetic—”

A droplet formed on my temple as my white knuckled determination not to look at his clear rimmed glasses only made it more obvious that this was where my focus lay.

Plastic rustled as the Bauhaus record under his arm pit fidgeted like a new born. “All that contempt for it, for them,—” he said. “It sits on the only branch the livestock are tall enough to strip clean. You gotta know that right?” He paused to give me the same kind of look I was giving him, no longer trying to hide my assessment of every hipster stereotype present on his body.

“—Since you’re so smart, no?” he added.

I shook my head.

With his free hand, he pushed his fringe into his beanie and turned towards Unity’s display window. Between the self help best sellers and a deluxe cook book, one of the Chomsky clutchers inside caught my eye. I waved and they reacted like I’d lifted my shirt to show a nipple. The pile of Tom Clancies tumbled for a second time.

“You already know these kids are just the symptom though right?” asked my acquaintance.

I started nodding, then realised too late it was a trap. I closed my mouth as his spread into a winner’s grin, watching the air wheeze out of my pre-loaded comeback.

He stole the nod I’d started, stroking his moustache to make sure I’d seen the “sailor” tattoos beneath his lower knuckles before hiding them behind a corduroy pocket. “The root cause of it all, the thing these kids are reacting to, is only one branch higher than that low hanging fruit you started picking the moment you walked into that store: technology, the internet and the Clavicularisation of society—”

Something about this pop reference which belonged nowhere near a man at least two generations my senior, turned out to be my breaking point.

I stepped onto the empty road—

Before my trailing leg left the curb, the stranger gripped my wrist then let go with an abruptness that froze me for as long as it took the parking warden beside us to write up a ticket for the Daihatsu in a loading zone. By the time this rent seeker, who I could have sworn was nowhere in sight seconds ago, had pasted his ticket beneath a windscreen wiper, my heartrate had stabilised.

In fact, this stranger’s panic after insanity gifted me something like comfort. I stared at him open mouthed and realised his fright might have been the first genuine example of cause and effect I’d witnessed all morning.

I returned to his side of the road, lifting hands to hips and squaring my shoulders on the book store. “Excuse me mate, but I don’t remember saying one bad word against these kids.”

The blown bulbs that were his eyes fed on me, expressing the redundance of such words without saying a word.

I doubled down all the same. “They’re seeing where it’s all headed and doing their best to turn back, no?”

He neither nodded or protested.

I carried on. “Aren’t those tomes they’re hauling around just props for their fantasies about a time when people didn’t know all the trends, weren’t forced to keep track of the latest collective code word for fear of being cast out as a normie?” I shook my head. “Can hardly judge them for that. Who wouldn’t prefer the days when when a monoculture didn’t taint and sterilize every opportunity to express original thought.” I noticed his attention drift to a plastic bag riding the wind, but I kept going all the same. “At least you and I got to experience that kind of world for a good portion of our lives, before it became this—”

I gestured to one of the kids who’d retired outside of the bookstore with a roll your own cigarette pouch balanced on one thigh, and an Iphone on the other, expression dead focussed as he studied a Youtube tutorial not demonstrating how to roll the cigarette itself, but rather, how to hold it “correctly.”

“Think of the dud hand these kids were dealt,” I said.

This statement shifted something beneath the stranger’s carefully tailored look.

I took a step back, half expecting to watch an American Werewolf in London style transformation take place. Indeed, his face changed to a shade of grape and he started doing strange things with the saliva in his mouth.

A courier van tooted and I jumped back onto the curb.

The man pressed his back against the bookstore’s glass with enough pressure to draw the cashier’s attention. She made shooing gestures at, but with a line of twelve or so customers waiting to hand over their money for the paperback wrapped clout on sale, she was powerlessly chained behind her desk.

I acknowledged her gestures with a nod but made no effort to get the stranger’s attention and to this hour I have no idea why not.

My counterpart was already too invested in his next tirade to process instructions in any case. “Did you ever stop to wonder—” he drew out this pause so long it had me doubting whether he’d ever pick up the conversation again. Eventually he lifted his chin and studied me, frowning, though couldn’t possibly have been expecting an answer.

I cleared my throat.

He opened his arms, dropping the entire bundle of records on the concrete at his feet. Harvest Moon, Changes, Myra Lee made a dash for a stormwater drain.

“What do you make of that my friend?” he asked.

The shopfront glass began to creak as if reacting to my shaking head. I took a step closer and the entire window pane started to bow, though the stranger didn’t seem to notice.

“You’re a marvel to me,” he said. “You know that don’t you?”

Despite, this odd turn toward affection. I couldn’t help getting closer, not to him but to the glass. I held out a hand to the whining, creaking window, sighing under the pressure of my stranger friend’s spine.

He arched his back and continued to speak, addressing me, though seeming to announce his observations to the once again deserted street, once again, insisting time which I didn’t notice pass has indeed passed, a silent street demanding I accept the ticket warden had moved on and the Daihatsu owner had since returned to his car, found his freshly minted fine and drove away silently without catching any part of my attention.

“It’s a marvellous thing to notice all the cliches and log them without being touched by them.” The stranger took off his glasses and in the depths of his black pupils I saw the thing that had eluded me in the glass, yet due to it’s absence, failed to signal what is was exactly. Now I saw it, my own silhouette echoed in this stranger’s eyes, yet somehow absent from the Unity display window, despite the heavy glare bouncing off its face and mirroring the street I stood on, the square beyond and the water feature behind me that should be blocked by the image of my torso, sat superimposed over the tempting titles of countless bestsellers.

“I’ve only got one question for you,” he asked.

This time I was hungry to hear it. Ravenous to know, what he wanted to know. Not so I could enlighten him, but so I might find the fodder to search myself for an answer I became certain would change everything about this strange day, this strange day, this strange—

He didn’t wait for me to give him permission to ask and I was grateful.

“Where do you fit in?”

I blinked as the first crack spiderwebbed behind the stranger’s back and the cashier left her barbarian queue to investigate.

“Where do you stand if you’ve managed to be outside it all?” he asked as the bell beside him rang and the cashier’s baffled expression attacked the two of us.

She studied the man as if daring him to complete his madness.

He ignored her and waited till my full attention had returned to him before saying. “To see it all and reject it all, yet remain so compassionate towards those poor souls who are affected and will forever be affected, it’s a marvel, no doubt. But I’ve got to repeat—” he shook his head, tearing up, “Where do you fit in?”

A scoff came out of me. I glanced at his beanie— the namesake of an archetype so buried under sub-culture that it became far more of a belonging to them than whoever he or she was. He nodded in agreement. He was one of them and we both knew it. But he wasn’t asking about himself.

I nodded back and tried the tactic that had worked so many times during this conversation already. But this time my silence caused a state of crisis on the man’s features.

“It seems…it almost seems…” he swallowed a lump and let his eyes migrate to the tragedy of his scattered records, pocked with drizzle, likely cracked inside their sleeves, certainly scratched beyond the mint condition a man like this would have undoubtedly purchased them in.

“Hey, hey. Hey you there.”

I blinked to find the cashier clicking her fingers before me.

“Don’t do that. Don’t run from this,” she said. “Answer the question.”

“What question?” I stared through the window, its crack climbing on a diagonal to the far right corner, not quite, but almost there. Cracking and reflecting as windows do, yet failing to show me, refusing to do the other thing windows do.

What question?
It was obvious isn’t it?
I scoffed and looked down at my shoes, shoes without a brand. I heard a squeak somewhere inside my skull as I strained to recall where I purchased these brandless shoes, shoes planted firmly on the road.

Where do you stand?

Firmly on the road, I suppose.

Yet it wasn’t a road anymore, it was a river and these shoes weren’t planted, water surged over them, yet they remained dry and they weren’t mine and I didn’t buy them anywhere because—

I lifted my chin to answer, but the time for this had passed. The stranger and the cashier exchanged a wink a split before the entire window buckled in, shattering glass, tearing through book covers and skin and the fabric of something else.

The Unity shoppers clutched their books and peered out through the window frame, wincing as a heavy gust blew rain across their faces and the upturned book covers. Some rushed to salvage them, the rest stared beyond the bounds of their frame, asking without asking a thing at all.

Yet it was there all the same.

Where do you stand?

Outside of it.

Outside of what?

The window.

What window?

Hope you enjoyed that. The story above originated as the intro for a non-fiction article I was trying to write, but by the time I’d hit paragraph three I got tired of the flat language that non-fiction tends to steer me towards and became more interested in the scene itself than the article I was writing.

Next week’s post will dive into this a bit more. Keep an eye out for it.

Also…

My short story collection Hallucinations is out in stores. Please grab yourself a copy.

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“Most of the stories feel like a desaturated fever dream, where everything appears normal but feels far from it.” - Keith Long.

“lyrical, haunting, and unafraid to dig deep into the psychological abyss.”

- Jodalita

If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy my books as well.

I’ll admit that title has a touch of click bait to it. I wrote this story over two years ago, but given how heavily it’s themes overlap with some of the insights from Louis Theroux’ recent Netflix doc Inside the Manosphere, I thought it was worth riding that topical wave.
Enjoy. Apologies in advance for my butchered reading .

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When I wrote the first edition of this series, I almost didn’t press publish. People who tell you how many books they’ve read this year or what books they read are the same people who take their shirt off when they go running on the waterfront- I don’t care how hot it is, that’s not the reason you did that.

I’ve written about this before, but I’m fairly deliberate about which books I place on my reading list. I’m conscious that books are made out of other books, so I read with one eye towards improving my writing and my perspective.

I didn’t start this series to flex. I started it because books change you, but those changes aren’t always delivered in predictable ways. My goal here is to to catalogue the cause and effect of my encounters with each book and prove or disprove my own point one novel at a time.

Zone of Interest - Martin Amis

I picked this copy up in my apartment building’s community library—which never fails to include a few surprise gems. Nice to know my neighbours have good taste.

My first encounter with Amis’ work was London Fields, which I read a few years ago shortly after I heard the author had died. That book is a dialect heavy tour through the underbelly of 1990’s Portobello road and a pub called The Black Cross in London, channelled through the neurotic voice of its failed-author narrator. It didn’t feature any of the whippets, sunbathing brits or science lab spec coffee shops that the gentrified London Fields of 2025 had primed me to look for in a novel of this name, but I probably should have known better.

In subject matter, this novel didn’t do a great job in preparing me for the period piece in Zone of Interest either, but prose wise it did. When I open an Amis novel, it’s not uncommon for me to catch myself having read an entire page or two before realising I haven’t taken anything in. His style is dense until it’s not. I find you have to work upfront, but then he hypnotises you and suddenly you’re in it and that hard work converts to a nutrient dense reading experience.

Charting the day to day of a high ranking Nazi official, Zone of Interest spotlights the absurdity of totalitarian regimes, walking a line of dramatic irony which risks putting the reader in a strange state of moral limbo if they’re not applying the close reading Amis’ writing demands.

In the last few years, I took a lot of plane trips and ducked the movie for Zone of Interest every time I saw it come up, primarily because that is probably the worst the setting for that kind of film. But I’m definitely curious to see how the tongue and cheek mockery of death camp jargon translates to a medium where it might be easier to miss the subtle wink the storyteller is making at his audience.

Junky — William Burrows

Burrows and the Beat poets are in a mythic category. My exposure to them for the most part has been as cultural landmarks, mainly delivered through other artists I respect making reference to them in interviews, Bourdain, Lou Reed, Maynard from Tool. For a while now, I’ve known my reading would eventually bring me to to them, but I’ve kept a weary distance - maybe out of a half fear that I won’t “get it” and the illusion of this whole scene will shatter for me.

I read Junky on a beach in Fiji - which initially seems like the polar opposite setting to the subject matter this novel tackles, but sadly, isn’t so far off the mark from the addiction problems that are currently plaguing this island nation. Though I was in a hammock drinking Fiji Bitter for those four days, so maybe that first instinct was correct.

The copy I read made for an interesting author study as it included the multiple iterations that were included in reprints across the years. Given the time it was written (1953) the novel’s name and contents enjoyed many rewrites and spellings. On the sentence level, Burrows is a master of authority. The street terminology doesn’t feel inauthentic for a moment. This is a man who’s tasted this world and lived there.

This book has too many children of influence to name, but not all of it’s tropes are familiar. At times Burrows strays from street jargon speak and dips into a quasi scientific voice when describing his addiction: "

“It was a suffering of his cells alone. He himself — the conscious ego that looked out of the glazed, alert-calm hoodlum eyes — would have nothing to do with this suffering of his rejected other self, a suffering of the nervous system, of flesh and viscera and cells.”

Often when a writer’s voice leaks into his work it snuffs out the fictive dream that drives the reading experience, but in this case it adds to the story. It takes off the non-person mask of “junky” and reminds you that there’s a poet and a thinker under there who wouldn’t be so buried if this substance didn’t have such a heavy hold on him.

This straying from expectation is what I love in a novel. You look at the cover, you make up your mind of what this will be, but you’re wrong.

Orbital — Samantha Harvey.

Orbital was 2024’s Booker prize winner. Leading up to the announcement of that award, I went to a panel talk in London which interviewed the final six or so short listees, and found Samantha extremely compelling when being interviewed. Likewise, Percival Everette (who was a close challenger for the prize) sold the shit out his novel, James, through charisma alone. I’m yet to read that one, but I’m sure it will feature here at some point.

