2023 in Review

Happy last Flex Friday of 2023

This has been a big year with a wildly up-and-down trajectory – as I guess most years kind of go.

There were some really epic highs: Collingwood winning the AFL premiership; awards and accolades for THE BRINK; a TV series greenlit and foreign rights sales for IB; a grant won for its sequel; going to Sydney to appear at World Pride; getting my first tattoos (some Pearl Jam lyrics) after wanting them for years. Heaps to be happy about and grateful for.

And some crushing lows that beat me up a bit: I sadly lost some family members, one sooner than expected and one terribly suddenly; I had one book caught up in that AI drama and lost my shit about it; I had various personal and professional bullshit happen that I don’t talk about publicly cos I’m a classy bastard, but suffice it to say it knocked me around a bit. 

I’m excited that this year I got my third novel TIME BOMB drafted and edited: I’ve spent the last few weeks editing my arse off to whip the third draft into good enough shape to send back to my publisher. Once that happens, I’ll have more info like a slated release date (likely 2025, but watch this space).

And I’m really pumped for what 2024 has in store. I’m gonna be withdrawing a bit from the public space (i.e. events/apperances) in order to focus on writing my fourth novel – the follow-on to IB – and I’m happy to say the full, detailed outline of that book is already completed and I love it. I’ve had this book idea planned since 2012(!!) and I’m stoked to still be both buzzed about the plot and excited about the progression of Zeke, Charlie and Hammer into grown men and what their lives look like post-IB.

On a personal note, I’m also using this withdrawal time in 2024 to focus more diligently on my fitness goals. I don’t think it’s news to anyone that I spend most of my free time working out at the gym, and I’m disciplined and consistent with my weightlifting and cardio, but since 2019 my nutrition and substance use have been, uh, not so disciplined. It’s frustrating to hit the gym hard six days a week only to have weekend benders and blowouts that undermine my goals. I’ve decided to make nutrition and reduced substances a big priority in 2024, the way I did pre-2019 when I was both sober and much leaner. I’m pumped to see what I can achieve in the year ahead & intend for the last Flex Friday of 2024 to be leaner than the one I’m posting today. Bring it! 

Thanx to all of you for the support over the past year – both here on this page, and across my socials, at events and appearances, and by buying my books and continuing to support them. It means the world to have readers and supporters engage with me and my work, and I don’t take any of it for granted for a second. I hope youse will enjoy these two new books I’m working on now when they finally hit shelves and that they’ll be worth the wait. 

Cheers for 2023 and here’s to a kickass 2024! 

Holden

Leaving it Behind

One thing I’ve always been bad at is letting go.

But as we reach the end of 2022, there is something I want to leave behind in this year.

Christmas and the holiday period has been a really difficult time for me for the past few years, because I’m estranged from several people in my family and I don’t see them.

It has meant that instead of feeling happy and festive, every December I feel deeply depressed. It’s a month of feeling shit and sad and angry and lonely.

It hurts, a lot.

I saw the below tweet from Dr Nicole LePera and it describes what I’ve felt the past few Christmases: grief.

As she stated:

“Few people talk about the grief that comes after ending toxic relationships. Intellectually, we know it’s for the best, but we also have suffered a deep loss many don’t understand.”

Tweet from Dr Nicole LePera on Twitter, December 2022.

It’s strange and difficult to end a relationship with someone you love, or have them end their relationship with you, or both. I’ve never thought of it as grief, but that could be the right word.

This post isn’t going to identify anyone, or shame them, or divulge details about family shit that ought to remain private. I’m not being cagey, just protecting the privacy of other people.

I am writing this with a more personal goal, because I have a demon to exorcise, personally and professionally, about the impact this has had on me. It’s affected my mental health, but it’s affecting my writing, too.

In 2021, I made a generic, relatively cautious statement on social media about having had an encounter with someone I went no-contact with years ago. I didn’t identify the person, I kept it vague, and I didn’t say much other than I was upset at having this person ignore my boundaries.

That comment was met with rage and abusive messages from several people I am related to. I was to be punished, shunned and ostracised for having told the truth that I was not okay in that moment.

That experience burnt me so badly, I haven’t been able to express myself properly since.

I blew several deadlines with my publisher for my third book as I couldn’t bear sitting in the emotional space required to write. I was too scared, and too emotionally rekt. I couldn’t do it.

I haven’t been able to write any short fiction at all since, either. Nor have I written any opinion pieces or other journalistic articles, both of which were goals of mine for 2022.

I’ve just been frozen.

When I did finally churn out a rough draft of my third novel in July, I rushed it, and I had to drink to be able to write it.

This, to me, is a bad sign, because it usually means what I am writing isn’t very good.

INVISIBLE BOYS, THE BRINK, and all my short fiction that’s been published – it has been written in a state of sobriety, when I am happy and peaceful, when I feel safe enough to excavate feelings and weave them into character and story.

When I am in so much emotional pain that I need to drink to numb it, I always churn out substandard writing. I did this for my Honours thesis and it resulted in a creative work that was okay, but didn’t dive deep enough to resonate on an emotional level.

And so it is with this third book draft.

Upon reading the manuscript draft, my publisher, accurately, pointed out to me that this early draft hasn’t gone deep enough into the emotion of what needs to be said.

And she’s right. I didn’t go deep enough, because I was too scared to follow two of my key principles of writing.

Firstly, from Ernest Hemingway, the edict to “write hard and clear about what hurts”.

Secondly, from Alanis Morissette, the advice to make self-expression paramount to the artist, regardless of what people might think of it: no sacred cows.

I have been unable to do either of these. I’ve been too concerned with getting attacked again if I say the wrong thing.

This year, I’ve focused on trying to heal on a personal level and make Christmas a happy time again. My husband and I realised we have never put up a Christmas tree despite living together for years, so this year we bought a nice Christmas tree, set up our own Christmas Day rituals and made time to see people we do have healthy relationships with. It made Christmas happy and festive again.

But as I sit here on the brink of a new year, I know I can’t fully move on until I remove the splinter that’s been in my paw for over a year.

I had to write this, and share it without any fear or shame, to leave it behind and move on.

Professionally, I had to prove to myself I can write hard and clear, and that I am not beholden to anyone else’s opinions about what I say or write: that self-expression is paramount.

Personally, I had to prove to myself that other people’s abusive rantings will not make me cower. I am not afraid of them anymore.

More importantly: I don’t want to shoulder the weight of this for one second longer. I don’t want it to colour my 2023 or the years beyond. I don’t want it to hinder my creativity. I don’t want to be unhappy and silent.

So, here is my little demon and here I am, exorcising it with a kick up the arse and a stake right through the heart. Get the fuck behind me and let me move on. I want to be happy.

Holden

The Parts of my Unpublished Manuscript That Did Get Published

This morning I’ve been revisiting the first full-length manuscript I ever completed – the still-unpublished Young Adult action/adventure novel I wrote from 2014-2016. The pic above is from early 2015, when I was close to finishing the first draft.

Before I wrote INVISIBLE BOYS or the current version of THE BRINK, this was the book I thought would be my first published novel, and I poured a lot of time and effort into it.

I worked very hard on this manuscript, writing it mostly during a time when I was working full-time at a university. I had a mentor through the Australian Society of Authors who helped me refine the later drafts – there were seven drafts in total. I was so sure that with enough work, this book would get published.

It didn’t.

I’ve only ever spoken about this book in the context of it getting rejected by an agent in early 2017 (which I wrote about at length in an early 2019 blog posted titled A LETTER TO THE NOVEL I ABANDONED.) In some ways, I’ve spoken about it too much through that lens and not about the novel on its own terms. But that rejection was pivotal for me on two fronts.

One, it drove me into a total war/scorched earth kind of mentality – what I’ve described as “going black behind the eyes”. The failure of that manuscript hurt me so much that I doubled down on my desire for success. Weekdays, weeknights, weekends, weekend nights: all my spare time was devoted solely to the dogged pursuit of working on a new book and getting it published. No chilling, no socialising, no downtime. Work work work until I got what I wanted. I would get published or I would die trying. It’s a bit intense, but it also worked. So as much as there are unhealthy downsides to the hustle mentality, there’s also sometimes no way around it. I don’t think I would be a published author now if I hadn’t driven myself like this during that time.

Two, it catalysed the career I have now, because it made me shift the focus of my creative output. Whereas the YA action/adventure manuscript was focused on plot and action, I realised what my writing badly needed was a focus on character, humanity and heart.

It was from that new approach that INVISIBLE BOYS and THE BRINK were born.

Occasionally at events, people have asked if I would ever revisit that first, unpublished manuscript and try to get it published now.

I’ve usually said that it’s comfortably in the drawer, but that I do sometimes think about revisiting it. I’ve said that if I did, I would probably need to give the book a heart transplant, because that was the key element it was lacking, that made it unable to leap that last hurdle to becoming a publishable work.

I still think that’s what’s needed, but I spent some time reading parts of this manuscript this morning and I was surprised by a couple of things.

Firstly, I have always referred to this book as a YA fantasy novel. And it did have fantasy elements – a system of low-key magic and so on.

But at its core, it isn’t quite a fantasy novel. It’s much more an action/adventure novel, with explosions and gunfights and swordfights and running away from danger, and ancient mythologies and corrupt corporations and shady underworld organisations and a band of misfits pulled together as a kind of found family against the danger of it all.

It’s adventure fiction – like Matthew Reilly’s Jack West Jr series (The Seven Ancient Wonders etc.) mixed with Tintin and Tomorrow, When the War Began. So I reckon I’ll call it adventure from now on, rather than fantasy.

Secondly, I think if I did ever revisit this manuscript, I’d start with some fundamental changes. Apart from making it more character-driven, I’d be making it an adult protagonist instead of teenage – it just gives the story so much more room to breathe and also makes the plot more believable. I also think I’d strip out the fantasy elements and shift it towards being more of a straight-up adventure/action thriller. I think it could work that way and it would be a novel I’d actually want to write.

