From Me Flows What You Call Bullshit
“Where does your bullshit come from?”
It’s not exactly how the question is conveyed to me, but it is a fair aggregation of the often-asked line of enquiry.
Sometimes the answer is easy.
My first release, 2016’s On a Winter’s Night was an amalgamation of stories from friends who had lived in London in their early 20s. Setting it at an 80s themed house party in Acton Town was really just an excuse to make a Dexys Midnight Runners reference.
A year later, The Other Guy came about when I went down a YouTube rabbit hole and ended up watching a clip of John Farnham performing with soft rock legends Little River Band. My immediate thought was: What would (original singer) Glenn Shorrock have thought of this?
It made perfect sense to pretend I was Glenn and write a fake memoir to find out.
Sometimes the answer is a little more complicated.
My third effort, 2019’s The Bear Supremacy was my way of trying to solve a mystery related to Winnie-the-Pooh. Did I have to make it into a Robert Ludlum-style thriller? Probably not, but the original concept: a treatise of squatter’s rights in the early 20th Century was a little dry for mine.
When I come to the end of any writing project, I look at what is floating about in various journals, computer files and, incoherent notes typed on my phone to see what might come next. Often it is a single line premise like: The guy that replaced the apostle Judas. Is that a story? Can I get enough juice out of that?
Following The Bear Supremacy, I was in the early stages of planning a new project (more on that later) but I felt the story itself needed to marinate a little bit longer.
Then in August of 2019, my work colleague Emily suggested I tackle the monthly micro-fiction competition run by the Australian Writers’ Centre. Called ‘Furious Fiction’, on the first Friday of each month you are given a couple of parameters and 55 hours to produce a 500 word (very) short story.
Emily’s encouragement is infectious, so I set about the task to enter a story each month, not in the hope of winning, but to aid in the discipline of writing. Then, after a year, I would have 12 new mini-stories that could be developed into something bigger.
They Can All Be Wieners is the culmination of that output over the last year, plus a few orphans and strays that needed a home.
Some months I would get to 5pm on Friday when the competition opened and have no idea what I was going to write. By late Sunday I was submitting something that was completely conceived, drafted, edited (often for length), and re-written over the past two and half days.
The first story, Plum Distress, is one such example.
Other months, as soon I received the parameters, I knew exactly the direction it was going to take. The aforementioned idea about a replacement for Judas became Judea’s Got Talent, whilst a ridiculous notion that James Brown was not only the Godfather of Soul but also a mafia don became the basis for Victim of Love.
I have long been obsessed with the following quote by Frank Herbert, the author of Dune:
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
For a guy who took six books to tell a story about spice mining and giant earthworms, Frank should have heeded his own advice.
I get it though, sometimes it is hard to let go of characters that you formed out of thin air. The melange, after all, is intoxicating.
Which is why I decided to revisit creations from my previous releases. Both This Time Round and Number 1: Robbie King contain characters mentioned in passing in On a Winter’s Night. Because I will never be able to extricate myself from Glenn Shorrock, he returns in diary form twice more in Friday 22 November, 1968 and Thursday 18 January, 2018.
My personal favourite though is The Great Roar which is a continuation of a flashback scene in The Bear Supremacy. Though this time it is a little less Ludlum and a little more The Lady with the Lamp.
Finally, in a nod to what is to come, I decided to road test my character from the idea I was working on before I embarked on this project. Cutting Clean Through My Heart is set inside an actual song by the (now) late singer Justin Townes Earle. The vessel of ‘Rogers Park’ was chosen because Justin had the ability to convey the brutality of life with unnerving clarity, something I have been fortunate enough not to have experienced first-hand.
What the past year has taught me is that ideas for new stories won’t ever run out. You just need the right plumbing to channel the bullshit.
May it always flow.
They Can All Be Wieners is released December 2, 2020.
It is available for pre-order on Amazon and Gumroad.
All profits from the sale of the book will go to Beyond Blue (and matched by the author)