Since her win Harvey has received no shortage of criticism for the lack of plot in Orbital. I bought this one for my fiancé as a Christmas present, and she, like many, found it too heavy on lyrical descriptions and too light on everything else.

I opened the cover prepared for a hard slog and…it wasn’t that bad. In the early pages of the book there is a diagram of the orbit that the astronauts involved are following, after training myself to reference this before reading the coordinated chapter, I found it was a huge help in adding a bit of expectation to the prose and context to what might be coming up. But again, I read this on a beach in Fiji with all the time and mental energy in the world on my hands, so I can see how many people wouldn’t like this book. If the prose requires you to get extra-curricular to enjoy it then it’s not doing its job right?

Depends on your taste.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest - Ken Kesey

I picked this one up from the Hard to Find Second Hand Bookstore in Auckland years ago as a Christmas present for my Dad but I didn’t get around to reading it until this summer.

While Ken Kesey is a graduating class removed from William Burrows, his influences and aims share a lot of the same DNA (though in my opinion execute those ideas with significantly more success).
OFOTCN is my favourite book right now. That balance of fractured psychology and charisma is intoxicating. All the characters are broken but have heart. Kesey’s version of this story is a much more sympathetic reading of Nurse Ratchet than the movie is. She is a symptom of a system rather than the villain that the Jack Nicholson film makes her out to be. While I’ve read some criticism of Kesey’s use of The Chief’s POV lens. This choice makes his telling so much stronger. The unreliable narration that makes up the very fabric of this novel allows Kesey to ration his narrator’s quiet genius when needed, yet offset any risk of over exposition via a flare up of his psychosis— which simultaneously serve as credible supporting evidence of his insights regardless of his madness.

“I know already what will happen: somebody’ll drag me out of the fog and we’ll be back on the ward and won’t be a sign of what went on tonight and if I was fool enough to try and tell anybody about it they’d say, Idiot, you just had a nightmare; things as crazy as a big machine room down in the bowels of a dam where people get cut up by robot workers don’t exist. But if they don’t exist how can a man see them?”

Style wise, this is a high watermark for me. Stream of consciousness blending fractured hallucinations into reality, but not in a distracting, indulgent way. At the time it might have been experimental, but it’s not inaccessible. This is a great example of what the novel form can do that movies can’t. If you try to film this element, it will come off cheap and embarrassing. Because a reader is using their imagination to visualise a novel already, these blips in reality come in a more accurate true to psychology way. This is the lane novels should exist in. Anything that’s unfilmable is the shit that stays with you for years. Because it creates an experience that’s almost like a secret in your own head. You read these words without making a sound and now you’ve got something unspeakable going on up there. It’s not just the words, it’s the order of them and the context which makes that experience so unique.

This one sent me down a rabbit hole of all things Kesey. He was apparently a participant in the MKULTRA studies where the CIA fed LSD to students and criminals with a mind towards developing brainwashing tools for who-knows-what purposes. There’s a great documentary called Ken Kesey’s search for a Kool Place. Which overlaps my chat around the beat poets from earlier as he comes across Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac etc. It’s funny watching these encounters as a person decades younger than all involved because you can see the old heads looking at these young ‘ns and thinking what the fuck, yet those very young uns were in their eightees before I even started primary school and had already offered up insights about human nature I wouldn’t discover for decades to come.

“As a matter of fact there are only a few men in the ward who are committed. Only Scanlon and— well, I guess some of the Chronics. And you. Not many commitments in the whole hospital. No, not many at all.”

The Reed Warbler

The RW charts the journey of a German Seamstress Josephina leaving her country to escape family shame over an event beyond her control and boarding a ship for late 18th century New Zealand. I’m not a huge fan of saga style intergenerational texts of this kind, but there are subtle things going on structure wise that made the six hundred plus word count worth it.

The first handful of chapters frustrated me. Often major plot beats are fed to the reader in such an abstract way that it has you squinting to decipher what is going on, but then it would go back over that same territory with a borderline detective novel grade exposition to fill in the info gaps. This was annoying until I realised the parallels with the stitching that the character Josephine was famous for. Very clever. But was the trick rewarding enough to sustain interest for an entire novel?

Sometimes, but I’ll admit there were points where this got annoying. I found myself wanting to scream, just deliver the story once and do it clearly so we don’t have to go through this song and dance.

As a writer I’ve wrestled with my own tendency to withhold info— but when executed poorly its effect is to frustrate the reader, rather than an enticing.

The other stylistic element I didn’t enjoy was the characters as ghosts effect that the author confessed to attempting in his afterword. There’s a brother called Freddy who sits in the periphery. In his case it works well, because plot events justify his absence. But this quality leaches into other characters, Wolf, Josephina’s lover feels very 2D outside of his socialist costume. Their meeting and relationship came abruptly and was touched on too lightly for my liking. When (spoiler) he died tragically, I felt nothing.

This raises the question of the line a writer has to walk between attempting interesting structural choices and providing a satisfying, fleshed out reading experience. It’s the prog rock vs love song dichotomy all over again.

Okay, that’s all for this one. Sorry my publishing cadence has been less regular than usual. I’m back at work which means my writing time is being pushed into my novel rather than this page, but I’ll do my best to keep this on my fortnightly routine.

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Hunting, Fishing & Outdoor Supplies, Western Suburbs

A bullet can’t kill a man.

It’s speed that does it.

Not here to give you a physics lesson. But you should know that if you’re gonna point a gun at a guy.

I sold you the damn thing.

Can’t imagine I’d be in business long if I made a habit of leaving stray rounds in the chamber of my display pistols. You think that pocket full of lead is gonna do you a whole lotta good if I decide to rush you? Do you want that?

Look at those hands. Shaking too much to pick up a bullet let alone stack a magazine.

Of course you don’t want that.

Put it down son. This isn’t your world.

A few bad tattoos can’t buy you history. Besides, the kind of history you’re trying to flex would put a kid like you in the spare room of some sympathetic aunt long before you saw a prison cell.

You don’t want to do time. Right now, you might think you do. Whatever’s going on in your life might have you convinced that’s the best path forward. But it’s either gonna be me who convinces you otherwise or some two hundred keg angel with a pig dog tattooed on his cheek.

Go home, boy. Find yourself a fat lass who’s pushing the edge of baby age. A girl like that will probably have you. She’ll make you feel every thrill you’re hoping this morning of bad choices will give you.

That’s my boy. Put it down. Walk out the door.

Wait.

Speed’s not the only thing. I suppose if you threw that handful of bullets on top of the coals you might get one step closer to killing.

Sorry no. I won’t hold you up. I misspoke that’s all. Get out of here.

Agency Road, Western Suburbs

What you got their buddy?

Best put that away before someone takes it off you.

This your car? Nice roof scoop. Can you show me what the keys look like?

Woah, woah, woah. I know you’re not pointing that at me. That’d be daft. Cause you know I’d probably–

–take it off you.

There there. Now you’ve done it. Turned my tinnie run into a whole afternoon deal. Over there. Yep. Right here on the curb, that’s it. Settle in. I wanna hear the jiggle of a key ring.
Beautiful.

Nice weapon. You just buy this from inside?

Oh buddy, sorry to snatch it so soon.

Now. Do you have a phone on you?

Perfect. Give it here.

Oops

I had to do that I’m sorry. Hope that wasn’t too costly?

I’ll tell you what. If you wait behind that steering wheel and hold the passenger door open for me, I’ll be right back with your car keys in a minute.

Deal?

Buddy. I only need you drop me east side of the highway and you can have your car back. Shit. I’ll even let you keep the gun.

Good. Now, did you buy any rounds while you were in there or was this water pistol just a prop for your next role play circle jerk?

And what breed of shop keep am I walking into? Beer gutted hunter or ex-military bruiser?

Gotcha.

***

Here take them. Start her up, Go, Go. Go

What you looking at me for? Go!

Turn here. Shit, You missed it. Here. Here.

What? You never seen a bit of spatter. Got some of it in my mouth. Think that makes me a cannibal?

You must have been home-schooled hah?

Turn here. Actually no. Keep heading for the highway.

Shit. The joker behind the counter had some lip didn’t he?

Pocket full of shells. Brother, more like chest full of holes!

Glad you and me met today, buddy. I feel like we’ve bonded. Don’t you?

Fuck you then.

You can pull in over here.

Perfect.

Here you go, as promised. Sorry, I used up all your rounds. You can try and beat me to death with it if you like.

Just kidding. You’ve been a huge help today buddy.

Roll up that window and forget you ever saw me. But don’t forget me. I feel we’ve bonded this afternoon don’t you?

Woah, woah, buddy. Don’t even give that idea the time of day!

Point that bonnet some other direction and cool down on the revving ay? Your cars already hot.

Go home. I just gave you a story you can tell your friends for the rest of your life. Take that and run.

Don’t do it, buddy. You’ll never get out of here in time. Lord willing, my forehead will turn that shitsibishi into a write off.

Oh you think you’re cute? Headlights?

C’mon. You’re showing your age now.

Hey. Fucking calm down. Fucking–

Expressway On Ramp

My friend, you can’t walk along the highway like this.

My friend, you’ll stop and talk to me if you know what’s good for you.

Smart man.

That your car back there?

Did you notice the wreck at least? Real mess. Flames and a hell of a lot of screaming.

You would have had to walk past it to make it up here, no?

Sad sight anyways. Hit and run without the running part.

I suppose the crumpled carburettor likely had a hand in that.

Mind if I see some i.d?

Got to be thorough you know? There’s a chance the driver popped out before the rig went up in orange and smoke.

Wow you really thirty nine? Could have sworn you were scraping twenty two by the look of you.

Be Jenga you must get this a lot. I’m sorry friend. I Didn’t mean to flog the dying equine.

Hey would you like a lift in my patrol car per chance?

Sorry, that wasn’t really a question. They’ll write me up if I let you keep walking down this non-pedestrian zone.

Na, na. Sorry. I can’t have you riding shotgun. Department policy. I know it’s degrading. But most of this life is, no?

Murphy’s Family and Criminal Law Office

Kiddo, if you’re gonna play the denial game, at least understand which charge they’re trying to drill you on.

We’re well past questioning whether you’re a killer or not. When she’s got you bailed up on the docks, that sex bot prosecutor is gonna blow up your body count to pro-athlete figures, you understand that?

Oh here it is. Enjoy a nice cold glass of water.

You smoke?

You should take it up. Might shorten your life. But longevity isn’t a high priority among the folks you’ll be joining if you don’t come straight with me. Lets cut the shit. Did you do ‘em both?

You know it’s funny, I came in here thinking I had a juvey case on my hands. Look at you. It might not be the worst thing for ya to go through a little rapid aging.

But let’s get to it. They’re pushing for armed robbery, armed homicide and murder with a deadly vehicle.

Why? Well the firearm purchase on your bank statement matches the ballistics report for our leaking shop keeper and your Mitsubishi registration happens to match the charred pedestrian we found compressed against the back concrete of an RSA pub.

Oh my words are too crude are they, kiddo? Apologies I didn’t realise I was speaking to a delicate flower. Well, it ain’t so fucking delicate to murder a father of two and leave his wife widowed.

Why’d you do it?

Believe it or not, I actually believe you. This is good. I think the jury will too.

Mind if I smoke in here?

The idea that you stood in front of some hard talking shopkeeper, loaded a full clip into that shooter before his eyes and proceeded to unload them into his chest, just to make your wallet a little heavier? Na. None of it matches up. Look at you. Your gangly legs should be stuck to a seat in some BO filled gaming den right now, not on the wrong end of an armed robbery and murder charge. Not even a top shelf prosecutor could sell a jury on you having that kind of nerve. No offence.

But if they work the revenge angle? Pent up, pushed around your whole life, called things like kiddo (sorry) even though you’re a fully grown man. Then you might be in trouble. Real trouble. Won’t take long for a jury of your newspaper reading peers to decide what type of resentful vermin you are.

We need to use your appearance. You’re frail, it’s scary for a boyish guy like you to walk around in this town.

We need to distance you from both of the vics. That gun shop salesman was a stranger to you from the moment you walked in with your saved up payslips till you walked out with your only means of self defence.

And that car jacker?…he didn’t say a word. He used the gun to do all the talking. Didn’t take much for him to disarm you, of course. After he blasted that gun nut’s skull all over his own trophy case, he cucked you into playing getaway driver and you got out of there the moment there wasn’t a muzzle pointed at your clavicle, ran for your fucking life—-

Oh you don’t like that story?

Would you prefer it if I told them you were quietly grateful to see someone else hand that smug gun seller his divine retribution? Would you prefer I tell them that this unexpected gratitude you felt towards your proxy assassin quickly burned away when he kept chattering on and on and suddenly all you could hear out of his mouth was the voice of every mean kid on the playground, every girl who said no before you even had a chance to ask the question, every employer who picked the squared jawed Jockey model over you and the anger started to build, your afternoon started to crack.

Would you prefer I got up on the stand and announce to everyone that you finally got one back on this unfair life? Congrats kiddo. You win. Your prize is a decade on a cell block.

Kiddo, I don’t care what kind of man you see yourself as. Your time to make that case expired a week ago when you decided to spaz rage for the sake of a back page feature.

I’m the only one who can paint who you are now and I’m not in the business of ego stroking.

After I’m done?

It’s up to the jury to make their final call.