Thirdly, and most surprisingly, there were little glimpses of heart in this plot-driven book that I hadn’t really remembered being there. The teenage protagonist – an angry young man named Gabe – was not given a deep inner world the way my published protagonists have been. This reflects not just my tendency at the time to eschew character for plot in my writing style, but also my own inability to be emotionally vulnerable at the time. I couldn’t show real shit in my characters because I didn’t know how to confront my own feelings in real life, either.

But there are a few points in the manuscript where moments of emotion did spill through. What surprised me was that I had forgotten about some of them, and yet they showed up in different ways in the novels I wrote later on.

For instance, this scene, where Gabe storms out of the shack he is hiding in with some locals, contains elements that would later be published in INVISIBLE BOYS and THE BRINK:

(NB: I’ve never shared even a sentence from this novel publicly before, so this is a first, and for all I know, this might be the only part of the novel that ever sees the light of day … here goes.)

*

I threw the door open and stormed out, leaving the shack via the fly-wire door at the front. I didn’t care if anyone saw my face anymore. I didn’t care that I was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only a loose pair of Heath’s boxer shorts. I didn’t even know where I was going, just that I needed to be alone. I needed to be outside and away.

I passed the burned remains of Peninsula Senior High School, the pungent smell of seaweed wafting up at me, and found myself on Peninsula Beach. I could see the CBD from here – the marina, the wharf, the port and its orange ship lifters, the markets, Horizon Terrace, the Vic, Hudson House – but it was distant. It was comforting to see it all like that, silent, spread out before the crashing waves of the Indian Ocean. It made everything feel insignificant.

I stomped a few metres along the beach sand before the desire to get wet suddenly came over me. I strode straight into the waves in my boxer shorts and waded in until I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet anymore.

Unlike last night’s torturous swim, the cold, salty water was refreshing. I breast stroked through the shallows for a bit and then floated on my back, eyes closed against the belting sun, as seagulls called out from the shore.

When my brain started to rumble, I dived underwater. It was cooling, satisfying, like a red-hot iron being dipped into ice water and sizzling with steam. I stayed underwater for as long as I could, my eyes closed and ears deaf, floating like a foetus in its amniotic sac.

I eventually waded back onto the beach and flopped on the soft, powdery sand, eyes shut.

A few minutes later, as the droplets of water on my bare chest began to evaporate, I heard a gruff voice behind me say, ‘Thought yer did a runner.’

‘Needed to clear my head,’ I said. I didn’t shift, didn’t open my eyes.

The sand shifted as Darren sat down beside me. ‘Does it feel clearer?’

‘No.’

*

What struck me in this scene was how much my angry teenage self was demanding expression in a novel that didn’t really have space for it. I also didn’t have the emotional intelligence in 2016 to give this scene – and Gabe – room to explore this anger. Not long after Darren arrives, it becomes a bit more surface-level, the older bloke giving the young lad a bit of a sermon, but it was all about intellectualising Gabe’s strife, rather than sitting in it and letting it be raw.

I’m also a bit happily surprised at how several parts of this scene showed up in later books. Gabe storming off in his boxer shorts is remarkably similar to Leonardo’s meltdown on Brink Island. The use of the ocean as a cleansing force and then flopping onto the sand afterwards to reflect is also very close to a scene later in THE BRINK when Leonardo flees to the island’s northern cape. Except when played out through Leonardo’s character, and written by an author who’s a few years older and more able to be vulnerable, it is a longer and deeper psychological dive into that character’s inner workings.

The part that is almost identical to something that later got published is the paragraph of Gabe looking at the burned-out remains of Peninsula Senior High School. In INVISIBLE BOYS, Charlie – my angry character of that novel – has a very similar moment of reflection from the rooftop of an abandoned school in the middle of town, where he feels better watching the town from a distance, hearing the waves of the Indian Ocean. In both scenes, the characters are at peace with how the schools are abandoned, destroyed, and therefore safe.

This might only be interesting to me, as the author, rather than to any readers. But it really does make me happy to have noticed these similarities. Until now, I really viewed my unpublished YA adventure novel as starkly separate to my later work: the surface-level, plot-driven stuff versus deeper, character-driven work.

But I can see now that I was trying. There were attempts to express my suppressed anger – and express myself – even in the earlier work. I just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth or literary skill to do it well, or sustain it for longer than a few sentences. There are only occasional glimpses of inchoate angst, a nebulous self finding brief moments to reveal itself before being swallowed by the camouflage of a plot-driven tale.

I still don’t know what I will do with this manuscript. It might stay in the drawer forever. Maybe it was just a necessary first attempt at a book – not a failure as such, but a bridge between writing fun adventure fiction and writing something more honest. Or maybe I will come back and shape it into an adult-led thriller with heart. I don’t know.

In any case, it’s not the next thing on my to-do list. I’ll be spending my summer reading some books I’ve wanted to read for a long time – for inspiration, for learning – and then the first half of 2023 will be spent doing the rewrites on my third novel. I haven’t said much about my third novel, other than it’s about an angry gym junkie named Dane hitting his thirties, and I’m glad, because I think I am going to do a pretty major rework as I write the third draft of it next year.

Even the title of book three is going to change, so I’m especially glad I didn’t follow one of my whims last year to reveal the title during the promo tour for THE BRINK. That would have been hard to walk back, especially as the old title said so much about the book’s content, and now the book is taking a different direction in some ways. In fact, currently I don’t even have a new title for it, and although I’ve brainstormed a bunch of working titles lately, I don’t think any of them will be the one that makes it to publication, because they’re not even good enough for me to want to pick them as working titles. I don’t think I’ll really get a handle on this until I’m working on it properly in like Feb/March next year.

All I do know is book three is next up, and I’m keen to share Dane Di Angelo, and his story, with youse.

And after that? Book four is about a trio of men in their twenties named Zeke, Charlie and Hammer. 😉

So, maybe my fifth book will be rework of this unpublished novel? Or maybe I’ll be inspired to chase down one of the dozen or so other book ideas I have patiently waiting for my attention. There’s a joy in not knowing, really, and a liveliness in just following my gut towards what most needs expression each time I start a new book. I’ll suss it out as I go, and just hope that people will come along for the ride.

Holden

An Alternate Ending to “Game of Thrones”

Orright, so this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever posted on this blog.

The return of the GAME OF THRONES universe to our screens last week with HOUSE OF THE DRAGON (2022) ignited a twitter conversation with some of my followers today. Specifically, we were discussing the much-maligned ending to the original series of GOT in 2019.

Many fans felt cheated and let down by that ending – a surprise and unsatisfying twist that many felt ruined a character the show had spent eight seasons building up.

At the time, in 2019, I remember raging about how poor a choice this was for the show. To be clear, I didn’t rage at or abuse the writers themselves – no creator deserves that kind of treatment – but I did privately rant with many a fellow fan that our beloved show had ended so unsatisfyingly. In fact, GOT has become something of a cultural touchstone of how to not end a TV show, such is the extent of fan dissatisfaction.

At the time, I was so longing for the satisfaction of a solid ending that I ended up doing something I hadn’t done for years at the time: I wrote a piece of geeky fanfic about it. What I wrote was about 5500 words – a skeletal first draft, very loosely sketched out, of how I thought the character arcs could have been wrapped up in a way that was true to the characters and the story itself.

But in 2019, I decided not to post it publicly even though, yes, it’s just a benign bit of fanfiction. The writers of GOT were copping a lot of shit and I didn’t want to add to that storm. It also felt a bit disrespectful to do that to fellow writers right when they were copping backlash. And I didn’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hadn’t yet seen it.

But today’s conversation on Twitter reminded me this was sitting in a file somewhere, and I fished it out from three years ago. It’s rough, but gets the basic idea across of how this fan would have loved GOT to finish.

Now three years have passed and that storm and backlash have settled, it doesn’t feel so bad to post this up, so I’ll share it for the handful of fellow fans who might be interested in something this nerdy.

Two disclaimers from me.

Firstly, I mean no disrespect to the writers of the original GOT ending – they had a helluva job to try to wrap up all the threads of that show, and I’m not dissing them. This is just an avid fan writing a version of the ending he would have liked to see. The very end of my version might be a bit too neat/happy for a show based on grimdark books, but whatevs.

And secondly, all the usual disclaimers that go with fanfiction: GAME OF THRONES belongs to HBO so this work of fanfiction is made freely-available and is not for sale – it is non-commercial and no income is received for it. It is posted in line with the principles of fair dealing (in Australia) and fair use (in the USA).

With all that said, here’s a random fan’s alternate ending to GAME OF THRONES, picking up from the moment the bells ring across King’s Landing. In the series, this signified a sudden and catastrophic shift in Dany’s character and caused huge dismay in many fans. My fanfic picks up from the moment the bells ring, but Dany takes a different – more in-character – course of action.

Here we go:

GAME OF THRONES – S8 E6 – ALTERNATE ENDING

Holden Sheppard

A bell rings, and two armies exhale.

A pregnant pause persists, only seconds, until Jon Snow releases his sword, dust eddying as it lands at his feet in the chasm between him and the Lannister army.

Two armies inhale again: clean air, fresh air; and suddenly the tendons that gripped steel relax, white knuckles release and turn pink as human blood flows within veins again. Swords clatter to the earth. Ser Davos exchanges a look of relief with Tyrion Lannister. Grey Worm is one of the last to hurl his bloodied sword into the divide between the two armies.

It is over, Jon thinks. It is done.

He glances at Dany, expecting power to radiate off her in exultant glory, expecting the smug grin, face tilted to the sun like the ruler she has become.

But there is no grin, no glory.

Dany’s face is contorted into a mask of rage. Her violet eyes pierce the air more terrifyingly than Drogon’s flames did. Her gaze is squarely on the Red Keep.

“Dany, no – it’s done,” Jon says. “You won. You are Queen.”

Dany jerks her head in defiance, like she is shaking an angel off her shoulder. Her lips grow tight over her teeth. There is no satisfaction in a bloodless coup. No security, either. This isn’t revenge, nor destiny fulfilled. This story will never be over while the Lannisters draw breath. She sees it playing out in her head – perhaps happening, right now, within the walls of the Red Keep. Cersei Lannister will be whisked away to another part of the realm, somewhere in secret, to give birth to her child. That child would be exiled to a foreign protector in a foreign land – maybe Pentos – raised to believe they are the true heir – raised to grow an army and seek revenge in twenty years.

