Another Book?

Hello everyone, it has been a little while since I last wrote a blog post here. In that time I was unfortunately not able to complete the horror fiction novel that I have been working on for submission to the Fremantle Press competition. This came down to a combination of crazily trying to complete a first novel in a couple of months, as well as having the electricity to my house knocked out for several days because of the cyclone that passed through. Losing electricity for a few days is nothing though, when compared to the many people and homes that weren't so lucky within the trajectory of the cyclone.

Most of the novel is written now though, and I will complete the rest of it over the course of this year, either for another competition later in the year, or if I finish it earlier then I may send it around to publishers anyway to metaphorically test the waters.

Anyway as a short break from writing the novel I have been catching up with far away friends online, and I have even managed to put together a thirty page poetry pamphlet which I have submitted to my favourite indie publisher: SPAM Press. It is titled: "Poems from an Aggressive Vegan", and it is a thematic compilation of poems from a file on my computer named: “Vegan Propaganda Poetry”. It also includes a large collaboration of ekphrastic poetry to my friend Colleen's art which can be viewed under the pseudonym: "UNEXIIST" on Instagram. I am incredibly grateful for any opportunity to collaborate with creatives from other fields or of varying styles, and especially in this case to be able to combine my writing with her surreal, surgically spliced, visual splendours. So please check out her work which I'll link below, and hopefully what has been created between us will be of taste to a poetry publisher.

https://www.instagram.com/unexiist/

Here is a quick description of the project as a whole and one of the poems from it, along with an accompanying artwork from Colleen:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bd0kJSwl5MF/

A lot of the work alone is probably madness, but in stitching all of them together I think I have created a piece that translates into a post-new age, vegan aesthetic. It is raw, harmful, strange, discomforting, and woke. My aim is to poke readers into considering veganism, progressive politics, activism, and environmentalism. While still entertaining them and giving them an example of how to implement ethics into creativity without it being detrimental to the creative piece itself.

Car Door

Driven to dive deep into a dwelling, twice was the amount of time it took to reconcile said - sudden red asphyxiations intertwined in tandem with a rare strain of tuberculosis *cough*

The proctologist propped me up on a pedestal to make it easier for him or her or they to karaté chop my shins - bleeding wet cartilage mess on his sweater already, definitely not mom's spaghetti, though he is nervous

Random thoughts of a pink dolphin careening into the side of a building - two scoops of mint choc chip while on a date in Delaware, this is god's country

Lying underneath the stars, wrapped in striped towel with my boo, I am left with nothing but the feeling of bad porridge - too late and it's already made its way into the back of the pickup truck aka ute where all of my desperate affections lay congealed

Still working up the courage to contemplate the consideration of my life as my own - what a waste it would be to reward my own positive actions and/or affiliations with gang violence in fear of a scraped elbow to be had