High Court Chambers

It gives me no pleasure to slam down this gavel my child. No part of me doubts you committed this crime. But whether this verdict means justice, is another question entirely.

Do you have any final words before I adjourn this session?

Defendant Box

Argh, I ain’t much for talkin’ but someone once told me, a bullet can’t kill a man. It’s speed that does it. Don’t make no difference how high calibre that round is if it stays in your pocket.

I ain’t so sure about that though, y’know?

Shit look at me.

Not a single trigger pulled and I’m about as dead as a guy can get.

Author’s note: This was a bit of an exercise in point of view. Second person voice is hard to write in. But I felt that was the best fit for this story. I’d love to hear what people think. Was it easy enough to follow? Did you find the POV switches confusing? Did you find the different narrators had sufficiently distinct speech mannerisms?

Please comment if you’ve got thoughts and opinions. Every little bit helps.

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Three and a half years ago I nearly gave up on writing.

While house sitting five stray dogs and a cat in Faro, Portugal, I spent a full afternoon staring at a ceiling thinking about all the time I’d wasted and wondering what the hell I was going to do now.

I’d spent five years working on that first novel and I’d spent the three months leading up to this crisis moment distracting myself in Europe, but it only took a two week long window of nothing but time to drain away my last excuse, and that’s when the black hole opened up.

I’d known for a while that the book I was working on wasn’t any good.

But this had never concerned me. I could justify why and I trusted I’d be able to fix this soon.

My novel wasn’t any good because all the obstacles of ordinary life had been standing in the way of it, a lack of time, a lack of energy, too much distraction, but those factors were finally gone.

I could fix it now. This novel wasn’t good YET, but it would be soon.

No job anymore, no obligations (barring this ragtag group of animals I was looking after). Finally I had a chance to take off the duct tape, diagnose and prescribe some permanent fixes.

But this story I’d been living with for so many years was a bloated mess by the time I unravelled the top dressing. At four hundred thousand plus words its negatives were hard coded into DNA. I was too early in my writing life to understand that it’s harder to correct a broken scene than it is to start afresh, my experience as a reader was too shallow to recognise that this story’s merits were the very things tearing holes in its own skin, but I was experienced enough to realise I didn’t have the skills to whip a single one of the flaws back into shape.

I’m no catastrophiser by nature. But under the forty degree heat of that afternoon, the mass of variables I realised I needed to fix before I could make a dent in this novel’s problems came crashing down on me all at once. It was sentence level craft, story structure, pacing, genre confusion, POV, not to mention a closet full of hang ups concerning the type of writer I wanted to be seen as.

I was very close to quitting.

***

Today I reread a scene from that novel. It was bad. But reading it made me feel good because I can still smell the grass seed carrying in the wind from that afternoon, I remember staring at the ceiling and staring down the barrel of all the work ahead, thinking, I’ll never be able to put in the time required to fix this, wondering, what if I hit another false peak and realise there’s even further to go than expected?

I kept those memories in mind as I reread the scene and automatically began picking out flaws in each sentence, as I mentally corrected sections that I’d cut entirely if I rewrote it today, I realised how much ground I’ve covered since that day.

People love to throw around the line, “If you write, you’re a writer.”

That’s valid if it helps you stay motivated. Imposter syndrome is a sufficiently malevolent bitch in her own right without someone like me throwing around claims of stolen valour. But before my brief breakdown in olive country, surrounded by a three legged mongrel and a foxy on death’s door, I wasn’t a writer.

Sure, I’d already put in late nights, seven day weeks and countless pre-sunrise hours into this craft before that afternoon, but I didn’t truly start until I’d seen this monster for what she was and witnessed her blink back at me with mocking, judgemental eyes.

Today I thanked her for that.

If you’re yet to encounter your own crisis of this kind. Good luck. My prayers are with you. But trust me, you’ll thank her one day.

***

I almost failed to see him. Gosh. I almost knocked him over the edge.

Under Tuesday morning drizzle, while pushing my bike up the harbour bridge’s incline, I first set eyes on the man who would break my mind in two.

Rain spots pocked the path ahead of me. It was unclear if I was catching up to them or them to me. Wound wire hung from upward columns like low effort decorations. My spokes whined as I pushed, yet to work out whether I was enjoying the chemical high of tar fumes or not. To this day cars whizz far closer to the cycle path than I’m comfortable with. That’s why I was so close to the walkway’s edge that morning— I didn’t want a wing mirror to send me rag dolling onto state highway eleven. Imagine that? The next day headlines would suffer delayed deliveries as the front page image of my destroyed bike revealed every gory detail of my crumpled front basket spilling damp Daily News rolls all across the tarmac.

I almost failed to notice him as I brushed along the bridge’s handrail. His feet dangled, he was a child atop a jungle gym, except his thoughts were of serious things. His brown eyes had taxes, stock options or perhaps a complicated love affair keeping them galaxies away from this drizzly morning.

“Be careful up there,” I offered.

He rolled his eyes.

I squeezed my front brake, lowered my kickstand and the first toot erupted behind me.

He turned away. “Spare me, Mr Račić.”

Perhaps it was the fumes, but I had to brace myself on the balustrade as I followed his gaze to the swirling brown below. To guess my name on first attempt? hardly a case of swinging wildly. “Do I know you, friend?” I smiled.

“Do we have to play this game again?” The man kicked at the nothing beneath him. “You tell me to be careful. I jump anyway.” He shook his head. “You won’t even have time to see your own deathbed by the time I climb back over this rail again.”

“Sir?” I chuckled and smiled harder than was comfortable “…What are you saying?”

He groaned and raised both hands to the heavens. “Do we have to retrace this old ground every time?”

"We?” I followed his eyes skyward. “Who are you talking to, sir?”

“Arghhh give it up Račić. You ain’t livin’ that life of yours any more reckless after this whether I share the truth with you or not.”

The clouds moved slowly, deep grey, but not brooding enough to be beautiful. There seemed to be an intentionally bland wrinkle of nature being delivered unto this particular commuting hour.

“Wheel that hunk of rust onto the rest of your afternoon you nosey old beggar,” said the man. “Go finish your mail run. I’ll be out here for another hour before the liquor’s taken hold enough to start me on my jumping jacks.”

Something in his ease of language struck me as too flippant to be serious. I began to move my bike on.

He winked and called after me. “Don’t go get yourself all bundled up about this either, Račić.”

I kept my eyes on the man’s frantic gestures, though didn’t stop wheeling step by step as I listened.

“A school teacher and an off duty policeman will visit me before I jump, so you’re off the hook.” He released a nasty cough and came up wet eyed. “—plenty of other witnesses who could’ve but didn’t step in to intervene.” He winked again. “You’re off the hook, bud.”

His words were clinically composed and his past tense predictions carried no reverence. This was a man discussing the easterly that was due to close in on the coast at around 4 pm Greenwich mean time, not a person concerned with his own hundred metre fall and impending broken neck. It had to be insanity.

Only a fool, a bad Christian or an outright coward would’ve walked on after drawing this conclusion. Yet that’s what I did, spokes squeaking, shoes damp, I pushed my bike up the incline and left the poor man behind on the wrong side of the bridge rail.

Every time I recall that drizzly Tuesday, I watch myself make the same retreat, the same proverbial pulling of the hospital plug, disobeying the impulse to squeeze my brake lever and stay. Every memory ends with me pushing my two wheels at a faster pace than the traffic beside me, and a faster pace than I’d move at even when late for my mail run. In every memory I leave the man on the bridge behind, though in some versions I do work up the nerve to stay and chat a little longer.

In these instances the man leans further into his Nostradamus monologues, telling me about his looping life and the thirty year timeline that always ends up here among the high winds and low idling traffic. He speaks bitterly of the memory that stays with him while others enjoy a clean slate every time. This man sees his lot in life as a curse and has no patience for my suggestions about what his looping version of reality might mean. According to him he’s already heard these out of my mouth a million times.

“Good news. Proof of something after,” I offer.

He pushes out his bottom lip. “What part of an “after” could possibly interest you, Račić? You’re terrified of this life as it is. Wouldn’t it be a relief to get it over with?”

“Sir, you’re in a high emotional state, there’s a lot to live for.” I draw my eyes to his sneakers teasing the edge of the bridge side. “I’m sure there are people who love you, who’d hate to see—”

“Na, na,” he says.

I step away from the edge as he thrashes his head in the wind and threatens to lose his balance. Thankfully he grips the balustrade with both hands and leans towards me with his words. “Račić! You brush shoulders with me every lifetime, but have you even once taken it as licence to live a little more recklessly?”

I wait. I don’t know the answer to this.

He shakes his head. “v’course not. If endless dusty classrooms and endless conversations like this have taught me anything, it’s that human nature doesn’t change, even in the face of mind bending news. It don’t change.” He lets go of the rail and opens his arms the city scape hugging either side of the harbour he’s flirting with entirely unprotected. “That teacher’s aid will walk past me in half an hour and tell herself I’m probably a dangerous junkie, too risky to involve herself with. And that undercover copper won’t even grace me with a pause. He’ll carry on to meet his underage girlfriend and might even crack a joke about my floating bloated belly when I surface in tomorrow’s newspaper there.” He points to the bundles of Daily News neatly stacked in my basket.

“You’ve seen the future as well then?” I ask, staring out at the white capped waves, feeling guilty that I’m no less eager to cross the bridge and get out of the cold.

“Na,” he glares. “That’s another ball punch big JC blessed me with. I never get to float above my own funeral like people always imagine they will. That’s the awful thing about this loop. You only get the life bit. There’s no relaxing in the clouds, looking back, seeing what all your friends and family think about you.”

“This might be a silly question.” I stare down at a tourist ferry emerging below, smile speckled waves clustering on the top deck. “But have you ever tried to avoid the jumping part?”

He sniffs but the wind steals the sound away before I hear it. “Not many things harder to sit through than a suicide funeral though are there?”

I narrow my eyes. It seems the wind stole my words out of earshot as well.

“So I could hardly hope for much of celebration even if I could stick around to see it, right?” he sniffs again.

I can’t confirm or deny if this is right. I leave him there. I left him there. I tried to finish my shift, but my back wheel got a puncture. The hard tube of air deflated into a sloppy loop of rubber. I wheeled it home, the black tube maniacally fighting against the motion of the loop with each rotation. I felt an urge to call someone about my afternoon, but Sue was already on her last breath with me. Who else? My Dad?

The next morning I’d call in sick. Going the entire day without looking at the front page would be too much. I couldn’t swallow that. I’d have to be a different type of person to attempt that, and I’m not.

Memories don’t work the same way as old recordings though do they? Sometimes when I picture pushing my handlebars up the steep part afterwards and swinging my leg over the seat ready to coast down the other side, I picture myself squeezing both the front and back brake instead of heading right home. I hear the hiss and squeak and everything. I picture myself chaining my bike to the middle of the bridge and going back to him for a second time, standing with him for as long as it takes. Because when you’re reliving those moments, things seem like they could be different, don’t they?

For seventeen lifetimes my mail beat has thrown me across the path of my friend on the bridge and according to him, sixteen of those times I’ve been no less astonished by him than I was this afternoon.

People don’t change.

This time, though perhaps it’s every time, I watch myself wheeling my bike beyond the danger channel of traffic noise and nearly knocking my troubled friend off the side before he has a chance to jump. This time I catch myself looking for tethers, looking for a hidden man with a gun in his hand. There’s got to be one, no? There’s got to be some blackmailer or some catch-22 that keeps the man coming back here even though he knows how it ends, even though he doesn’t like how it ends.

Today I wheel my flat tyre up the hill—my tyre made flat by the tack I somehow knew would be waiting for me on the edge of a torn piece of cardboard that blew across this footpath, yet I rode over it anyway. Square that for me while I retract one of my delusions from earlier.

Remember how I predicted a wing mirror clipping me and rag dolling me into traffic or off the edge? After talking with the man who would break my mind in two, I see that was a silly thought now.

People die in traffic every day. Some are accidents, some aren’t, but every one of them happens because the things put in front of you are the things put in front of you and you can’t do a damn thing about it no matter what you know, y’know?

Sometimes I doctor the memories to cheer myself up a touch. But no amount of daydreaming changes the fact that I didn’t do anything to help that first time, the ninth time or the seventeenth damned time either. I never do. That’s the scary thing. Doesn’t matter how much wisdom he gave me out there on that drizzly Tuesday with enough tar, exhaust fumes and suicide speeches to send me to the nut house, I’m certain that if I could remember like he remembers, I wouldn’t try to help him any more than I did this time around. Sure, I’d probably track him down before he made it to the bridge, but not to help out, only to watch the dominoes stack front of him in the right order and to watch him acknowledge them yet allow them do their work on him without protest. If I saw him once, I’ll see him again, but I can’t edit how he’ll look to me. Maybe memories are more like old photographs than I thought?

By the time I reach the gas station a block away from my house, the complaining rubber gets to be too much. Sometimes the things put in front of you are a pain in the neck, aren’t they? I unwind the spoke guard and tear the ruined tube away. I should take it home with me, but I leave it here on the forecourt instead.

With sagging rubber wound over my shoulder, I wheel the bike home on an empty rim. I don’t pass by an undercover police officer, I don’t bump into a relief teacher either. Though no part of me doubts they’ll be swinging past my man shortly.

But I cut myself off back there didn’t I? I told you I was gonna redact one of my delusions but never got that far. Let’s correct the record then.