It is her story, too: Dany’s story. She has lived it her entire life, and now the wheel has turned, and it will be the story of Cersei’s offspring, too. And it will destroy her as a ruler. It will destroy the tentative sprouts of peace from ever getting their roots into Westeros.

And that child, that poor child, would be another Dany, a child who never grows up knowing peace, a child who is used, exploited and manipulated by others and their selfish desires for power, until he or she learns to do the same: use, exploit manipulate. The war would go on, the wheel would turn on and on, spinning faster than before, spinning out of control …

“I came here to break the wheel,” she calls to Jon, without taking her eyes off the Red Keep. “The wheel is not broken yet.”

She grips the hard ridges on Drogon’s back, beckoning him to take to the skies; which he does; he had already begun to unfurl his leathery wings, like he could read her mind.

“No!” Tyrion shouts. “Please – the bells –”

Dany doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence over the wind rushing past her ears; she is already too far away. She and Drogon are soaring over King’s Landing; the shadow of an enormous, fully-grown dragon darkening the red roofs of the buildings below. She sees the soldiers in their silver reach instinctively to the earth for their swords; peasants cover their heads with their hands as if it would offer any kind of protection.

Dany grits her teeth, beckoning Drogon to fly higher, further from these innocents.

I am not here for you, she thinks. Today, I break the wheel. Even if it means breaking myself.

*

Cersei Lannister holds the goblet of mulled wine until the very last minute. If I am to go, she thinks, let me be stupid drunk enough that I can’t feel it.

“My Queen, we should move …” the Grandmaester pleads beside her.

“I am well protected,” Cersei tells him, eyes on the dragon silhouetted against the airborne ash as it flies directly for her. “The Red Keep has never fallen. The Dragon Queen cannot kill me if I surrender. And I have Ser Gregor at my disposal should she try.”

The discoloured beast of a man grunts beneath his armour; even the six soldiers flanking him flinch.

“The Targaryens have never been much for mercy before,” the old man mumbles, gnarled fingers playing uncertainly with the Hand of the King pin on his tunic, like he is wondering whether it might be too late to tear it off and run.

The dragon draws near to the castle, searching the windows until it finally spots Cersei at her window and draws level to her, hovering in the air so its mother can face her enemy. Cersei can see the dragon queen’s silver hair trailing in the wind, the russet walls of the Red Keep reflected in her eyes so her blue irises look almost purple.

“Cersei of House Lannister … you are sitting on a throne that is not yours,” Dany says, evenly. “Your people have lived only in fear of you. Your armies have abandoned you. You are a tyrant, and you are done.”

Cersei drains the last of her goblet and makes a mockery of holding her hands up.

“I’ve already surrendered,” she says, with a shrug that is deliberately casual. Even now, she defaults to the old ways, like charm might still be enough to disarm. “You can hear those bells, can’t you? To attack now would be to commit a war crime.”

Dany’s face, already twisted with rage, snarls further. “So be it,” she says. “A war crime may be the only way to end this war for good – and that is what I came here to do.”

Cersei’s heart flutters, because there is no humanity left in those purple irises.

“I’ve never understood why the symbol of House Lannister was a lion,” Dany says suddenly. “I have never seen you act as bravely as one, only slither, like snakes, into everything that is good in the world. I doubt anyone in the Realm will be dismayed to see such a treacherous house meet its end.”

“I am unarmed, and innocent,” Cersei says, hand reaching for protection and finding the steel plated arm of the Mountain beside her.

Dany’s eyes blaze as Drogon rears up. “How interesting,” she says. “Missandei of Naath was unarmed, too.” Flames explode in her irises as she shrieks, “DRACARYS!”

Cersei ducks, just as she is pulled back; a tongue of flame erupts from before her; fills the air, fills the room, and for a second she knows she is dead.

But her mind is still whirring as the air is scorched and her limbs blaze with heat. She glances up to see the Mountain towering over her, standing in the direct blast of the Dragon’s flame, roaring the way only an undead man can; behind him, three soldiers have provided extra layers of protection with their own bodies, but unlike Ser Gregor, they are mortal, and all of them are already either dead or dying; and then there is Cersei, buried beneath them all as the flames rage.

There is a pause as Drogon draws breath; his armour melted to his discoloured skin, his world ablaze, the Mountain grips his iron spear, one big enough for a Scorpion, and launches is directly into Drogon’s jaws.

The animal shrieks in pain as the steel pierces the soft flesh within its mouth; its mother screams in fury as the dragon is forced to wheel back, shaking its head vigorously as it tried to dislodge the missile.

Cersei spots the opening to the spiral staircase below, the escape from which her grandmaester and other soldiers have no doubt fled already. As the dragon reels outside the window, she shakes the burnt bodies of the soldiers off and races for the staircase, bellowing behind her, “Ser Gregor, protect me.”

*

In a large, flat room at the base of the Red Keep, its polished stone map of Westeros etched into the floor, everything happens at once.

Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane burst into the space from one end at the same moment that a door opens at the opposite end, and a wounded Jaime Lannister limps towards them, blood trailing behind him – fresh, bright red.

Outside, a dragon shrieks and something metallic clatters against stone before a pillar of fire erupts outside. The roof explodes with flame as a turret is destroyed in a matter of seconds.

Arya exchanges a look with the Hound.

“I told you you had the chance to leave,” he says. “You’ll only end up as dead as I will.”

Arya grits her teeth as more of the side wall begins to cave in; suddenly, a shaft of light breaks through the gloom of the castle she was once, as a girl, trapped within.

“No,” she says flatly, her hand resting on Needle’s hilt. “We are both assassins, and death comes for both of us. Let it be a death that satisfies us.” She nods at him. “We both have unfinished business.”

The Hound grips his sword and they move forward into the cavernous chamber.

Before they are even two steps in, footsteps clatter down the spiral staircase from above; an old man in the sparse, dirty white tunic of a maester appears. He glimpses them, enemy soldiers, and flings a gold pin from his tunic; it clatters to the polished stone floor, abandoned, as he sprints in the other direction.

Arya exchanges a look with the Hound that says let him. 

That look does not resurface when three Lannister soldiers pelt down the staircase and into the room. The soldiers are followed by a bedraggled and charcoal-faced Cersei Lannister, her robes still smoking, and the monstrous form of the Mountain, molten metal now fused onto his blue skin.

Arya and Sandor press forward, blades out in a flash; the three soldiers have blackened skin, and they fumble for their swords like they are in a daze; metal flashes and blood spurts within seconds. Three dead Lannister soldiers clatter to the stone.

“Protect me!” Cersei cries, shifting behind the Mountain as Arya and Sandor advance.

“Cersei!” Jaime bellows from the far end of the chamber. He is doubled over a stone seat, too wounded to move.

The blonde-haired once-queen turns, her eyes finding her brother who is also, Arya knows, her lover, and something cracks in her voice; the cruel regent sounds like a little girl.

“Jaime – you made it – you came back to me …” she splutters. “Help me – you have to help me. I want to live.”

“I will,” he calls. “We’re together now. It will all be –”

And at that precise second, the entire wall of the chamber explodes, stone melting away in a combination of flame and wings and claws; sunlight streams into the room as Drogon lands spectacularly on the polished stone, cracking the map of Westeros into pieces and dividing the room into two with Drogon’s bulk, Jaime invisible from the other side of the chamber.

Dany sees the opponents squaring off – the Mountain and the Hound, and Cersei Lannister and Arya Stark – and for one mad rush of a moment she envisions all of them burning, with one word from her and one action from Drogon. She could do it. But the soldier belongs to her army; and Arya is Jon’s sister.

She instead finds herself staring into the eyes of a wounded man slumped over a stone seat.

A twisted smile breaks over her face.

“Jaime Lannister,” she says. “You have a lot to answer for.”

*

The Clegane brothers’ fight is the one Arya would prefer for herself: blades clashing against each other, steel flashing in the blinding sunlight; shouts of desperation as two enemies fight to the death.

Instead, she advances coldly and calmly on Cersei, who is backing herself towards the unbroken wall on the left side of the chamber.

Cersei draws her dagger, and Arya laughs. “We both know you’re too cowardly to even try it,” Arya says coldly. “Lannisters don’t tend to wield blades when others can see them do it, do they?”

Cersei’s skin is milk white beneath the soot as she drops the dagger to the crumbled stone floor.

“We surrendered,” she says. “The bells have rung.”

“They aren’t your bells,” Arya says, pacing forwards evenly and kicking the dagger to the side. Across the room, the Hound is sent flying by the Mountain; Sandor knocks his head on the stone floor and scrambles blearily to his feet. “The bells rang for you a long time ago, Cersei, when you crossed my family.”

Cersei’s eyes widen as the back of her heel strikes the wall; she has nowhere else to go now. “No-one can get away with killing a queen in cold blood, girl,” she says, an acidic whisper.

Arya takes another step. “That’s correct,” she says, a wry smile curling her lips. “And I am No-one.”

Cersei’s arms flail in the direction of her dagger on the floor. “I am unarmed!” she proclaims.

“So was my father when you had him beheaded in front of me,” says No-one.

Cersei flattens herself against the stone. “I was only doing what was right by my family.”

“As my mother was, when you had her throat cut,” says No-one.

Desperate now, the pale former queen places a hand on her swollen belly. She is frozen, as a statue, a pillar of ash waiting to crumble. “I am pregnant. You wouldn’t be killing just me – my baby doesn’t deserve to die. You would be committing infanticide.”

Arya Stark smiles more broadly than she has in years, and raises Needle to Cersei’s stomach. “You mean, like this?”

And she slices Needle directly through the skin and into the womb, three sharp jabs, like they told her it was done to her brother’s wife.

Cersei jerks, seizes in shock, her mouth gaping as she clutches her belly in horror.

“My unborn nephew didn’t deserve to die, either,” Arya says, withdrawing the blade and watching with satisfaction as Cersei Lannister crumples to her knees. “Robb’s child didn’t deserve death. Nor did Robb.”