Remember that fantasy of me rag dolling off the bridge, like the man who broke my mind in two?

Something like that would never make the front page. Accident or not, things like that never make the news, because a guy dying in traffic isn’t news to anyone because the things put in front of you are the things put in front of you and you can’t do a damn thing about it, no matter what you know ahead of time, y’know?

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into my live video and commenting live.

You can probably tell that isn’t my most natural environment, but it was a good to experience. There’s something surreal about how the live element ramps up the pressure well beyond what you’d assume.

It mimicked the writers’ group environment a little bit in the sense that even while reading part of my mind was tracking the efficiency of my language and making notes along the way. For example if to rewrite this story, I’d probably trim the grappling sequence by two or three beats. Some of those sentences could have done with some sanding down as well. Too late for that now obviously, but it’s a good reminder that, now that I’m back in New Zealand, I should probably put the feelers out and join a writers’ group that replicates something close to what I had in London.

If you’d like more stories like this, you can buy Hallucinations here.

If you’d like to leave a friendly review, you can do that here.

That’s all.

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On Saturday at 8:00 pm EST (which is Sunday 2pm NZT) I’m doing a live reading of, The Island, a story out of my collection, Hallucinations.

This isn’t the type of thing I usually do, but gotta promote y’know?

I finally got my hands on a box of physical copies of Hallucinations and I’m really happy with how the book came out. They all look and feel high quality which is harder to achieve than you might think. Thanks again for the time and effort you put into making this a reality.

Don’t expect some dramatic performance. I’ll be doing my best not to stutter through it to be honest— but maybe there’s some entertainment value in that.

When deciding which story to read for this, I considered picking one out that lives up to the title and the cover image, something surreal or psychedelic. Those stories are definitely in there, but I settled on The Island for it’s absence of those on the nose qualities.

The Island is surreal in the way real life is surreal. The back cover of this book contains the tag line, perception is reality, that’s a key feature of the collection, not the fireworks and weirdness. That’s easy to miss if you’re skimming. But I suppose that’s the point of readings like this.

Alright, you’ll get an email when I go live. See you then.

Buy Hallucinations here.

or leave a (nice) review of it here

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This is the first Substack post I’ve published in three weeks. Between all the wrapping paper and holiday boozing you probably didn’t notice. But that’s the longest gap I’ve left since I started writing these “weekly” posts three years ago.

I’m not patting myself on the back for that work rate. It’s a compulsion more than anything. It’s also not the smartest way of doing things. Publishing weekly forced me to rush out half baked ideas in many cases and acted as too convenient an excuse to avoid writing fiction on days I didn’t want to.

While I’ve got no intention to stop writing every day, In ‘26 I’m going to slow down the publishing cadence to one every second week. Alternating between fiction with non-fiction until I reach the end of my season three batch.

If that schedule is too slow for you, feel free to read through my back catalogue (don’t worry, reading a story from three years ago doesn’t carry the same stalker connotations that liking an old instagram post does).

This slower publishing rate is in service of sitting with ideas for longer, editing more and producing higher quality writing.

Looking back and looking ahead.

We’re in the season of resolutions, where we get to hear all the promises people are going to break in a few months time.

I hate to join in on that mob, but since this article has so far consisted of how much less work I plan to do this year, I feel I’ve got some ground to make up.

But first, a recap of the year that’s been.

2025:

I started this year picking up dispirit shifts as a furniture mover in east London and I ended it working for a tech start up in New Zealand. Funny how things pan out.

From May to September I stretched the boundaries of my Schengen region allowance, dipping in and out of the EU before touching down in Canada, the US, Fiji and New Zealand.

I also got engaged beside Lake Bled in Slovenia.

Which is a great way to overshadow the three separate physical books my writing appeared in this year. Two Anthologies and one full collection of my own.

(If you haven’t already, you can buy Hallucinations here).

(If you have read it, leaving a Good Reads review would be much appreciated).

Being unemployed for months on end helps, but this year was one of the most prolific writing periods of my life. In the span of twelve months I wrote over sixty short stories on top of the ones I’ve published here on Substack, I worked through three complete drafts of a brand new novel, read four times the number of novels I did in ‘24 and started placing a much heavier emphasis on writing at the sentence level. That last part probably sounds like an afterthought, but the deeper I dig into this stuff, the more I realise it’s everything.

In the early period of this year I took a high volume approach to submitting short stories to lit journals- spreadsheets and rejection logs etc. I got a few hits. But again, this approach incentivised faster writing, made to order, which stole some time from the editing, fermenting, re-editing part of the process which has resulted in some of my strongest stories to date. I will take a similarly pared down approach to this clip of submitting in ‘26.

Midway through the year I had the privilege of getting coffee beside the Paddington canal with a prominent New Zealand author (I haven’t asked him if I can use his name here so I won’t) to pick his brain on the best path forward when trying to break into the industry. He offered some encouraging words on my current strategy, but most importantly provided concrete evidence that it is possible to do this.

Hallucinations.

I already mentioned it, but given the mission statement of The Sudden Walk, the publication of my first book isn’t something I can gloss over too quickly.

In July 2022 I moved to the UK with the goal of publishing my first book and on the 10th of November 2025 (the day I landed back in New Zealand) Hallucinations was published.

And the response has been eye opening.

People who I never thought would take any interest in some obscure collection of literary existentialist stories came out in droves to buy the book. While others who were closer to my lane went radio silent or worse.

It’s funny how these things pan out. People are happy for you unless they think they deserve what you’ve got. But that’s enough wallowing among the jealous.

It was humbling seeing people send through photos from the other side of the world with my book in their hands, then nerve wracking when it dawned on me that they might actually read what’s in between those pages. Normal people who might not have picked up another book all year were going to open the first page to the junkie ramblings of the smack head in story number one. (I put a lot of thought into the order of stories in Hallucinations, but I didn’t consider that part).

But it wasn’t so bad. The people who get it, get it, and they tell me about it. The ones who don’t, I don’t hear from. That’s fine.

Short stories are a hard sell, no matter who writes them. There’s a lot of wind up. There’s a lot more focus required. It’s a different thing to your page turning beach read. I write to my own taste and that taste isn’t for everyone. I wouldn’t want it to be. But if Hallucinations is for you, it’ll be for you.

In writing this, I realise I’ve learned a few more things during this publication process than I realised so I’ll pin these thoughts for now and circle back to them on an article of their own.

Second plug, buy Hallucinations here.

What is in store for 2026

Slow Songs for the Landlord.

Over the past year and a bit I’ve been working on a novel that draws more from personal experience than anything I’ve written before. These parallels will definitely raise some eyebrows when people read it. But it’s a work of fiction. I’ll say that here for the first time, but probably not the last. It’s called Slow Songs for the Landlord.

I’ve got one more full line edit/pacing draft to work through on this. But I aim to seek agent representation for it this year.

Southern gothic collection.

In the last year and a half or so, my writing style has erred closer and closer to southern gothic themes with a dash of the Ken Kesey, Irvine Walsh psychedelia thrown in there. I’ve written a roster of twenty stories in this mould, but I don’t want them to stay as satellite standalones. My aim for this year is to rework the common threads among each of these stores and reshape them into a collection that shares characters, lineages and themes in Denis Johnson fashion.

Where that will end up? We will see.

Style:

As I mentioned above, writing at the sentence level is everything. The precision of your grammar, word choice and word order not only allows your images and ideas to come out clearer, it delivers them in a form that is easier to metabolise. Mastery in this area allows a writer to close the gap between abstract thought and their delivery method, which doubles back and feeds into a heightened clarity of thought which results in clearer delivery and on and on and on. Reading with a more scrutinizing eye has helped me recognise this, and this year I aim to put a lot of work into syntax and linguistic theory to build on this trend of seeing things in the text that I wasn’t able to before.

In saying that I’m healthily cautious about going too deep down this rabbit hole as I’ve seen a lot of writers who know all the words for every technique yet still can’t write to save themselves. But I’m not so stubbornly subscribed to this latter school to dismiss the value of learning the rules first then deciding whether it’s worth forgetting them or not.

I’ve got some other goals in this area that I’ll keep to myself for now, but they may pop up here on the Sudden Walk at some point.

Okay that’s all. You’ll hear from me again in two weeks time.

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This isn’t me at my best. I swear.

I ought to have eaten an early supper and tucked myself in bed. But I clung to this low resolution day instead. Now the moon hangs high above the town hall spire. I can see it from my pillow through the curtains I forgot to draw, glowing off the backs of fleeing children.

Stale chips lie limp among strips of lettuce. I lie beneath a mangled duvet, between paper bags. Nothing worth photographing comes delivered in a carton.

They’re beating old oil drums out there, offering all stowaways one final chance to show themselves. “Our mercy won’t stick around until daylight.”

As a boy, I once read that our skin is the largest organ in the body. Tonight mine seems to have been stuffed with batts insulation wool and fits me no better than a big brother’s hand-me-down.

At my best I would have had something more intelligent to say to the black eyed man who turned up at noon with rope in hand and a finger painted face. When he asked me if I considered myself a leader among my people, I certainly wouldn’t have buckled over in laughter. No. At my best, I would’ve noticed my office lanyard still dangling from my neck.

I draw in a breath and resist the urge to itch. Staring at the ceiling, I resist the what ifs. What if this had broken out yesterday? Tomorrow? Or during one of my health kicks? I’d’ve been far better equipped.

Ug boots and a dressing gown are no garb for a leader. But today? Well—

I schedule or rather, unschedule days like today for good reason. These “write offs” typically fall directly after a circled calendar date—a celebration, a graduation, an office party. A day of meeting many people followed up by a day designed precisely against meeting anyone at all. No business luncheons, no important phone calls. I’ve earned days like today where no knock on your front door should carry more weight than the Uber Eats bag or an evangelist’s plea which you can politely decline and inform, “Sorry, a portion of my paycheck already goes to the poor.”

If today were like other days, I’d be entirely excused for taking the day off. But when the man with the black eyes and era defying robe asked me if he could come in, I should’ve recognised a new kind of day had dawned. I certainly wouldn’t have said yes if I was at my best.

As he kicked off his sandals, I attempted a wisecrack about my sorry state. He balked at the word hangover with all the understanding of a dog looking at a switchboard and we never returned to the subject.

I would’ve stopped him at the door if I was at my best. I swear. Yet there I was, offering him a choice between coffee or earl grey. Coffee or earl grey on a day when the smell of either were liable to send me to the loo for a difficult to explain length of time. I should have been tucked in bed instead.

Either way, he declined. He strictly wanted to talk local council issues. I gargled on politicking jargon till my mug was empty before I thought to suggest my neighbour– His Worship, Barry West– might offer a more learned opinion on these topics. At my best I might have corrected my visitor when his pupils turned entirely white and he suckled the word Worship like I’d handed him the codes to the US nuclear arsenal.

I’ve blocked out the infant screams in a way that must defy evolution. I shouldn’t be able to block them out. I shouldn’t want to. But what else? I’ll go mad if I don’t.

At my best I would have recognised the black eyed man’s visit as an opportunity to prove myself. To justify my title, Your Excellency. Even in my cloudy state. I identified a fellow man of standing—if not strictly a man– had arrived at my door. I would have done my best to answer all of his sticky policy questions. When I sensed him steering the conversation towards the state of religion in our town and the structure of sects in the region, I shouldn’t have passed on the parcel.

If I was at my best, we might not be here.

I hear crackling through the wall. Orange flashes join the moon in lighting up my room. The central beam of His Worship’s A frame home sends embers as high as a redwood when its supports give way and that great slab of kauri plummets to the ground. I should have closed the curtains. I should never have left my bed to answer the door.

At my best I would’ve felt the sting of pride when I sensed myself failing. When my visitor asked my opinion on the state of the town’s stormwater system, I wouldn’t have choked on my words. At my best I would have come up with a clever diversion, papered over my ignorance with a segue towards my impressive attendance record at council sponsored events.

Instead, I deferred to the clock. I let a ‘on call’ man handle the questions. More concerned with my need for paracetamol than my standing in the eyes of this stranger. More concerned with my harassed liver than the ulterior motives this visitor might hold.

If I was at my best, I might have questioned whether he had any business acquiring the info he was after. At my best, his arrival at my door in particular might have spiked my suspicions.

When I saw them ushering the school children into the cattle trucks, I told myself they must be off to some alpine camp adventure. On a Sunday? To get a jump on traffic I suppose. The tears? First time away from their parents I suppose.

I’m starting to suspect my visitor from earlier is trying to make an example out of me. Call me arrogant, but this feels personal. I never wore my job title comfortably, I only signed off on the papers they handed me, I only let them call me “the best of us,” because it was written on the press packet. I would have told him all that if I were at my best.

My porch window shattered during the first melee, but no one’s touched my house since he left it. I’ve got a strange sense that no one will dare to touch my house tonight. Not if he’s instructed against it. Not even the crowd crazed hordes who shifted from door to door with their flaming torches found any cause to knock on mine.

I’ve made peace with this. If that word still exists during these times.

No, it seems this day will play out for me as I originally planned it. The only door knock I expect on this scheduled day of unscheduled activity, is one from Uber eats. Just as I planned it. Though I doubt any cars would brave my neighbourhood on this night of all nights.

I comforted myself ahead of time that days like this one are okay. Poor use of the gift of life, sure. One wasted day, sure. But only in the service of enhancing the day preceding it. A rest day in preparation for the day after. Even if there is no day after.

The moon’s gone behind a cloud now. Even the flames seem incapable of casting colour against their black mass. Raindrops land on the tarmac outside my window. Heavy, frequent slaps against pavement, the roof. Rising in volume and tempo. Thunder crackles, the flames hiss under a monsoon-bucket rainfall.

I climb out of bed just in time to see the flash flood screaming down my cul-de-sac. Whatever I might have told that black eyed man about the stormwater is defunct in the face of this.

I groan and fish out a Panadol from the pocket of my dressing gown. I swallow it without water, making a face at its bitter taste before dragging myself back over to bed.

Today I’m not at my best. But it seems today was the day they pigeon holed to take out the measuring tape. It seems today is the day scheduled for the gavel to fall.

Bad luck I suppose. Bad luck that this is what He found when He came looking for the best of us.

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Thanks you for reading. If you liked this story, you’ll love my debut short story collection Hallucinations. All links on where to buy it can be found below.

Hallucinations

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Below you’ll find a list of the books I’ve recently read and some of my main takeaways from them, but please don’t read these as traditional book reviews. I’ve got no aspirations to join critic ranks. I’m coming at these strictly from the angle of a writer.

Whenever I read an author with a distinct voice, I tend to parrot them. I take on their rhythms. Their voice weaves itself into my own work for a while, not as a perfect replica, but in cadence, echoed themes and turns of phrase.

Knowing this about myself, I’m deliberate with the books I choose to read. Books are made out of books after all, so if you’re attempting to develop your style in a certain direction, I believe you should lean into authors who exemplify a voice worth chasing.

I also think exposure to titles outside of your typical wheelhouse help open up a funnel for discovering stylistic possibilities you hadn’t considered before.

While I’ve by no means landed on a perfect reading strategy, my bedside bookstack typically looks like this.

80%: comprised of highly intentional book choices e.g. authors whose reputations precede them and whose work exemplifies a style I’d like to incorporate into my own work.

20%: comprised of chance encounters with books. I might spot a book in a neighbourhood library with an eye-catching cover, I might get a recommendation from a friend, I might read a back cover blurb that sounds interesting. This portion of my reading diet represents the chaos element. It’s definitely the less consistent of my two approaches. But it randomises my selections a bit, so I don’t become the dictator of my own taste with too rigid a hand.

Alright, that’s enough shop talk, here are some of the books I’ve read recently.

The Inquisitors Manual- Antonio Lobo Antunes -

This book came onto my radar shortly before I moved to Portugal in May-June of this year. As per my ritual of familiarising myself the most lauded local novelists of whichever country I was visiting during my travels, I initially had my eyes on picking up an English translation of either Saramago (who I’m still yet to read) or diving a bit deeper into Pessoa’s back catalogue. After watching an Anthony Bourdain episode based in Lisbon however, I pulled a U-turn on that plan. Antonio Lobo Antunes featured as a guest on that episode and kicked off my two month crusade to find an English translation of his early works (which proved a lot harder than it should have been). Even with a language barrier Antunes’ vibe immediately resonated with me. Heavy, authentic. Speaking about the Salazar regime with contempt that never completely left a poetic register.

And when I eventually got my hands on a copy of The Inquisitors’ Manual, it didn’t disappoint.

My star Rating: 4.8

Borrowing fairly heavily from the Faulkner toolkit, this novel uses fractured accounts of characters in the orbit of a high ranking minister in the Salazar regime that plagued 20th Century Portugal, perfectly capturing the cynical abuse of power and driving home the banality of evil— which to me, lands far more jarring than violent accounts of war and torture. Antunes is a master of showing how regimes of this kind strip away potential lives that might have been lived, using thinly veiled propaganda campaigns to drain the life out of a society no matter where you sit on the hierarchy.

I’ve seen mixed reviews on this one, but I suspect that’s due to the non-standard structure. Each chapter follows a new character who the reader has been familiarised with as secondary characters in earlier chapters. I can see how this could be frustrating to some as you’re constantly moving on and may prefer the voice of some characters over others. But for this novel’s purposes, it’s highly effective. Building out the sprawling impact of totalitarianism. It’s given me structure ideas for a project I’m tinkering away on in the background, but more on that later.

White Noise- Don DeLillo:

I found a copy of this in a Scottish op-shop for £1, so it gets extra points for my chance encounter strategy, although, DeLillo has one of those reputations that precedes him, so I suppose this book encounter satisfies both of my curated vs randomised approaches to reading.

This is actually the first of DeLillo’s books that I’ve read. (I did watch the Netflix adaptation of White Noise a few years back, which didn’t blow my socks off—though the things this story were trying to do went above my head on first watch, so maybe its worth my time going back now that I’ve read the book).

Star Rating: 3.9

At its heart, White Noise is an existentialist novel. It’s about death, it’s about Capital M meaning (or the absence of) and denial through distraction. But it’s dressed up in quirky character eccentricities that do their best to keep you from thinking about this too hard which forces these themes to be delivered to you as a low hum throughout the novel—or in other terms, as White Noise.

Voice is a big feature of White Noise, which is responsible for my favourite and my most hated elements of the book.

Steffie walked in saying, “I’m the only person I know who likes Wednesdays.”

I love moments like this. Every character is particularised to perfection. Every scrap of dialogue gives you the sense that there’s a thinker behind the words. The simple example above does so much more than the words on the page. You’ve got the first order delight of this novel claim, but then there’s a layer beneath that acknowledges Steffie is actively characterising herself as a “special” type of person by voicing this out loud. Then there’s a the bassline layer beneath that, which acknowledges that she’s aware she’s characterising herself this way, which and begs the question, what makes her the type of person who feels the need to differentiate herself and vocalise these differences knowing exactly how she will likely come off as a result?

Even when characters are serving as a conduit for a certain worldview in White Noise, DeLillo finds ways to express such ideas in a manner that’s original and entertaining long before you read into the underlying implications.

But there are other examples of this voicy style that I found annoying:

Tell me, Orest. As you get closer and closer to the time. Are you beginning to feel anxious?

"What Anxious? I just want to get in the cage. Sooner the better. This is what Orest Mercator is all about.”

Maybe some people like it. But this style of dialogue comes up a lot in the book and I find it jarring. Granted this is taste. But this manner of talk is annoying to me. The shift to third person. The “I know I’m intelligent and I like the sound of my own voice,” tone that is embodied by more than one of the characters. Personally, I can’t spend too much time around people who speak like that in real life, so I don’t particularly want to visit it in book form.

I get the impression, that De Lillo gets a kick out this dialogue style and has a reader base who do as well. (and I might be missing something on this front) but for me, this element of the voice made the direct reading experience less enjoyable than it would otherwise have been because I felt like I was in the wrong circle at a party being forced to nod my head and grin at all the appropriate spots while feeling nothing.

Nonetheless, I believe you can learn just as much from what you dislike as what you enjoy. So in my own writing I’ll be careful not to replicate this effect where I can.

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner:

After discovering that thanks to lapsed copyrights, I can download a whole lot of classics to my kindle for free, I went on a bit of a tear through writers I hadn’t given as much attention to as I should.

I read As I Lay Dying on a beach in Greece. Not a standard holiday read, but I tore through it in three days. It took me the best part of thirty years to make it to Faulkner. But I tackled The Sound and the Fury last summer and really enjoyed it was easier to break the seal this one.

Star Rating: 4.7

As I lay Dying is a multi-narrator avalanche. Fifteen points of view circling the central event of carting the family matriarch to the burial ground she requested on her death bed. But to me, any continuity issues that might arise from the POV are offset by the family as character throughline.

I know a lot of readers don’t like the fractured stuff. I can understand why. But when it’s done well it delivers some of my favourite prose. Between this and The Inquisitors’ Manual, it got my gears whirring, style wise.

When I first committed to try and make something of my writing, I did the thing many green authors do and tackled a novel premise that was far too ambitious for my technical abilities at the time.

I stumbled from a linear narrative, to a complicated post-modern thing, then added a semi-murder mystery framing none of which quite hit the note that was ringing in my head. Though I know better to attempt yet another rewrite on that project just yet, having read a lot more of this fractured style lately and integrated it into my writing more and more, I suspect this might be the way that my “big” novel eventually needs to be written. But I’m not there yet. For now, I’m filing away notes on how I might one day tackle that Big White Whale. In the meantime Faulkner has given me some angles to work with, fresh off a 1930s press.

Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin.

Rhythm. That’s the word of the day when it comes to James Baldwin. One of the most musical writers I’ve read. Not in a flowery, orchestral way, but in a manner that you can tap your foot to. I read this one in a Greek laundromat while I took a rare opportunity to get the smell of backpack off my clothes. To any passer by I probably looked a couple coins short of a euro myself as I smiled away to the many standout lines in the book.

Star Rating: 5

Go Tell it on the Mountain is a story about faith and sin and the burden and liberation that religion can bring.

Honestly, this one became one of my instant favourites. I sought it out after reading Baldwin’s short story, Sonny’s Blues which gave me my first taste of that Jazz influenced prose. This style is exemplified in the following section:

“The Tambourines raced to fill the vacuum left by the silent piano, and his cry drew answering cries. Then he was on his feet, turning, blind, his face congested, contorted with this rage, and the muscles leaping and swelling in his long, dark neck. It seemed that he could not breathe, that his body could not—”

Read that out loud to yourself and tell me its not music. These are the words of the preacher this boy would later become. There’s a worldview baked into the language, that both revers the things it’s describing but also fears them.

Then other examples which aren’t so flashy, do advanced work on the character level.

“For a moment her eyes met John’s eyes, and John was frightened. He felt that her words after the strange fashion God sometimes chose to speak to men, were dictated by Heaven and were meant for him.”

The above prose is by no means optimised for concision, but it does an incredible job of describing a perspective unique to the naïve eyes of its child narrator. As a reader you’re forced to watch this young narrator draw conclusions they’re unlikely to have come to if they’d been fed the same inputs as an adult which results in a heart breaking dramatic irony. At least that’s how I felt reading this.

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

I began reading this in the lead up to my first North American Halloween (This probably isn’t shocking to most, but Canadian’s are a lot better at getting the spirit of this holiday than New Zealanders are).

As with White Noise, I’d also watched the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House and found it hard to get through. The casting was strange, with pretty poor acting in my opinion and only loose ties to the original Hill House that Shirley Jackson wrote.

I made a point to read this as my writing focus has been erring more towards the Southern Gothic genre lately. Jackson’s The Lottery is one of my favourite short stories, so as the spooky season came along, I thought it was appropriate to dig out one of her classics.

Star Rating: 4.7

It’s hard to bring up this famous ghost story without touching on its first line which is a fantastic “envelope” for the entire story to come:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

Outside of the blurred lines between the ghostly and dream states that will follow, this opening sentence also presents us with an early use of what Chuck Palahniuk calls “Big Voice,” a declarative 30,000 foot view of the story that gives the narrator license to make more sweeping observations than a tight first person can get away with. The Haunting of Hill House breaks all the rules of POV, heading hopping frequently outside of its main character’s perspective. But this technical faux pas (in the hands of a lesser writer) is justified here by the slippery nature of reality that’s being depicted. There are hazing borders between Eleanor’s consciousness and the house’s consciousness and an ambient point of view that’s designed to destabilize.

I read this on Kindle and noted that it takes until 55% into the novel before anything remotely “ghostly” comes up. Prior to this, the story is character focussed, and could have carried on in this way as a perfectly passable literary piece without delving in the horror tropes at all. But when The Haunting of Hill House does eventually arrive on that misty road, it never fully leaves the grounded possibility that everything we’re experiencing might be an example of madness rather than the supernatural. I know this unwillingness to leave the plausible behind could be seen as a weakness, but I personally think this detail sets The Haunting of Hill House apart from shallower peers within the genre. In the same way that No Country For Old Men is masterpiece for its ability to be read as a straight western action movie without a reader understanding any of the deeper themes, Hill House offers something for a reader interested in fractured psychology as well as the reader who wants to dig into a good old fashioned ghost story.

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And that’s it for this addition of my recent reading diet. I appreciate these aren’t exactly contemporary titles, but sometimes that’s just how the reading list stacks up.

Before I leave you, I want to reiterate my early disclaimer: this series isn’t intended as a traditional “review.”

The star ratings are reflections of how closely each title aligns with the direction I’m hoping to take my writing style in. Nothing else.

Any negatives I’ve pointed out only hold water against a very idiosyncratic set of criteria which is slippery at best and evolving with each new title I get under my belt.

My scrutiny is designed to better define my personal taste and hopefully develop my own writing style downstream of that. If you’ve read this far, thank you. Maybe there’s something useful in here, you can carry across to your own reading or writing as well.

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One of my favourite works of classic literature is Franz Kafka’s 1927 novella, Amerika or The Man Who Disappeared.

This is an archetypal immigrant story of a Czech man travelling by boat to New York City with dreams of gold paved streets, though this novel departs from other titles among its lineage in one important way: Its author never visited the United States himself.

This detail makes it one of my favourite stories.