Cersei is moving involuntarily, muscles jerking, a strange cry aching from her throat as blood pools beneath her. Arya draws Needle up to Cersei’s throat and shunts the blade gently across the surface of her chin, forcing the woman to look up, and finally Arya has those dark brown eyes locked with her own.

“They say a Lannister always pays their debts,” she tells Cersei. “You ran up rather a large one, didn’t you?”

She leans forward at once, lunging, and slices Needle downwards, directly into Cersei’s heart. A final scream is choked with blood, but the eyes are still moving as Arya Stark leans into Cersei, her lips grazing the woman’s ear as she whispers, “The Starks send our regards.” A vicious twinkle in her eye extends through her body; energy exploding through her arms as she pulls Needle cleanly across Cersei’s throat, the final blow before blood erupts from the dead queen’s throat. “The North remembers.”

*

“I have surrendered,” Jaime says. “You can’t harm me. To do so would to be tyrannical.”

“Perhaps,” Daenerys Targaryen says coolly, stepping down from Drogon’s back; the dragon’s enormous body has shielded them completely from the shouting and slashing on the other side of the chamber. “But I didn’t think allies needed to surrender to their Queen. Unless you were never an ally, after all?”

“I came back for Cersei.”

“You broke free from capture – or someone else let you free,” Dany says, realising the part Tyrion probably played in this scheme.

“Let us escape alive, please,” Jaime says. “She is pregnant with my child. Please, let us flee, and we will exile ourselves and never set foot in Westeros again.”

Dany doesn’t feel the savage justice of the moment the way she might have. All she can see is the shimmering salt water in Jaime’s eyes, a shimmer she knows she will never see from Jon.

“She is your sister,” she states blankly. “And yet, you love her. You really love her.”

Jaime doesn’t hang his head, but lifts it slightly, facing the judgment. “I always have.”

“People know, you know,” Dany says, advancing on him slightly. “People talk about it behind your backs. You are a famous joke, not only in Westeros, but in Essos, too – the man who fathered three children with his sister – who was a queen, and a king’s wife, not your own.”

Jaime keeps his head up, though he looks diminished by the effort. Blood is dripping off the stone seat and onto the floor. “They didn’t just say it behind our backs,” he says. “And I don’t care anymore. I love Cersei. I love her.”

His words, the warmth with which he proclaims them with ragged breaths, slice through Dany like a shard of ice. She will take the Iron Throne, but she will never have what Cersei had in Jaime.

“I don’t have a love like yours,” she says, pacing and looking through the massive hole she made in the wall, sunlight streaming through it. “In fact, I never will. So why should I let you be with your love now, in your last moments and in hers, when I can’t be with mine.” A scowl of vengeance roars like a lion throughout her. “Besides, perhaps I was misguided all along. My quarrel has never really been with Cersei, after all. It is with you, Kingslayer.”

*

The most unlikely of teams, their blades flash in unison, bouncing off the armour that is now melded with their quarry’s eerie blue skin.

“Why – won’t – you – fucking – die?!” Sandor Clegane screams, driving a sword into his brother’s heart for a second time, only to watch the monster pull it out like it were a splinter, and hurl Sandor backwards, almost tripping over Cersei’s body.

“He survived dragon fire,” Arya cries, parrying the Mountain’s sword with Needle. “A blade can’t kill him.”

The Hound’s weary eyes flash as the knowledge finally comes to him, and he knows he can do it, because the molten armour has made his brother even slower than before, and he is scorched by fire and clumsier than he once was.

And he knows he can do it because he now knows he is not trying to kill the Mountain.

Sandor screams, and while Arya distracts Ser Gregor’s hands and face, he dives to the floor, and slices his blade through the tendons of first his brother’s right foot, then the left. Ser Gregor is falling, a landslide of a man, before he can react; he is still on his back as Sandor severs the feet completely, blade cutting through flesh and tendon and bone until there are two disembodied feet on the floor.

Blood doesn’t spurt out in a geyser; it oozes and bubbles, a semi-solid acid slowly leaking from the sawn-off ankles.

The Mountain is not hurt; but he cannot stand or balance.

And then, they circle him, Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane, and they take no mercy on the monster before them as they separate first his hands from his wrists, hacking through until the hands fall, dead and stiff, to the floor, then they separate his arms from the shoulders, and finally the head, flailing and roaring, from the neck.

The disembodied head still roars, and Ser Gregor Clegane continues to live, but he is no longer an animal but a tree; alive but empty and impotent; an observer for a world and a brother that will now live without him, free.

*

“My father trusted you,” Dany says, facing Jaime Lannister squarely. “You were his hand. You betrayed him.”

“I had no choice!” Jaime protests. “Everyone except him understood that is Reign was over. He was a danger to the Realm, to everyone in King’s Landing – he was the Mad King. I saved lives that day. I would do it again if I had to. Perhaps,” he says, “someone will do that to you, since you seem to be following in your father’s footsteps.”

Jaime hears the scream, then, and he knows. His eyes begin to leak as he calls his sister’s name and nobody responds from the other side of the dragon’s enormous hide.

Dany scowls at him, her mind processing what the scream meant. “I never knew my father, but I know I am nothing like him,” she says proudly. “I am not a Mad Queen. I am here for justice. I am here to break the wheel – and you may be the final spoke to break.”

“I saved lives that day,” Jaime sobs, lowering his face as tears pool with the darkening blood.

“You didn’t save my father’s, or my mother’s, or my brother’s, or mine,” Dany says slowly, deliberately. “You made me an orphan. You made me grow up in exile. You caused me a life of unbearable suffering, revenge and loss. My tortured, wretched life is all thanks to you – you set this wheel spinning, and now, today, the wheel is broken for good. I will never let this happen again.”

Jaime opens his mouth to say his final words, but Daenerys interrupts him with one of her own.

“Dracarys.”

The flames envelope the man who murdered her father, and the Kingslayer is dead.

The fire feels like soft warmth on Dany’s skin.

*

A silver-haired, violet-eyed woman strides through a sunlit stone chamber in an ultramarine dress. Her name is Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, first of her name, the Unburnt, Breaker of Chains and Mother of Dragons.

And now, rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.

She walks, almost as in a dream, towards the Iron Throne: the seat forged by the swords of her ancestor’s fallen enemies. She has never seen it before, but it pulls her towards it, magnetic, and as she walks tears spring to her eyes. Her trials and suffering over so many years flash before her eyes, from the exile in Pentos to the Dothraki Sea, the journey across the Red Waste, the dangers of Qarth, her rise to power in Slaver’s Bay, as Queen of Meereen, her fleet finally sailing west to claim Dragonstone as she made alliances with the lords and ladies of Westeros.

As she closes in on the throne, faces and bodies appearing before her as if they are standing beside her in the room as she passes. Illyrio Mopatis, who sheltered her and her brother in Pentos; Viserys, her foolish brother; Khal Drogo, inclining his head; there is Daario Naharis, Hizdahr zo Loraq, Ser Jorah, Missandei of Naath, her two fallen dragons, her children … all of them now memories of a journey that has finally come to an end.

Dany reaches the Iron Throne, touches the blades that form its back, then sits upon it, a savage smile on her face as the cold metal presses through her dress.

Drogon takes to the skies through the gaping hole in the wall of the Red Keep, breathing fire into the air in glorious triumph.

*

They have seen each other during the dying light of that afternoon, but always at a distance, and always something more important was happening. Prisoners were taken: the defeated Lannister Army. Soldiers were celebrating – from the Unsullied, to the Dothraki, to the Northmen. The people of King’s Landing were emerging from their houses and hiding places, blinking in the red rays of sunset, like they could scarcely believe they had survived.

And there was always someone else to tend to, to bark orders at, to advise, to help. Grey Worm, Ser Davos, Tyrion, Arya, the Hound, captains and soldiers, maids who helped her bathe in the Queen’s quarters in the Red Keep, washing the soot and dirt from her pale skin.

But eventually, Jon Snow finds her, just before the dinner feast, when noise emanates throughout the castle.

Dany is sitting on the Iron Throne when Jon enters.

“Your Grace,” he says tentatively, like she is a creature he has never encountered before.

Dany smiles sadly and beckons him in. “Even after that night we spent at Winterfell, during the Battle of Ice and Fire, I still don’t think I’ve ever felt as cold as I do now. All my life I’ve wanted to sit in this room, and all I notice now is how cold it is. It is strange how cold this room feels, after having been in Winterfell. How empty this big room is. I can hear my voice echo, but never any laughter. How empty.”

“You committed a war crime. The bells had rung. Cersei had surrendered.”

“Cersei would never truly surrender. The only way peace would ever occur is if she was dead. I had to see to that.”

“But it’s wrong.”

“It was wrong for Jaime Lannister to murder my father. He did it for what he saw as the greater good. I did what I did for the same reason. You don’t have to agree with me. I am Queen of the Seven Kingdoms now. I don’t need your permission. But I do need to know why.”

“Why what?”

“Why you couldn’t be with me.”

“You know why. If I could un-know it, if I could undo it, I would. But knowing what I know … I’m sorry, Dany. I’m so sorry.”

“Cersei and Jaime Lannister made it work. People whispered about them behind their back, the whole world did, but they died loving each other.”

She pauses, seeing Jon’s awkwardness.

“But I know now it’s impossible. I can force a claim to the throne. I have a dragon. People are forced to respect me out of fear. But I cannot force you to love me in return. I will die one day, and I will know in that moment that I am worth less than Cersei Lannister, because I will die without knowing how it feels for the man I love to love me back.”

“I have loved, and I have lost, and I have died and survived it,” Jon replies neutrally. “More is survivable than you think.”

“But now, what to do with you, Aegon of houses Targaryen and Stark?”

“I told you, I don’t want it,” Jon says. “I don’t want any of it. Not King of the Realm. Not King of the North. None of it.”

“Then I shall grant you your wish,” Dany says. “But to be sure, I will send you somewhere far away where I know you will never leave; you will never be permitted to set foot in Kings Landing again, because to see you with another woman – to see her smile, or the light in my grandnephew’s eyes as she nurses him – would be enough to drive this queen as mad as her father, and that would be a terrible thing for the people to suffer especially with a dragon at her disposal. You will go to the Wall. You will be head of the nights watch. You will guard the Realm from any new threats should they arise again. You will spend your life serving and protecting me.”

Jon swallows. “Yes, your Grace.”

*

Targaryen banners are unfurled throughout the Red Keep and the throne room. Lords and ladies, knights and nobles and peasants are gathered from across the lands. All areas are represented.

Daenerys is crowned Queen at her coronation. She speaks to her subjects. “Twenty years ago, a great injustice was done. This injustice has been righted today. A Targaryen heir sits on the Iron Throne. The Realm is at peace.”

She brings in Drogon.

The crowd cries out, panicked at what might be about to occur.

Dany says “dracarys” and Drogon destroys the Iron Throne in a blast of fire, melts it into molten steel before the watching crowd.

“The former kingdom was built upon the weapons of enemies. I will craft a new Throne using the swords of allies of the Seven Kingdoms. My rule will be based on cooperation among all men, an agreement of the Seven Kingdoms to exist in peace, in exchange for the protection of the Dragon, and for the Dragon to leave them to run their kingdoms in peace.

Each of the Lords of each Kingdom lay down a sword to swear their allegiance.

Bells ring. Peace reigns.

*

A small council meeting is held. Tyrion is hand of the queen. Sam is Grand Maester. Ser Davos, Bronn, Brienne and Grey Worm are all on the council too. Tyrion presides over the meeting in classic Tyrion fashion. There is rebuilding to be done. Podrick is there too, as a squire for Dany, and we have the sense that she is using him as her new boytoy but there is no affection there.

Dany leaves the meeting and is called away by a minder to attend to something.

*

Arya is at the wharf in Blackwater Bay. She is about to step onto a ship when she sees the Hound drinking at a pub.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t think there is anything left to do. I was supposed to die and I didn’t. Nothing left here to raise my sword against, and raising a sword is why I exist. I figure I drink and fuck as hard as I can until one of those kills me instead. What are you doing?”

“What’s West of Westeros?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing West of Westeros. That’s why we call it Westeros. Otherwise it would be called fucking Middle-os, you daft bitch.”

Arya grins. “There’s a Stark ship setting sail today. I’m going to find what’s beyond the edge of the maps. There could be anything there.”

“What a stupid fucking idea.”

“I don’t belong in Westeros anymore. There’s nothing for a person like me here anymore. You could join me. A swordsman like you could be an asset against the unknown.”

“I’d get to raise my sword again.”

“I can’t imagine we’ll go unchallenged.”

“Will you keep your cunt mouth shut or will it be flapping open the whole fucking time?”

Arya grins.

*

In Winterfell, Sansa sits with her dire wolf overlooking Bran in the tree area, who is piling into a cart.

She goes outside. “Where are you going now?”

Bran says, “I’m needed in Old Town. They don’t know it yet, but they need me. I need to tell them what I know.”

“And what is that?” Sansa asks.

Bran looks at her with disinterest. “There is a surviving Targaryen who has been groomed to be king.”

“Jon doesn’t want it. He’s been banished to the Nights Watch now anyway.”

“Not Jon. Another. A Targaryen who would have claim to the throne; who was hidden away in Essos. Now that his protectors have seen Westeros accept a Targaryen regent, steps may be set in motion.” He pauses. “I must be in Old Town to ensure they aren’t set in motion.” He pauses again. “I won’t be coming back.”

Sansa nods and hugs him. “You aren’t my brother, are you?”

“Not really, no.”

Bran leaves in his cart. Sansa watches him with a tear in her eye. After he leaves, she goes into the crypt. She visits the graves of her father, Eddard, the mother, Catelyn, her brother Robb and his wife, Theon, Rickon. She thinks of Bran, Jon, Arya. All gone. She is the last of the Starks.

Gendry knocks on her door. “We have arrived from Highgarden.”

Sansa smiles. The last of the Starks for now.

*

Jon arrives at the Night’s Watch, Castle Black. Greeted by Tormund and the others there. Pats his Dire Wolf, Ghost.

*

Arya and the Hound sail past the Iron Islands, into the unknown in the West, a smile on her face.

*

Sansa reigns in Winterfell, Gendry by her side.

*

Bran’s cart arrives in Oldtown. He draws his cloak around himself and gets on with business.

*

Dany meets with a peasant woman who wants to appeal to her about a business matter. Then she is told that they were almost killed by Cersei Lannister’s army until Dany and Drogon arrived and blasted through the walls of the city. She says thank you.

Dany feels surprised to have any reaction other than fear. She is immensely touched. Never will she know the love she wants – and she knows that for sure, because her love will never return to her – but that she could give love, and receive thanks … This might be enough to sustain her.

She climbs aboard Drogon. Now that she knows peace, where might they go to find silence? She takes to his back and they fly for a long way; over King’s Landing; across Blackwater Bay; to Dragonstone, the ancestral home.

There were others once, like her, in a place called Valyria. Jorah told her. Perhaps there can be eggs found there. New dragons. New children. New life.

“Drogon, let’s take a detour,” Dany says, feeling her robes crinkle with icicles as they fly higher, into the stratosphere, together.

Fin.

On the brink of The Brink

G’day crew,

My second novel THE BRINK is published tomorrow and I am so excited for it.

I had intended to write a more comprehensive blog post to herald this book’s release, but I’ve been swamped for a long time.

I was doing a podcast interview earlier today when I mentioned how I recall the specific moment my career exploded. I was standing in the art exhibition space in building 16 at Edith Cowan University’s Mount Lawley Campus in mid-2018, back when I worked there, and while setting up for the event, I glanced at my phone and saw an email from Griffith Review.

The email stated that my novella “Poster Boy” had been declared one of the five winners of the 2018 Novella Project competition, and would be published in Griffith Review #62 later that year.

I remember being numb with shock, disbelief, excitement, anticipation. It had been a long slog to get any of my work recognised. And this email came a few months after a phone call with my then-agent, who advised me that the big 5 publishers in Australia had all rejected the full-length novel manuscript we were pitching to them, titled INVISIBLE BOYS.

I remember taking that phone call in March 2018, a few minutes before teaching an Academic Writing tutorial at ECU for their University Preparation Course. My heart sank through the floor. I remember saying to my agent, “So, is INVISIBLE BOYS dead in the water, or what?” And while she assured me it wasn’t, I feared my career was over before it had begun, and had to go on to cheerily teach a class about how to write an academic essay while inside I felt devastated that I would never make it as an author.

So, just a few months later, when I stood in that white-walled art exhibition space and saw the email from Griffith Review, I was ecstatic. Something was happening! Something I wrote was getting published in a really respected journal. I remember how my colleagues – Sarah, Shad and Julie – celebrated with me, supported me, and encouraged me. It was an awesome win after a long few months of failure.

When “Poster Boy” got published, I was given a few thousand dollars of prize money. It was the first time I’d made any real money off my writing, ever. And I remember that moment as the start of an avalanche, because a few weeks later, INVISIBLE BOYS was shortlisted for the Hungerford, and then it won, and then things went KABOOM .

I mention the mid-2018 “Poster Boy” moment because it was from that moment that my career kicked up a gear and I felt overwhelmed by it for the longest time. The world became a gigantic, non-stop hustle. The INVISIBLE BOYS tour was awesome. But it also made me dissociate the fuck out of my body almost every gig, because it was just so intense to revisit that trauma over and over.

It wasn’t until late 2021 that I started to feel like I had any level of control over my life again. I started learning how to say no to things, how to put up boundaries, how to protect and defend my writing time and my time to just be a human being. I learned how to define myself beyond being a writer. I found a lot of peace and comfort in weightlifting, and cardio, and playing social footy, and working as a labourer again.

I mention this because my headspace, now, today, the day before my second novel comes out, is so wildly different to how I felt the first time.

When INVISIBLE BOYS came out I felt like a newborn foal taking his first shaky steps only to cop a torrent of fire-hose-pressure water to the face. I felt knocked off my feet. I had only just worked out who I was, and then the whole world seemed to just COME AT ME, with its misreadings and expectations and projections. Ahh, it was amazing and horrific in equal measure.

Tonight, I am sitting at my desk with a can of bourbon, pausing for just a minute to reflect on how I feel before THE BRINK goes out into the world.

I am really happy to say that this time around, I don’t feel overwhelmed. I don’t feel like a nervous foal finding his feet in a dangerous environment.

I feel like a goddamn wild stallion.

This time around, I know who I am. I know I am not everyone’s cuppa tea and I don’t give a shit. I’ve happily set up a whole tour where I can put myself out there, show up as I really am, meet a whole heap of you guys, and then promptly retreat back to my cave to take care of myself once it’s done.

This headspace was hard-won. I pushed back against the expectation that authors, gay YA authors specifically, have some duty to be good role models (fuck that – it’s unhealthy!) and I rejected the projection of literary class that was foisted upon me in the public eye by proudly accepting my status as a bogan on season seven of the ABC’s TV show YOU CAN’T ASK THAT (I’m not kidding – the moment that episode aired I felt this bulk sense of relief that I didn’t have to pretend to be anything other than a Gero dero anymore).

I really can’t overstate how much these moves have made a difference to how settled I feel.

I don’t feel any pressure to be perfect or well-behaved or anybody’s role model.

I don’t feel the weight of being an award-winning literary author.

I feel more comfortable showing up as myself now. The good parts and the bad.

It makes the eve of a new book release far less daunting than last time. Instead of this sense of dread and terror, I feel excited.

I have written a book I am proud of. It is, as John Mellencamp would say, the best that I could do. It is a book about self-discovery and self-love. It is about wrestling your own identity back from who the world wants and expects you to be – something I have spent the past few years trying to do. It is, I hope, an ode to self-empowerment and finding a way to be yourself, even if the climate around you has always made you feel like shit. It is about Leonardo, the shy, terrified boy who wants to be tough; and Kaiya, the high-achiever who wants to be bad; and Mason, the footy jock who wants to be with his best mate, Jared. It is about burning your fake persona down to find who you really are – who you really wanna be.