Kafka being Kafka, it’s hard to parse which elements of this upside down novella are a symptom of the author’s unfamiliarity with the country he was writing about and which are a mere result of his signature style. Either way, Amerika is a jarring read. It’s a foreigner putting down in words what he “thinks” a place would be like. This is the foundation of its brilliance. All of his descriptions feel a bit off. Scale and distance in Amerika are something right out of a trip, helped in no small part by the fact that he never finished the thing. It’s existence is a reminder that no place can live up to those grand ideas that exist in your head. Yet that precise quality of the untouchable is the domain of novels of this kind. In the case of Amerika, a visit to the physical location could only have been detrimental to Kafka’s ability to write it.

The uncanny effect of Amerika is further magnified by the era it was written in. Sure there were books, accounts from family members, black and white photos and maybe the odd radio broadcast, but what was the quality of Kafka’s exposure to this foreign land during those days? Imagine the cross-continental games of telephone that might have been played during his day. How accurate were those accounts, and how much fact checking was applied to the tales of glory and horror he collected from the few people he might have bumped into in Prague who’d supposedly made the long boat ride and actually come back to talk about it? Little to none I hope.

That “wrongness” of Amerika fantastically captures a texture of stressful chaos mirroring the immigrant experience. It’s broken image depictions render the act of moving to a strange land in a way that no factually accurate account is capable of. Kafka had no designs on representing the geo/societal landscape of that place, but rather had his eyes on expressing the feeling of. His eyes were on mapping the conscious landscape of moving to a place where you don’t know the rules, and accepting that when you finally learn those rules they may not make any sense to you, and you’ve got no guarantee that you’ll find people willing to help you.

Amerika 2025

I write all of this as someone who’d never touched down on US soil until just under a month ago.

It’s not the same for me though.

With movies, media, the internet, there’s no hope for me. Recreating my own morphed mental image of some alien land in the way Kafka did isn’t an option. The US is everywhere whether we like it or not. The CIA actually just got the green light on placing an office in New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington.

Whether we like it or not.

But my point here isn’t based in politics, it’s got a spicy chilli base.

As the lore goes: The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ solid, albeit overplayed hit, Californication was inspired by lead singer, Anthony Kiedis’ visit to Papua New Guinea back in the day where he spotted a child wearing a t-shirt with his band’s logo on it.

“Everybody’s been there and I don’t mean on vacation.”

I quote this man in full acknowledgement that his lyrics are more often the butt of jokes than discussions of literary prose style, but in this case, I can support his testimony that the reach he’s describing is real.

Even as a barefooted farm kid in the Ruatiti valley circa 2001, I’d already held up my fists like Rocky, Welcome to the Jungle was baked into my DNA and one day I biked to school to find the classroom TV was wheeled out so the entire class could witness footage of the twin towers falling.

Let me be clear, New Zealand and the US are very different nations in most ways. Spectacle is a synonym for shame for the most part in NZ. For better or for worse, we typically react to the reality show that is America as if its one of those over energetic dogs that jumps at you the moment you open the door, spins around three times and licks you on the face. “Woah just chill out, ay?” is the default reaction when a kiwi encounters an American in the wild.

But this culture disparity isn’t even close to what the aforementioned Czech novelist might have experienced in his day.

We watch their shows, we listen to their music, we get radicalised by their podcasts. We’ve trade partners, we’ve fought wars alongside each other, we’re both “Western” nations (even if it’s nice at times to be reminded that term isn’t strictly geographically accurate).

Yes, it’s still a view from afar, but gone are the days Kafka.

Thanks to the internet and unstoppable distribution of information, foreign doesn’t mean the same thing it used to.

At least, I thought that was the case.

An LA layover

After walking around in LA for a few days, I’m convinced the Amerika effect isn’t all the way out of reach.

Somewhere between and the politics-drunk taxi driver who picked me up from LAX and the first uber eats delivery bot I saw, I started to realise I wasn’t 100% prepared for what this place was going to be.

Within my first hour I’d watched Eric Andre pull his sports car in front of traffic and cuss at the mandatory horns that came his way. Over lunch I had no choice but to sit in on a full Jungian breakdown of dating and existential health of the Lulu lemon wearing girls sitting at the table next to me.

Sure I spotted the odd gap between my mental image of the place and the vocal fried reality before me, but the parts that jarred me most were in the lack of a gap I saw.

With feet on US soil I found I’d stored an entire cache of internalised Hollywoodisms that I’d assumed were just a movie thing. I now realise I pre-inserted a distance that wasn’t really there based on what people are like in “my” corner of the world.

“Sure that’s how they make it look on TV. But that’s not how people really act.”

I now realise that if I’d tried to write my own Amerika prior to visiting I no doubt would have corrected for this imagined gap and written a Los Angeles with oddly rendered canyons and an uncanny valley in some backwards play towards realism.

I appreciate Los Angeles is hardly the real world and isn’t exactly representative of the broader country. But its worth noting that in the few days I spent there I had more “holy shit, people actually live this way,” moments than I’d could plausibly fit into one article.

It took going there to discover I’d been sitting on more Kafka distortion than I’d been giving myself credit for, which alone was enough to make the plane ticket worth it. (Excluding the most stressful airport experience of my life—that part wasn’t even close to worth it)

LA over

A certain type might panic scramble to close this gap upon this kind of discovery. But as a fiction writer, I see this as a strength.

Amerika is still achievable.

Undoubtedly I could correct all of these gaps, apply a journalistic scrutiny to every detail I lay down. But I’m no journalist.

Kafka’s unfinished masterpiece wouldn’t have been stronger if he’d accurately portrayed the processing at Ellis Island with step by step accuracy. The “truth” he was going for was spelt with a Capital T. It’s human experience nested in a setting that cannot be real no matter how accurately you depict the texture of that business card. That’s the style I’m shooting for.

Even when I’m depicting realist accounts of rural New Zealand, the perspective I’m writing from isn’t local. The characters I write are humans placed in fabricated versions of settings. If that setting occasionally resembles the USA, you’re welcome to fret over the details. But I’m not writing America. No one is. This place is a myth-especially when it’s laid down in narrative.

If it sounds like I’m making an argument for lazy research here. That’s not the case either. I’m a huge proponent of James Joyce’s writing commandment, “The universal lies in the particular.” I see it as crucial to get the minute details correct for them to feel real.
But “real” isn’t always the order of the day.

There’s something to be said for that jolt that breaks the fictive dream occasionally, the kind that makes you go back and reread. Savour every inaccuracy you find in my work, please, but equally, please keep reading, keeping following that inexact track and indulge the strange angle from which it presents the familiar to you, let it reintroduce this old landscape and present it anew. Not more realistically but maybe more true.

Unless I’m tackling topic matter where the timelines are sensitive to the story’s ability to land, I’m of the opinion that the jarring offness is crucial to the effect. These moments are the setting equivalent to the cliché that’s been twisted just enough from the original to force you into visualising it fresh rather than glass eyeing your way over it. Sometimes they’ll be intentional: that inexplicable red school bus I placed in there just to shake you out of pattern and maybe see there’s a metaphor underneath all this. But even the unintentional ones have some utility: I’ll write a line of dialogue that has no place in the Brooklyn bodega I’m writing about, which I don’t catch until I’m editing and putting on my source-checking hat. Granted, those slip ups aren’t always gold. But when you notice them doing something unexpected, I’m a believer that they must be left in. They’re the reminders that “this isn’t real life, but I almost had you for a moment there.” Almost.

As far as I see it, the fictive dream only works on you if you’re present enough to remember it after you’ve woken up

This week’s article is a touch more essayistic than I typically like these to be. But this time I’ll let it slide for the sake of my point.

And remember, you’ll never catch me writing a story about America. I only write Amerika.

Writing doesn't pay as well as busking.

I

“You got anything I can prop that thing up with?” asked Benjy.

Drake left the bar fumes to their midday limbo with a tea towel draped over his shoulder. His eyes rose to the window pane above his pub’s entrance. Stylised, fresh from a car boot sale, the glass leaned within the bounds of a frame custom fit for glass of entirely different dimensions.

“Look’s good, don’t it?” He cracked a grin and admired the stained glass depicting Jesus Christ playing a Les Paul Guitar in faux catholic style.

“Looks like it’s waiting to flatten the first doorman to walk underneath it.” Benjy eyeballed the coloured glass that greeted drinkers and doormen alike to Faust’s Pub. It rattled in the southerly wind. It teetered with less sure-footedness than the drunk he ejected before ending last night’s shift. He’d wager this show piece was probably heavy enough to kill a fully-grown wino even if it didn’t shatter upon falling.

“Na, na, I installed her me self, “ said Drake. “She’s lodged firmer than a taxi driver’s political views.” His hands moved to his hips as if to settle the matter.

Benjy nodded though his wide-set eyes explored the rest of the pub’s flaking paintjob. “You got anything behind the bar that we could use to prop it up?”

Drake crunched his nose.

The grunt out of Benjy’s throat had enough horsepower behind it to clear a snowed-in underpass.

“Sure, sure,” said Drake, eyes darting to the tube vein on Benjy’s neck, movements no longer sleepy. Back into the keg fumes he went. One White Snake song later, he returned with a screwdriver rusted from hilt to tip. “Here, wedge this old thing in there. Should tick all the health and safety boxes, don’t ya think?” He winked and disappeared into pokey machine glow where low quality conversation bridged the lunchtime rush with the 5pm regulars’ residency slots.

II

The climber watched his powder coated carabiner bend against the strain of his rope. He remembered the stretching grin of the sports store salesman as he boasted about this equipment’s “triple-holding-power.” The twenty something retail worker sounded like a proud father as he explained how this Trail-Zone product could hold up to one-thousand pounds of pressure. The climber heard the crack and felt the slack as the only thing keeping him from the rocky basin below gave him up to gravity.

Benjy manned his whiteboard with all the duty of a first mate on deck. Dricus picked his teeth and scowled a scowl that had to have been practised in front of the mirror more than once. Both of them wore black polo shirts.

Tray’s uniform was white. It smelled of coal fire. He tested the back legs of his plastic chair as he waited to find out why he’d been called into Trig Security’s “War Room” this morning. This is where Benjy allocated all of the week’s jobs to his doormen. Usually this was a group event. Usually a solo invite to this room came with some sort of dressing down or worse.

The chair legs flexed but didn’t break. The War Room dictated whether you’d be collecting a fresh batch of work stories to share with the boys over Thursday beers or whether you’d be freezing your nuts off all week, counting cars on the sidewalk and wishing you’d studied accounting like your mother pleaded for you to do.

Halloween tonight, so bound to be a few crazies about. The toothpick in Tray’s mouth came complimentary with his mangal BBQ breakfast.

Benjy eyed the wooden accessory though made no comment.

Tray moved it from his lip to his teeth. There’ll be stories for sure. He pulled out the toothpick. Not the type of stories you wanted to collect. He dropped the toothpick on the carpet as a face grinned at him from across time and from behind the taunting anonymity of an IT mask. He covered the toothpick with his boot wondering why that face had decided it had any right to appear outside of his night terrors.

“Tray.”

Tray’s chin lifted, though the nightmare collectable from last Halloween still had its claws in him.

“You okay if I pair you up with Cedric tonight?”

Tray’s eyes narrowed. Benjy’s tone was of a man who’d just handed out a short straw. Trick question?

“Of course,” answered Tray, chasing down the disappearing smirks of his superiors. He found Benjy again and found a raised eyebrow with it. “You mean Cedric Jowl?” he nodded. “Sure.”

He hadn’t said more than four words to Ced since the kid joined Trig Security last month, but the new recruit was ex-police apparently. The Trig Security recruitment day (which in itself was a crazy requirement for a doorman gig) had been a shutout for Cedric. He killed the obstacle course, made Benjy look silly in the “basic restraint” module which was a pseudonym for “Who’s the toughest mother F’er on this team?” and had been by far the most convincing in the moderator module (also known as: negotiating with drunk bastards who’re too zonked to know what’s good for them 101).

“Didn’t take you for a dice roller, Tray.” Benjy wrote something on his clipboard and cleared his throat. “But far be it from me to judge–” he threw a devilish glance to a shrugging Dricus–the red faced South African with zero tolerance for grey areas.

“Halloween’s a wild night sir,” said Tray. “Having a gun like Cedric by my side can only make it easier. Don’t you think?”

Dricus snorted. Benjy’s lips flattened.

“No?” asked Tray.

Benjy released a long snort. “Don’t get me wrong T, you won’t find a more competent guy than young Ced, it’s just…”

Dricus tried to shush him with a school bully glint in his eye, but Benjy overroad his business partner. “Ced is just…he’s fresh. The kid hasn’t taken his first L yet. Y’know?”

“Isn’t that proof that he’s good at his job?”

“Everyone loses,” said Dricus in a dutch intonated exhale.

Benjy nodded morbidly. “This job comes to get all of us one day.” He glanced towards the door and let his words lapse to silence while he confirmed no footsteps were liable to overhear him, then he sighed. “You never want to be out on a job with an untouched man, no matter how good he is.”

“Untouched?” Tray laughed. “I’m not a gay man sir, but lookin’ at that bloke’s jawline, I can tell you Cedric Jowl ain’t no virgin!”

Benjy’s brow hardened. “I’m talking about the kind of people who have won everything they’ve ever entered in their life. The captain of the rugby team, the dux, the homecoming queen, the guy who gets promoted to 2IC within the first quarter of a new job–”

Dricus’ chin dipped on this line, but made no comment.

“Time is just waiting to feed on those folks,” added Benjy.

Tray shook his head. “I don’t believe in fate and all that.”

“It’s not fate, boy,” said Dricus.

Benjy pointed to his own temple. “This is a question of the psyche. Winning all the time makes you smug, makes you careless, makes you a liability–”

This is a bouncer job, not the military. Tray thought, though didn’t speak it.

Dricus seemed to read the sub-vocal train all the same. “—But if you’re happy to be partnered up with him,” he cut in, “be our guest.”

“I’m absolutely fine with it.” nodded Tray, swallowing a lump that wouldn’t have known to pop up if this pep-talk hadn’t happened.

III

The new dog on the billet came out of the second litter of a past champion, bred with a three time regional cup winner. A gene mutation adorned him with oversized forelegs and a hyper-hunt drive. His racing name was Goose Egg Number Three on account of the titles his older siblings had won. In the gambler’s world, pedigree is as close to a sure thing as you get. Few greyhounds on debut come in as favourites. Some late money on the underdog got a few grey skinned punters worried. Goose Egg Number Three led the pack until he rounded the bend where the spectator stand lay. There he balked, turned. The second dog clipped him, flipped and caused a canine traffic jam in the middle of the field. Stick legs snapped at the femur. Yelps split the silence and turned odds into animals once again. One face in the crowd grinned as the underdog burst over the line and devoured the fake rabbit as reward.

Faust’s nightclub lay on the drag between town and the football stadium. This made game nights busy, weeknights dead. Tonight didn’t play by those rules though. Adult trick or treaters were headed into the suburbs around the stadium. Pig heads, demons, grim reapers and Mickey Mouses stalked the footpaths. Faust’s Bar and Grill waited on the threshold of those porch lined abodes and offered them all a refreshing pit stop.

Tray zipped his tunic up to his chin as he approached the club’s empty front door. He looked up at the guitar playing messiah who stared down on him. Judging. Tray eyed him right back, took a long ciggy drag and tossed the butt into the dark. A fire eyed duty manager charged through the doorway before the orange tip had time to fizzle into pub garden top soil.

Heavy steps advertised intentions this service staff runt had no business letting slip in open air.

Tray swallowed a grin as a finger cocked beneath his nose. “Where the hell have you been boy?”

Boy? He was late, sure, but Boy?

He rolled up his sleeves.

The finger trembled, “You…You won’t believe what we’ve been dealing with in there–”

As if to answer, bovine footsteps rumbled behind hallway walls.

Tray glanced at the glass pane above the door, only now seeing the toy-store tool that lay between him and impalement at the hands of a Madam Empusa’s thrift shop bargain.

He stepped back and bladed his stance.

Feet rumbled. A wraith flew sideways past the hallway. No. It was two torsos morphed by speed. No. One torso—two men wide. Flesh not phantom, though, more bull than man.

Tray blinked at the space where he’d witnessed the shape with all the scrutiny of a seasoned hunter. Antlers or branches? A fleeing stag or an amateur outdoorsman too fresh to know to dress in Fluro during the rut?

The body appeared again, tossing elbows, swearing. Shit. Wrong day to leave your arrival at the mercy of London bus drivers! This bull figure charged into one of the walls, headbutted his way through its plaster and only as he fought to retract his Angus Beef head from the drywall did he show signs that this assault had been involuntary.

No sooner had he pulled his chalk-caked face free than he found his legs swept out from under him by a second figure. Chalk-face’s bantamweight adversary had anticipated his return lunge and dislodged his centre of gravity.

With nothing short of one twenty kilos loaded on his shoulder, the smaller man charged the raging bull right into a Faust premises doorframe. Hollowness clanged. Stained glass lurched dangerously above, though stayed in place. The dome of the bull did not.

While Tray braced for potential perps down the hallway, a stubbled leaf of receding hairline flopped over the bull’s brow to reveal its pink underside. The man’s head–which had just careened off earthquake ready steel–hung limp as his attacker finally let go of his massive slab of a leg.

Cedric’s exertion blushed face beamed from behind the immobile body “Tray mate! Glad to see you.”

“Glad to see that more like it.” Tray pointed up at the screwdriver wedge keeping the glass propped above their heads.
From the hallway, bar owner Drake emerged. A tea towel flipped off his shoulder, he wiped his hands and grinned up at the make-shift health and safety measure “Nice to see you, Tray. You boys out here admiring my wee screwdriver job?”

Cedric stood over his unconscious victim whom Drake seemingly hadn’t noticed yet, and gave him a slap on the cheek.

“Lucky I value patron safety, hah?” Drake drove a friendly fist into Tray’s shoulder and winked.

Cedric snorted as his victim came to amid a series of guttural moans. “You can keep your luck, Draky. At Trig Security we make our own.”

Tray ignored the slap on his back from Ced and ducked the “did I really just hear that,” glance that Drake immediately fired his way. He helped the fairy-headed bull to his feet as both men stared at him, their eyes demanding some type of fence hopping. He ignored both and shone his mag-light into the diluted pupils of their vic who mumbled from either drunkenness or a concussion.

IV

Mandy’s kitten was the cutest tabby you’ve seen. Hands down, but make no mistake, she was a killer. BlueJays, Chipmunks, Squirrels? Dead, dead, bloodstains and horror scenes every morning. Even when Mandy tried to lock her inside, that little feline would find a way out. It would wait, stalk, pounce and murder. As its owner Mandy watched with part admiration. She’d owned half a dozen cats, but none with this level of killer acumen. She loved the birds, but then again, we’re all put on this planet to do something aren’t we? One morning she watched it stalk a Cardinal. She cried as her tabby crunched bones, but not all of those tears were for the bird. This soon became a habit, every morning she’d watch a new kill. Like a proud mother, she watched her beast excel. Tonight a squirrel family squabbles. They’re blood related, but the food is finite. They don’t know the Tabby is watching. They don’t know that Mandy is watching. It stalks, moves an inch, chicken wing shoulder blades pushing against skin as her body lowers. A flash of black, a flash of grey, a howl. A scream. More bodies, canine bodies. Heads tossing. Wolf gums. Wolf teeth. Tabby print flailing. Mandy’s hands rise to her cheeks.

The doormen stood. They chatted. Tray offered Ced a smoke, he waved it off. For a Halloween night during a full moon, the crazies largely stopped after their bullish first guest.

Most of the crowd were Uni age. Still in the phase of trying on new personalities and pretending to be the thing that pretty girl in the Morticia Adams dress wanted them to be.

One Mummy made of loo paper tried to get in on a fake i.d. One twilight style vampire had drunk more than blood before he turned up. Neither put up a fight when the doormen sent them back the way they’d come.

Just as Ced was commenting on how the boys at the HQ had overhyped Halloween night, a screaming roller door preceded two fast moving bodies popping out from behind a van.

Tray blinked, then blinked again. The Pennywise mask from last year cackled in the back of his mind.

Both of the fast approaching men wore beehive woollen hats in what looked like some traditional eastern European style.

“I’ve got the big one,” said Ced. “You take the runt–”

“Are those costumes, or–” Tray bladed his stance and tucked his chin. Eyes on the runt. Something hit him from the side. White light stole a chunk of time. Numbness. Moaning pain. He awoke to three faces spitting hate in my face. “This is for Andras.” A steel cap dug into his ribs. He buckled foetal. “This one’s for the Eagle crew.” Like one of those hammer strikes at a carnival, the digging kick shot from the base of Tray’s spine up to the top of his skull. Sparks decorated his vision. Where the hell was Ced?

“You think you win tonight?”

“What?” Tray wheezed his response to the new-balance sneaker beside his face.

“You think you fuck with Eagle Crew and win?”

When these words seemed to fall short, the new balances accented their message with a violent stomp on Tray’s spine. Shit. Tray’s toes went numb for just a moment. But the implications didn’t. The assailants flipped him over so his mouth was on the sidewalk.

“What you prefer?” said a hostile voice. “Waist down or from neck up?”

Cackling followed. The nearest one lifted Tray’s shirt with his steel cap and taunted the skin of his lower back with his toe.

Ced where the hell are–

“No speak? Eating through straw then.”

The boots crunching grit next to Tray’s head couldn’t have been louder. He winced. He prayed. He cursed Cedric for whatever the hell and whoever the hell he messed with.

Benjy and Dricus were right. Why the extra measures earlier? Couldn’t he have got by by just throwing that drunk out on his arse? Did he have to scalp the poor bastard’s ego while he was at it?

Now Tray would pay the toll. He would be the first lesson young Cedric would learn. Young untouched Cedric. Well. That’s only if he stuck around to witness it. Where the hell did that little shit go–”

“Woah, woah, woah, slow down boys.”

Thank fuck. Tray was in too much pain to turn his head, but you bet he heard those boots move out of stomping range. Ced had one of them by the neck and was that a…a knife at his throat. Shit, Halloween night does get heavy.

Tray’s jaw stung as he unlocked his teeth from the bile flavoured curb stone, then used it as a pillow. Watching the rest. Energy spent.

“Just calm down brother.” said one of the wool hat attackers. “Don’t do anything you can’t take back.”

“You two need to get off the Faust’s pub premises.”

“Be careful boy,” taunted one of the hyenas.

Boy?

Something hit Tray in the arm. Not a strike though. A nudge. Cedric’s boot. Prompting him.

“If you’re not gone by the time my friend Tray is on his feet…” Cedric paused. “Your buddy’s jugular is gonna be separated from his throat.”

Tray took a knee.

The two hat wearers lingered.

Tray climbed to a crouch.

They left. Shouting cuss words in Cedric’s direction.

The weapon wielding doorman waited till the invaders were inside the van before he threw the third one stumbling after them. A cheerful pat met Tray’s back. “Stroke of luck there, hah?”

Tray found Cedric’s gaze and winked, “Na, no such thing.”

They both hooted into laughter. Tray’s ribs throbbed, but it was a hell of a lot better than a severed spinal cord. Tears of joy merged with tears of relief as the cackling kept going longer than seemed sane. That’s the near death release of chemicals outside the ordinary. The reaching Nirvana euphoria dump.

“Hey Ced. I’ve just got one question.”

The high cheekbones of Tray’s blessed companion shimmered under parlour light in a show of openness.

“Where’d you disappear to there? And where did you find the knife?”

Ced scoffed. “Knife?” He shook his head and held up the object he’d used to ward off their attackers. A plastic handle and a philips style head rusted all the way from the handle to the tip. Not a knife at all, but a makeshift tool and a makeshift prop.

Tray’s falling face spurred more laughter.

“I already told you mate,” started Cedric, but before he could bark out the line, “I make my own luck,” a lurching from above overshadowed his voice.

Tray’s feet may as well have been rooted to the spot, though even if I’d been given a ten second head start he wouldn’t have had time to move.

The last image the second doorman at Faust’s Pub saw that Halloween night was of the untouched man before him before a kiln kissed messiah collapsed his skull. All went white. All went away. All lessons were learned.

V

The children fought over the freshly set dinner table. Six forks and five knives bore their screams in silence.

“Be careful!” screamed their mother as a glint of silver caught her eye. A blade. Fine metal.

“It’s my turn!” pleaded the younger child. “

You’re too fat for silver,” mooted the second.

“Put down that knife!” yelled the mother. “It’s dangerous.” She took away the utensil and cradled it, admiring it for the first time since it had been awarded to her in a will reading seventeen years back. “You know boys, your Granny loved this thing.”

“It’s beautiful,” said the smaller boy reaching for the blade.

“It’s the best one we’ve got,” said the second.

“That’s what my sisters believed,” said their mother. She put the knife back down on the table and stared at it for a long time, looking like she might cry, looking like she had something more to say. But she stayed silent.

Cedric hovered over the body of his co-worker. He reached out a hand but stopped himself. No. Something stopped him. His fingers were tugged back by some force he didn’t understand. Red lips jumped scared his vision. Jeering teeth flashed and almost knocked him off his feet. He looked down at his would-be helping hand. Tendons straining to offer aid. He extended his fingers again yet they curled and stopped short. As if knowing it would change him— to extend this helping hand. As if to do so might mark him—as a certain kind of man.

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The big day is finally here.

Hallucinations is my debut short story collection published through Nascent Night press. I’ll have more to say on it later, but in a nutshell here’s what you’re in for:

From street life settings to high rolling finance offices, Hallucinations steps to the side of perception and lets you look at life in ways you’ve never had access, at places you’ve preferred to avoid, in dreams you’ve longed to stay.

These stories are fever dreams steeped in the traditions of Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy. The darkness-ambient and psychological; dread weaved throughout the fibres of the page rather than brushed plainly, edge to edge.

Hallucinations is a collection of hyperreal stories that present themselves as a lofty stroll in psychedelic realms until you carelessly wander into the dark tunnel, where things speed up faster than you choose to go; when you realise the trip’s going bad, you’re going too fast to disembark.

Sounds pretty good ay? I can’t take credit for the blurb but the rest of this book is all me.

Just to get the logistics out of the way. You can buy Hallucinations in all the places below:

Anyone based in NZ/Australia should go via this Amazon link

Or for a local alternative. Go via Fishpond.

Or The Nile

Anyone based in the UK should buy via this one.

or via Foyles

or Waterstones.

If you’re based in the US it’s best to buy direct. Here. As this avoids any middle men taking a cut. And man it’s a chunky cut…

I’m not sure how international my audience is, but for everyone based elsewhere the book is available with all the big name booksellers along with the above. i.e. on Barnes and Noble here. I will add more distributers as they come in stock.