It’s also a kickarse thriller (well, I reckon it is). I hope youse like it.

With all the edits to THE BRINK obviously now completed, and my third book draft completed and sent off to my agent and publisher earlier today, I am finally able to get back to blogging and sharing more writing and reflections with you guys again – just in time for my tour.

You can find out more about THE BRINK here.

And if you wanna come see me on tour, here’s the details of where you can find me in the coming weeks.

Can’t wait to connect with youse again as I hit the road across Australia over the coming months – seeyas out there!

Holden

How A Moment of New Year’s Rage Made Me Set Goals Every Year

This time last year, I blogged about 2020 being a shitshow, but that it seemed like ‘the tide was turning’ for 2021.

Fucken woops.

For many, 2021 was as bad as, or worse than, 2020. And it looks like 2022 is heading for a rocky start, too.

It might seem weird to do things like goal-setting, or writing, when the world is a tyre fire.

But doom scrolling on Twitter isn’t useful: it’s a huge sapper of creative energy and is best avoided. The world’s fortunes are beyond my control.

What is within my control is what I’m going to spend my energy on this year.

I find solace in escaping into writing, and setting goals at the start of a new year always motivates me to work hard.

Before I evaluate my 2021 goals and set my 2022 goals, though, I want to touch on a couple of things around goals.

Earlier this week, an emerging writer contacted me for advice. He felt plagued by self-doubt (as we all do) and said that since I seem big on setting and reaching goals, he wanted to know how I keep focused.

We chatted about it, but his observation validated why I do these blogs each year, because there was a time when people in my life had no concept that I actually worked hard.

Years ago, I remember sharing some good career news with a family member, and he replied dismissively, ‘Oh yeah, you’re always just so lucky. Shit just falls in your lap.’

I wanted to shout at him, because this was such a skewed perspective. That opportunity did not just fall in my lap: I had to get a degree, then an Honours year, then achieve a bunch of stuff, then spend years networking, proving my worth and actually asking for it.

I outlined this to him, but he just shrugged like ‘sure, whatever man’.

His mind was made up: to him, I led an unfairly charmed life, and my success was due to me being more cosmically fortunate than him. Dumb luck.

I think this is really misunderstood about artists. Our successes seem to happen miraculously, but there is so much unseen, unpaid work behind all of it. For every publication, years of toiling at a desk, full of self-doubt, with zero promise of any payoff.

Creative success is an iceberg: people see the single achievement, but not the years of ruthless determination and work that made it happen.

So, when emerging writers ask for my advice, I always say you need to first set clear goals: what are you trying to achieve, and by when.

Next, you need to actively block out the time into your calendar, every week of the coming year, to allocate towards working at each goal.

Your goals need to dictate what your daily life looks like.

I don’t think this can be taught. There just needs to be a moment where the desire to achieve your goals overwhelms your fear and inertia to act on them.

For me, that moment was New Year’s Day 2014.

That day, the dawning of yet another year as an unsuccessful wannabe writer finally broke me.

I felt like a supreme failure; all talk. Since the age of seven I’d been saying I wanted to be an author, and yet here I was at twenty-five with nothing to show for it. Where’s your book, loser?

I had a moment where I got so angry, I just lost my shit. I grabbed an empty notebook and cut sick, ranting and raging in a stream-of-consciousness style, page after page.

Me, drunk, in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2014.

What emerged in those pages was that I was fed up investing all my time, money and energy into stuff that only took me further away from where I actually wanted to be in life.

So, New Year’s Day 2014 was the moment I furiously decided to burn all of that stuff down.

I renounced trying to have a good full-time job and career.

I renounced trying to earn lots of money.

I renounced academic validation.

Just now, I dug that particular notebook out of my filing cabinet. It’s a Game of Thrones notebook with an image of the Iron Throne on its cover. Among the many hectic, rage-fuelled, ink-scrawled pages that day in January 2014, I wrote:

I ain’t no good little straight A’s boy getting an office job to make everyone proud and happy.

I am a fucking artist and I am gonna sing for my supper forevermore.

I will make my life happen.

That moment was when my whole life changed, and I became a dedicated artist.

I started calling myself a writer, got working on my first manuscript, and set a goal to complete it by the end of that year.

Since I had a full-time job at the time, my only chance to achieve that goal was to use my nights and weekends. I had to sacrifice all my spare time. I used to fill my down-time with studying various qualifications and drinking and socialising with work mates, uni mates, school mates.

I sacrificed that. No more studying. No more socialising.

I only had so many hours to use per week. If I wanted to avoid being in the exact same place come January 2015, I had to actively make changes in my life.

I dedicated myself to the hustle: evenings and weekends became writing time.

Some shit I wrote on my arm in early 2014 to remind myself what I was giving up and what I really wanted. May have been drunk at the time. 😐

I didn’t miss my old pursuits. Working hard at my dream was a joyous end in and of itself. Even if I never got a book published, I felt alive and happy.

I’m sharing this because whenever someone asks me about goals and discipline as a writer, I feel I can only do so much in the way of advice.

I reckon it’s up to each individual artist to have their ‘fuck everything’ moment, where they get so mad they decide to actually do something about it.

If you’re struggling with this, I encourage you to lean into that moment and embrace it.

Not everyone is the same, of course, but it worked for me.

I spent 2014 working on my first draft, and completed that manuscript in January 2015. Finally, a new year rolled around where I felt satisfied. I wasn’t published, I had no accolades and still felt like a failure – but I was working my arse off to change it.

I was unsuccessful but trying, and that made all the difference.

I have kept this approach ever since, which has helped propel me year after year to keep chasing what I want.

I did the same in 2021, setting ten goals for the year: four writing goals and six personal life goals.

Here’s how I went:

2021 GOALS IN REVIEW

WRITING

1. Sign a publishing contract for Book 2 and do further edits on it.

This finally panned out in 2021. I signed a two-book deal with Text Publishing for my second novel, THE BRINK (out August 2022) and my third novel (out late 2023, probably). Big thanks to my agent, Gaby Naher of Left Bank Literary, for securing me an incredible advance that meant I could be a full-time writer – a lifelong dream come true.

On the editing front, I spent the year doing edits and the next draft is due back to my publisher at the end of January.

RESULT: SUCCESS.

2. Complete the second draft of Book 3.

This didn’t happen. I scheduled September and October to smash a second draft, but some crap personal life stuff happened and blew this to pieces. I had a shit few months and couldn’t write anything real. I wrote a Pokémon fanfiction novella to distract myself instead.

My third novel is due to my publisher this April, so I’ll work on it in the first half of this year.

RESULT: FAIL.

3. Progress the TV Series adaptation of Invisible Boys.

This project moved forward at speed in 2021. We got funding from Screen Australia, held a couple of writers’ rooms, got the first episode script written (holy shit, it’s awesome!), and in November 2021, we won a grant from streaming service Stan and Screenwest to develop the show into a ten-episode TV series.

TV development is a long process, but the next steps during 2022 will be to seek more funding to make this actually happen. Stay tuned.

RESULT: SUCCESS.

The Invisible Boys TV series has received development funding from streaming service Stan Australia, as well as Screenwest and Screen Australia. L-R: Producer Tania Chambers OAM, Invisible Boys book cover, director Nicholas Verso.

4. Get 1 piece of short fiction OR journalism commissioned, contracted or published.

This one worked out. My short story, Rappaccini’s Son, was published in the book HOMETOWN HAUNTS (Wakefield Press, 2021). A second piece, a short memoir titled Territory, was accepted for publication in the forthcoming book GROWING UP IN COUNTRY AUSTRALIA (Black Inc, March 2022).

I was also commissioned by WAToday to write a media article about gay conversion therapy, which was widely shared on social media and led to me fronting other press and radio opportunities to speak on the issue.

RESULT: SUCCESS.

LIFE

5. Maintain an average of 5 workouts per week (between weightlifting, footy and cardio).

I managed to maintain this all year and actually exceeded it. On average per week, I did four weights sessions and two cardio sessions (footy training and footy game) – six workouts total. I pushed myself to stick to this even when my nutrition was bad or my energy levels were low, and I’m glad of that.

RESULT: SUCCESS.

6. Get nutrition sorted to shred up and reach goal weight of 75 kg by 30 June 2021.

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. I failed this badly. I had a highly-disciplined first three months: by early April, I was down from 87 kg to 77.7kg, and it seemed I would achieve this. But my mental health nosedived in April, and I ate and drank heavily for months. By June, I was back at 86kg again, and by the end of December, I was still 84kg.

RESULT: FAIL.

7.Get first tattoos in 2021.

This didn’t happen either, and I’m getting mad about it. I wanna get my ink when I’m feeling good about my physique, so this goal is tied to me sorting out my nutrition. I also need money to spare for tattoos, which I currently don’t have as I’m living off advance and royalty income and need to conserve funds. Urgh.

RESULT: FAIL.

8. Train harder at footy and grow more confident and useful to the team in games.

I worked hard at this. For the first three months, I trained with an amateur AFL team, ECU Jets, in addition to the Perth Hornets AFL 9s team. I’ve always wanted to give full-contact AFL a crack. I enjoyed the training, but I felt badly out of my depth in terms of skills – sometimes, embarrassingly so – and I wasn’t able to make it work. The coaches and players welcomed me even knowing I’m a gay bloke, though, and I liked that. But combined with my mental health nosedive and years of crap self-esteem around sports, it became too much. I pulled out to focus on just AFL 9s.

I did become more useful to the team, and I was really proud when the Hornets coach awarded me the trophy for Most Improved Player last month. It’s the first time in my life I’ve won a trophy for anything sports-related. I’ll never be a natural athlete, but I was chuffed to be recognised for putting in the hard work. It’s hard to suck at something, in front of other people, week after week, but still show up and keep trying. I am proud of that.

RESULT: SUCCESS.

Receiving the Perth Hornets trophy for Most Improved Player in the Spring 2021 season was a huge highlight.

9. Do at least one guitar lesson.

After I failed my 2020 goal of doing a whole term of ten guitar lessons, I thought this was a nice, low-ball goal. Lol, nup. I didn’t fit in a single guitar lesson in 2021.