Let me know if you have any trouble, for now I want to focus on making it as easy as possible to find.

Hopefully you enjoy it and thank you for supporting me.

Next steps:

There’s an ad campaign in the works which should get a few more eyes on that stunner of a cover and the next item on the agenda is to get it into a few physical bookstores.

If you have a minute to leave a review at any of the above it would be a huge help in getting more eyes on my writing.

Also…

I’ve begrudgingly set up an Instagram account to build a bit more of a public presence outside of longform writing- so follow me there. To be honest the stuff I put on there will be fairly low volume but I’ll do my best to make it halfway interesting:

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Don’t waste time wondering where it went wrong. Listen to the sirens. Smell the spilt diesel. Feel the ink caking your hands. Just understand, it went wrong.

Leandro lets out a shriek, no, a wail.

I don’t look over. The first time I tried to check on him an unholy squeal popped out of my brain stem and sent three searing ball bearings down to my T-4.

A truck whizzed past my head with no thought of stopping as I discovered my legs didn’t work any more. I figure that squeal I heard was the final thread of my spinal cord tearing.

“You’ll be okay man,” I lie.

Something fabricated scrapes against gravel. Laboured breath precedes a heavy lurch, a stumble, a crash and a defeated sigh. “Argh dammit! We’re done for man. We’re goddamned done for!”

I can tell by the volume of Leandro’s voice that he’s screaming this into the sky.

I sigh.

“It’ll be alright.”

The rear axle that’s keeping my chest pinned against this mid-city retaining wall morphs my voice in a way that sounds like I don’t believe my own words.

I test my shoulder. When we ploughed right through the highway-side barrier, one of my deltoids twisted in a direction that would make a chicken wing manoeuvre look like a yoga warm up. But my right one seems okay.

Not sure what that says about the state of my spinal cord? Bad diagnosis? I suppose after I showed that elderly bank teller her intern’s brain matter, I likely forfeited some portion of my medical authority along with it. Small loss.

I dedicated my entire Tuesday afternoon toward casing the layout of Chastity Bank. The old duck boasted to high heaven how promising her rosy cheeked recruit was. “Six months more and he’ll be challenging our branch manager!”

Promising isn’t the same thing as a promise, though, I guess.

“Shit. It really went tits up in there didn’t it?” Leandro’s laughing now.

I’d laugh too if the house deposit we each stuffed into gym bags didn’t explode the interior of my sedan into a mess of pink ink. We were already three lanes deep into oncoming traffic by the time I managed to spit out my shattered molars and regain the wheel.

I can’t tell if I’m hearing fire engines or pig sirens right now. I can’t tell if the gut shot I ate on my way out of the bank went all the way through me, or if all this black blood owes its credit to the car crash.

“Hey Leandro. Come over here.” I cough up something warm and try to make my voice less thin. “Do you think you could make it over here?”

Ever lick a battery? Neither. I heard batteries and blood share some of the same–

“What do you mean come over? I’m already over!”

He’s right. He does sound close. I’m finding distances a bit hard to judge—

“Shit, you can’t even look at me!” exclaimed Leandro. “Did I mess up that bad? Jerry c’mon! Don’t do this to me. Look at me. Please, you’re killing me, here!”

“Na, mate.” I grunt. “The haemorrhage is what’s killing you.”

This cues another wail. Leandro spews a fresh appeal to the heavens. “You really think we’re done for? Is this the end?”

His naked arms drag naked legs across shards of automobile– I suppose to give me a glimpse of him literally on hands and knees, begging me to look at him.

My eyes fall to the steam wafting from an open wound beneath his belly button. I’m about to answer. But I keep staring. Staring. Answering by staring.

“Relax man.” I say. “You got a cigarette there?”

“With all this spilled petrol around?”

“Yea, you got one?”

He holds the white tip of a Marlboro red out to me. I’m forced to stare at it for too long before he figures to lug himself over, put it in my mouth for me, and light it.

I bite down and cough and make the filter soggy with the lung-deep blood that comes out of me, but if this isn’t the best cigarette I ever had? Well, I suppose I don’t have much time left to top it.

“Try to relax man. He’ll be here soon.”

“Who?”

“It’s gonna be rough when he gets here. So try to enjoy the last of it.”

“Enjoy what?”

I take in a long drag and gaze at my naked, bleeding friend. My partner in crime. My fellow member of the condemned. Eyes: all fear. Pale as a British Diablo IV superfan. His hair is matted and caked in pink dye like some punk rocker who’s found himself in a horror film. Tobacco smoke swirls into horn shapes and eye shapes. Sirens flash blue and red on the hillside. They’re as beautiful as a sunset. I sigh.

“Life.” I say.

“Life?”

I nod, or at least think I do as the drumming begins. I suck on my cigarette and savour the warm blood on my skin. I watch the stray notes of spoiled cash float in the wind like litter, briefly indulging thoughts of what it might have bought me. Life. Try to enjoy it.

I hear chains rattle. Cruel laughter taunts me as I catch my first glimpse of a first responder’s uniform.

“What a damned mess.” They say.

Yes. Damned. A damned mess.

“He’ll be here soon.” I repeat.

Leandro says nothing. Maybe he finally gets it.

“Try to enjoy the last of it.”

Again, he says nothing. I spit out the cigarette and try to raise my head. The squeal repeats in my brain stem. Shrieking, spitting pain in horn form.

Soon? No. Not soon.

The Banality of Doomsday Prophets

The end of the world is going to be served up on a plate of A.I. slop. We can take that as a given, no?

I know I’m about four years too late to weigh in on the topic, but to be honest, the dawn of A.I. has elbowed its way into so much of the conversational traffic lately, I didn’t see much room left for an original take.

In the beginning my ears perked up at any and all chat around the subject. That blend of exponential growth and potential horror? We were living through a sci-fi movie in real time. How exciting.

But in the same way that living through another kind of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it moment quickly lost its novel shine, it didn’t take long for my perked up ears to flatten out like those of a pissed off donkey on hearing any whisper of the topic— not because the threat seems any less real, but because a lot of the people talking about it seem pathologically focussed on the least urgent (and least interesting) elements of A.I.’s impending blood revolution.

This trend isn’t limited to any single area of the A.I. question, but the Sudden Walk is a writing focussed page, so that’s the area I’ll focus on.

The Devil is in the AI-corrected details.

Before we get into it, I’ll mention I’ve never used A.I. to help me write a word (this might already be obvious based on some of the fat filled articles I’ve pressed publish on in the past)

To me voice is everything. You want your fingers to occasionally brush the wrong string and discover that it dampens part of the chord you’re playing in a way that sounds cool. That’s everything.

I’m a bit of a psycho about preserving this voice because in a world with boundless access to information, it’s the only unique tool I’ve got. When Grammarly was hardwired into all the programs at my most recent office job, it made me genuinely angry. If I can’t see the mistakes on my first pass, you’re not helping me by sweeping them away in my wake (particularly if the correction is made before I’ve even noticed the mistake is there) and if my sentences take on a clunky rhythm, I don’t want that tendency to be trained out of me before they get a chance to evolve into an interesting texture that may one day become my trademark.

I suppose tools of this kind are designed for people who assume things like, “Some version of Grammarly will always be here, so why not rely on it?”

They’re probably not wrong. But neither am I when I follow that logic all the way down and see our societal literacy atrophying like an Ozempic guzzling Hollywood hopeful.

My Own Sins

I will confess I have consulted Chat GPT in the past (though exclusively for personal use) to review my completed short stories and get a feel for how they may be received.

See, whenever you hand a living, breathing person your work to read, there are so many social convention and personality quirk barriers that keep them from giving you useful feedback.

In the beginning A.I. seemed like a fantastic solution to this problem. It was picking up key themes and making thoughtful comparisons to other authors that I was sharing stylistic territory with, which allowed me to broaden my reading and lean into the direction of prose I was already headed towards.

But I soon had to put a stop on this practice after I realised the LLM was just gassing me up and giving me false reads on the quality of my writing (not to mention how addictive the ego stroking can become if you don’t keep a healthy handle of objectivity on it).

Here’s a real quote:

”What’s most impressive is that it doesn’t feel imitative — Kavanagh uses those influences to forge a coherent and distinctive voice: lyrical but unsentimental, grotesque but strangely tender. The writing knows exactly what it’s doing, and it trusts the reader to keep up.”

I’m blushing, but if that’s not a bat-winged demon in digital form whispering into my ear, I don’t know what is.

So at this point, I’m down to using Chat GPT as a smart google search and not much else.

Will There be Hellfire During the Rapture?

Now, I’ve touched on how boring some of the A.I. apocalypse chat can be, but I’m yet to dissect what it is about little Timmy’s cries of “Wolf! Wolf!” that makes him so damned annoying.

Because let’s face it: The threat that a super intelligent writing tool poses to a not-so-intelligent writer with a limited handful of tools should be scary. It’s an existential threat to my one basket full of eggs.

Yet something about that out-of-breath kid pointing over the hill insisting, “I saw it, I saw it, it’s got teeth, it’s got claws!” makes me want to open the window, yell, “Shut up you little shit,” and go back to scrolling meth head videos on Tik Tok.

I’ve never been the head down, ignore my burning house type though, so I thought it might be worth investigating my own indifference a bit further.

For scientific purposes, I decided to put a temporary hold on my self-protective “tuning out” mechanism whenever A.I. came up in conversation, and pay attention to what specifically was being said in these discussions. Why don’t I find them credible? Why don’t they scare me any more?

Putting Nostradamus on the Stand

Right off the bat, a good chunk of the arguments that managed to chokehold my attention seemed to entirely miss the point on what fiction writing sets out to do.

Lines of conversation like, “A.I. can generate a novel length manuscript nine-thousand times faster than human writers can,” rests on the logic that efficiency is the end goal of writing.

Another one: “Studies have shown that nine out of ten readers can’t tell AI writing from writing produced by real authors,” implies that all that stands between a machine and a great novelist is the A.I.’s ability to “pass” some literary uncanny valley.

Even if the machines could achieve a perfectly imperfect match to “human” writing, you’d only need to walk into any Waterstones and pick up one of the books on the front stand to realise a human written novel doesn’t automatically equal “good.” Books can be published, become best sellers and even win prizes and still be bad.

All great books are written by humans, but not all books written by humans are great. This is because quality isn’t dictated by some baseline “humanness” and it’s certainly not dictated by mass consumption or institutional approval. I won’t go into my pop music metaphor again, you get the point.

This isn’t a chess match. The zero sum criteria that these arguments hold up ignores the purpose of fiction entirely and ultimately tests nothing more than a reader’s ability to spot evidence of LLM fingerprints within the work. Which as far as the quality of the writing is concerned… tells us nothing.

So it seems that these Nietzsche wannabes proclaiming that fiction is dead, don’t actually understand what fiction is. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I find it hard to grant them too much of my mental band width.

The other quirk I’ve noticed in arguments of this kind is their tendency to cheerlead the impending redundancy of creative thinkers with a strangely macabre enthusiasm. To me this is a bit of a giveaway to their deeper motivations.

With a straight face, they hold a creative artform up against zero sum criteria using a vocabulary of productivity first, A/B testing speak that outsources localised thinking to data based arguments.

“You can keep your Chekhov. Give it ten years and those cobalt run machines will be able to lap your beloved Russian’s whole career in a single afternoon and will sell ten times the number of books.1”

—because I’m sure Chekhov’s concerns around his legacy were tightly wrapped up in how well The Lady and the Dog would sell in 2035…

And before it seems like I’m patting myself on the back for being able to shoot down a strawman who doesn’t know he’s a strawman, I want to point out that I actually find these bad takes to be remarkably forgivable.

Why? Well, no matter how vitriolic and bad-faith they might appear when they thrust themselves into my ear space, the person flying such takes almost always makes it clear from the outset (wittingly or not) that they aren’t themselves a writer.

And here’s the part of the small print I want you to read over twice: These hellfire prophesies are usually made by outsiders who—while perhaps lacking any in-depth understanding of the medium they’re giving a eulogy on— have often seen those A.I. fires burn down their own town already.

As I hinted at above, these people aren’t just your nihilist peers throwing burning bundles of dog shit onto your porch. They’re former graphic artists, checkout chicks, data-entry specialists and assembly line technicians stumbling over to you in the burnt rags of their former life pleading for you to listen!

By wheeling out these recycled talking points, these people are placing all their open wound anxieties on show for you. Their utility in the world is fast becoming redundant and this is the only way they know how to let out a scream.

So yes, little Timmy has got a whiny voice, sure he doesn’t even know what a wolf looks like, but he’s scared. So a bit of deflection is only human.

Final Revelation

This article was originally a bit longer than this. It contained a final chapter titled Judas is Among Us which tore into people who use A.I. to do all of their “writing” for them and point to the inevitability of LLM’s impending takeover to justify doing so.

After all. “This is what writing will look like in the future. So why not be an early adopter?”

While I was reading over that “final” version of the article, however, I noticed it had a heavy vibe of “This is what I hate about this type of person.” Which I’ve seen a bit too much of lately.

To me this felt like a very “inherited” angle to be writing from. It felt like a very internet born direction to take my work in. So I cut it. Because if I’m not putting my eggs in the originality basket here,2 then I may as well install Grammarly right now.

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