RESULT: FAIL.

10. Do some fun shit for pure enjoyment.

This was an odd goal, but I wanted to ensure I did stuff for fun. I went quad biking with mates, jumped on massive trampolines, went to concerts and went on a footy trip to Lancelin.

RESULT: SUCCESS.

Overall, I hit six out of ten goals in 2021. Not bad, not bad. I don’t stress about failed goals; they just kept me refocus on what I do and don’t want to keep trying at the following year.

My goals for 2021 look similar, but I’m simplifying down to just eight goals instead of ten. Four writing goals, four life goals:

2022 GOALS

1. Complete the final edits for The Brink and promote its release.
2. Complete the second draft of Book 3.
3. Work on the TV Series adaptation of Invisible Boys.
4. Get one piece of short fiction OR journalism commissioned, contracted or published.
5. Maintain an average of 5 workouts per week (between weights, footy and cardio).
6. Get nutrition sorted to shred up and reach goal weight of 75 kg by 30 April 2022.
7. Get first tattoos in first half of 2022.
8. Train harder at footy and grow more confident.

The first goal is massive, because the front end of the year will be preparing The Brink for release, and August onwards will be promoting it heavily with media and events. It will be hard to fit anything extra into 2022.

Because of this, stuff like guitar and fun shit will go on the backburner for a less hectic year. This year I’d love to go quad biking, go-karting or get out on a dirt bike, but I won’t set it as a goal. I’ve also left off full-contact AFL: I’m still interested, but it’s on the backburner.

I have a couple of more personal goals, too. I’m not sure if I’ll share them later or not, but I’ll be working on these quietly in my own time this year.

I’m keen to get started on smashing my goals now. The main joy for me is not necessarily being able to write ‘success’ or ‘fail’ at the end of each year, but just enjoying the dogged gut-fire I get that makes me work at each goal, week in, week out. It’s the most fun and rewarding way I know how to live.

In that notebook from 2014, I found a quote I wrote down from Paulo Coelho that I want to share here, to finish up. Coelho says, ‘Do something instead of killing time. Because time is killing you.’ I’ve always found that quote brutally motivational. I hope you might, too.

However you plan to spend your 2022, and whatever your own goals are, here’s to a year that, hopefully, has some good surprises in store for us all.

Holden

I Am Scared of Writing My Third Book

When I was a kid, I used to wonder what took authors so long between books.

I couldn’t fathom why Emily Rodda or Geoffrey McSkimming or JK Rowling would take years to produce the next instalment of Rowan of Rin or Cairo Jim or Harry Potter. What were they doing – swanning around their writery mansions, swimming in backlit infinity pools, drinking cocktails? I didn’t understand how, if you had a publisher, and money, and time, it could take more than a few months to churn out a new book.

Man, am I eating my words now I’m working on my third book. This shit is nowhere near as easy as it looked.

The conditions I’m working in are bloody awesome though, and I actually haven’t blogged about them since they all transpired.

In summary, early this year I signed a two-book deal with the legends at Text Publishing. I was so stoked. My agent, Gaby Naher at Left Bank Literary, pitched The Brink and there was a bidding war between two publishers, which had me practically pissing my pants with excitement. Both publishers were amazing and I could’ve happily signed with either (a good problem to have), but the incredible team at Text were the right fit at this stage in my career and I was so heartened that they really understood my voice and who I am as an author, and wanted to nurture it.

More pragmatically, they gave me a bunch of CASH. Yeahhhh boi! The advance was very nice, and meant I could make a go at being a full-time author, which has been my dream since I was seven. It was an epic moment of arrival.

I got to work fast: I had to deliver the structural edits of my second novel, The Brink, by the end of August this year (the book will be published August 2022). With no day job to distract me, I worked quicker than expected, submitting the edited manuscript to my publisher by mid-July – six weeks ahead of deadline.

At the time, I think I knew there was a rumbling unease in me, because I made sure to labour the point to my publisher: please don’t get used to me being early with deadlines.

On one hand, it’s just solid business sense to under-promise and over-deliver. Plus, deadlines in the publishing world are (tacitly) made to be broken, and most of us realise that as we get a little further into our career. As Douglas Adams famously said, ‘I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.’

That said, I had no intention of not sticking to my next deadline – but I had the vibe it wasn’t going to be easy.

After finishing The Brink, I was meant to go straight to work on Book Three, a contemporary novel for adults. I’d already completed the first draft in May 2020, so it was a case of reworking the story into a stronger second draft, to be delivered to my publisher by the end of November this year.

But once I was done with The Brink, I felt immediate resistance to my third book.

At the time, I rationalised it as me needing to take a bit of breather. After all, The Brink is really fucken intense.

So, since I was well ahead of schedule, I decided to take a short break.

I sat with my master list of planned creative projects and thought about which project I could tinker with as a light distraction. I could play with ideas for my fourth book – the intended sequel to Invisible Boys. I could return to a fantasy novel. I could add to my nearly-complete short fiction collection.

But none of those ideas appealed, because they all required emotional investment: writing them meant dredging up feelings.

Ah, there was the rub: I did not want to deal with real shit.

Once I understood that, my path forward was clearer. I started a new, fun project I have no intention of finding a traditional publishing home for: an eight-part novella. I am writing it purely for the love of writing and the world it’s set in.

That worked. For a few weeks, I wrote fast and had fun. I laughed. My main character is a smart arse. I like his voice and how he’s a brat.

But once I reached chapter six, I slowed down, then ground to a halt. I didn’t want to finish the novella, cos once it was complete, I’d have no excuse to not work on Book Three.

This is the nebulous shadow that’s been lurking in the corner of my eye, a truth I’ve been avoiding: I am very scared of writing my third book.

And it’s not for the reasons I might’ve expected.

It’s not the weight of expectation of writing a follow-up to a successful debut (I already went through that shit with The Brink – and that pressure was not fun).

It’s not about the shift to writing for an adult audience (most of my readers are adults anyway, and those who are older teens will be adults by the time this third book is published).

It’s not even about the premise of the story itself (I reckon it’s killer and people will love it – I hope so, anyway!).

No, the fear is the real shit I am going to have to deal with in order to write it.

The only way writing a novel works for me is if it is a vehicle to tell my own truths. The end product is made-up characters and an invented plot for others to connect with, but the seed from which a book germinates is always my own lived experience.

Invisible Boys was an exorcism of the teenage shame that left me psychically pockmarked; The Brink is a coming-of-age novel about being a misfit and what it means to want to burn yourself down.

The difference with these first two books was how much distance I had from them. The Invisible Boys are sixteen; the protagonists in The Brink are eighteen. I’m thirty-three now and although I am intimately present in both books, and writing them changed me massively, they are tackling older wounds from my younger years.

My third book is different. It’s about where I am now. I’m reflecting on what has happened since the Saturn Return of my twenty-ninth birthday. This book is about identity and relationships, conformity and individuality, acceptance and abandonment, abuse and escape, liberation and fallout. It is about what happens after the dust has settled.

During these past four years, there have been so many public highs, career-wise, that I know many people’s perception of my life is that it is charmed and that I am lucky. Professionally, they are probably correct.

But there have been many enormous unseen lows in my personal life which has made for such a schizophrenic four years in that regard. Almost every time I was being applauded or congratulated for something going well in my career, I was privately devastated by stuff going on in my personal life.

The truth of the last four years is that they have simultaneously been the best and worst four years of my life.

To write this third book, I have to take my blinders off and look at this time, and where I have landed now, with no illusions. I am going to have to write in real time about my present condition and ask myself: Where the fuck am I now? Who the fuck am I now? What the fuck am I even doing here? When I’m not telling my social media followers that I’m stoked and pumped about this achievement or that – how do I really feel?

Despite everything I’ve learned about making space for all emotions, this year I’ve still fallen into the trap of trying to keep a lid on how shit I’m feeling. Out of some sense of being grateful for what I have, or not wanting to seem negative, or not being an artist having an existential meltdown while the world is a fucken tyre fire.

Anyway, that’s bollocks and I should’ve known better. The world remains a tyre fire whether or not I add my kerosene to the blaze.

And I know the only path to feeling happy personally is the same path to feeling fulfilled professionally: I need to be expressed in writing in an honest and unfettered way. No pretending I’m fine when I’m not. No bullshit.

That’s all it takes.

My resistance to Book Three was not without merit, though. One thing I’ve learned, repeatedly, is you can’t write about something if you’re still going through it.

I’ve been grieving a lot of stuff for four years – broken relationships, rejection from tribes I thought I belonged to – but I’ve been treading water, impotently pinballing between denial and anger. After finishing the first draft of this book, I segued into the bargaining stage of this colossal relational grief. I was scrabbling around a dark cave, blindly looking for an exit that did not exist. Maybe if I always do x, and I never do y, then I won’t need to lose this person or that person from my life.

The bleedingly obvious truth is that no healthy relationship requires you to contort and suppress yourself in order to be tolerated. There was never a way out of that cave. Separation and departure were inevitable if I was to survive intact.

My task now is not to escape the cave, but to accept that it is where I live, and learn to allow my eyes to adjust to the gloom.

Although painful, I’ve recently been able to end that onanistic bargaining stage, which means I’ve now landed squarely in depression.

At the moment, most days, I feel lonely, isolated, burnt-out and bleak. I am often empty; sometimes I feel like a husk. I remind myself this is temporary and a part of the process, and although it sucks big hairy donkey balls, I can cope with it and it won’t finish me off.

But it’s still not the place to write a friggin novel from.

So, I’ve decided to pause this book until I’m in the right headspace for it. I’ve negotiated with my (very understanding) publisher to deliver Book Three at the end of March 2022 instead.

I feel like I’ve become one of those authors taking a while between new projects, though rest assured I am not swanning around in my author mansion (mostly because I do not have a mansion; I live in the hood yo). I’ll still be hectic with workload – finishing my novella, copy edits for The Brink, all the other busy paid work of being an author, plus several unannounced projects underway.

But when I’m not working, instead of mining my deepest darkest for nuggets of literary gold, I’m gonna chill the fuck out, man. I’m gonna stop putting my brain and my heart under the artistic microscope for a couple of months. I’m gonna spend the rest of this year living, chilling, processing, doing normal humanoid stuff and letting myself naturally shuffle from depression to the final stage: acceptance.

I think this rest is an essential part of the creative cycle.

Next year, I’ll return to Book Three, and enjoy writing for what it is: an alchemical confession box, a lightning rod of catharsis and expression, and the best medicine I know.

Holden

LONDON (2006)

LONDON (2006)

London, baby: the time has come. Time to unplug and taste the mud. Time to decant my father’s blood. Ghosted concrete columns hold up the Hyde Park hostel. My Globe skate shoes stick to the Fosters-stained carpet, everything smells like Ramen, the chipped toilet door doesn’t lock. It’s perfect. My back is beaded in English summer sweat and unwashed Europeans consume me in the corridor. Come, they say. They know why I’m here. Their eyes are as hungry and wild as mine: one shared look and we all understand each other. We are here to live, not survive. We are here to party and die. Come along, come with us.

Of course I’ll come; why else am I in London?

The portal into our new world is the Queensway tube stop, bright posters for Lily Allen’s new single “Smile” beaming down on drab-faced office flops. We swagger into a street of three equidistant Tescos, the footpath an aroma of overcooked curries and compact car exhaust. We creep to Tony’s illegal late-night grog shop, lights off in case of a visit from the cops. We walk back singing and air-guitaring to The Darkness, yelling at gargoyles. We vodka and we beer in a giant concrete pipe; we soccer empty cans in the alley behind. We coronate each other’s heads with crumpled tins; on the lip of a dumpster we confess our sins. I am a teacher of deviance when I reveal the word ‘cunt’ to the Basque separatist kids, but a student when they teach me to make noise that riles the cops at 4am. Do you want to spend the night in jail? they say.

Of course I want to go to jail; why else am I in London?

Breathing in the hostel nightclub basement: shisha, hookah, weed. Agony leaks from my mouth in illicit plumes. The girls laugh and thrust their nipples in my face but I’m too busy trying to give his meat a taste. None of them know I spent the day in Covent Garden trawling for seed or that it was the first thing I ever did that made me feel free. How in that moment I was finally alive; and how in that moment I’ll remain until I die. I will forever be that boy trying to outrun himself on Tottenham Court Road. But that night, under flickering neon torus and throbbing DJ beats, I am weak. He’s Irish and Catholic and pale beef. He leaves the DF for the urinal and I bear-hug him while he pees. Do you want people to think you’re a homo? he says. Do you want people to think you’re a freak?

It’s all I fucking want, man; why else am I in London?

– Holden Sheppard

I Am Not The Role Model You’re Looking For

The first time it happened was two weeks into my book tour.

At the end of my author talk at a library in Perth, a well-intentioned (and very nice) audience member asked a question that got under my skin.  

She asked how I felt about becoming a role model.

I was immediately horrified by this question, and I told her so. I explained that being held up as a paragon of anything was anathema to me, and I wasn’t interested in that kind of public role.  

But, she insisted, my example would be of interest to gay people, to young men, to people in general. She had just heard me talk about sexuality and shame, masculinity and identity, mental health and self-care. She thought these were important conversations.

I agreed. These themes are central to my book and my work. But I didn’t want to be seen as exclusively positive and wholesome. That terrified me.

The promo cycle for the book rolled on, and the “role model” question came up again and again – and continues to.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a super nice thing to have said to you. And I learned to be more courteous in my response. I didn’t want to come across as a completely ungrateful prick. After all, not long ago a man like me would have been derided, scorned, barred from events at schools; go far back enough and I would’ve been locked up.

So, “role model” is hardly a slur. It just made me intensely uncomfortable.

Once I looked up the meaning of the term – a person who someone admires and whose behaviour they try to copy – I thought, okay, that’s not so bad. If a closeted teenage boy could look at me and see there are many different ways of being homosexual, and that gave him something tangible to shape himself in accordance with, okay, fine. If that helps someone, fine.

But the terror has never gone away, because most people don’t just want a ‘role model’.

They want a good role model.

That’s the term that makes me want to run away.

A ‘good’ person behaves well and conforms to the norms and customs of society, and, to be frank, the norms and customs of western culture in 2021 are fucking horrible.

Being a good artist, or a good gay man, in this era, carries particular behavioural expectations. I have learned this from interactions over the past few years, and even in just the past week. I am expected to speak and behave in a certain way; effuse a certain toxic positivity and purity; project my morality and politics publicly; call out and be outraged by any fellow artist or gay deemed even slightly problematic, while never being deemed problematic myself. I am tacitly expected to become an activist by default – not just in my art either, but in a vitriolic, showy way on social media.

My sense is that in 2021, to be in the public eye, to be a minority in the public eye no less, is to be held to an excessively high standard of performative virtuous behaviour, bordering on squeaky-clean, lemony-fresh perfection.

This is sick.

That pressure to be “good” for the public is deeply unhealthy. Nobody is perfect. Nobody is even that crash hot. It’s human nature to be kind of nice but also sometimes a piece of shit. To pretend otherwise feels so disingenuous. We are all made of dark and light, shadow and persona.

This is particularly true of artists. We are often damaged people. We have a tendency to be mentally ill, addicted, traumatized, sensitive, troubled. I am all of these things. Most artists and writers I know are, too, to varying degrees. This side of our selves often informs much of our art, and explains why we can be navel-gazing and temperamental at the best of times.  

And the thing is, this drive for perfect behaviour sets me off because I’ve been there. I am proof of why it’s a terrible idea to pretend you are pure; when you let the persona take over and try to perform virtue for the world, in order to obtain safety, love, popularity, relevance, group acceptance, validation, or whatever it is you’re seeking.

This happened when I was a teenager. I was a big homo. I nearly killed myself because I grew up in a place, time, culture, class, religion, and family setting where homosexuality was a shameful thing. But also, I kept that stuff – what the world around me had deemed evil and sinful – hidden and private. Externally, I tried to become the paragon of a moral Catholic boy in as many ways as I could: praying to God, writing to God, studying the bible, wearing my crucifix, being straight, parroting Catholic views like they would undo what was going on in my heart.

I worked hard, and constantly, to be a performatively virtuous person. It obliterated my own sense of identity, my own humanity, and drove me to the point of suicide.

Thankfully, I didn’t kill myself. I got help from an anonymous mental health service, which saved my life.

I then wrote a book about my experiences. And the underlying message of that book was not just that it’s okay to be gay (although – spoiler alert – it is).

The point is that trying to conform to the world’s estimations of what makes a good person is an unhealthy and self-destructive endeavour. If you give yourself over to what the world thinks of you, you will lose yourself.

In the acknowledgements of my book, I wrote about my troubled teenage self; how my key lesson from having gone through a suicidal level of self-loathing is that I am good enough as I am.

It feels like a dereliction of duty for me to not, then, defend this idea in public, as well as in my art. There is a vexing misunderstanding that the thing that nearly killed me was homophobia. It wasn’t.

What nearly killed me was shame.

It was shame, thrown by others, internalised within me. Shame for being human, for being myself, for not being perfect, for being slightly bad. The world told me I was bad for being homosexual. I felt ashamed for it. The shame slowly destroyed my will to live.

Becoming painfully well-behaved, performing morality and flawlessness to please those in positions of authority, was the best thing I knew to do to survive at the time. But it made me sick, and I know it drives many to an early grave.

I have spent years clawing my way back from that teenage precipice. I have learned not to abandon myself, but to stay with myself. I have learned that all the shame an entire planet can throw at me cannot and will not divorce me from the knowledge that I am, at my core, okay.

Nowhere in that process of un-internalising that shame did any therapist suggest I start throwing shame back at those who had hurt me. Why would I hurt people the way I’d been hurt?

When I came out in 2008, Western culture seemed to be moving towards becoming less judgmental, less shaming, more tolerant of difference. A world more interested in living and letting live.

That idea feels laughable in 2021. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the human need to shame and punish one another supersedes any dogmatic Abrahamic religion. We currently live in a culture of permanent outrage: those we disagree with are not humans to be tolerated, but enemies to be called out and destroyed. We are not encouraged to be kind.

The crux is: my sense is that to be seen as a role model in this era would be to support and reify shame. I would be buying into a reductive, unkind system that is quite as crushingly inhumane and airless as the deeply moralistic one that almost killed me. I know how destructive that is. I know how many people take their lives because of shame. Everyone carries their own burden, often in silence. Throwing shame is destructive; internalising that shame can be fatal.

So, I won’t do it.

Trying to mould myself into who I think people want me to be would be unhealthy. My career might gain more relevance if I started ranting about sociopolitical minutiae on Twitter, but the gratification of those retweets would be cold comfort for my impaired wellbeing.

This culture has plenty of artist-activists. I don’t want to be one of them. Just “artist” is cool with me.

And I can make my peace with being a role model if that helps someone, but I would very much like to not be a good one.

I think I now understand why that original question bugged me so much. It’s not that I’m ungrateful; I just don’t want to be misread. Not after having gone through some dark shit on my way to get where I am. I feel that misrepresentation would wreck me.

So, if, as my career grows, I’m going to be held up as an example of something, let it not be model behaviour.

I’d rather be an example of being flawed; of being an imperfect person in an imperfect world; of cutting yourself some slack; of being allowed to be a bloody human being.

In a culture addicted to toxic perfection, and an era so unforgiving toward human nature, I don’t believe it’s just okay for artists to show these flaws. I reckon it’s vital.

Holden

2020 in Review & My Goals for 2021

Man. This year was a real shitshow, ay?

We’re all familiar enough with why 2020 was a giant tyre fire. Thankfully, it looks like the tide is turning. 2021 will hopefully (*touches wood repeatedly*) be a better year.

Every December, I reflect on the past year and plan for the one ahead. When I made my 2020 goals, I had no idea what was about to unfold. Consequently, many of my goals – like everyone’s – went to hell.

Weirdly, my career thrived in 2020. I don’t take that for granted. Invisible Boys landed a slew of accolades, culminating in winning the WA Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer in August. I also signed with a new agent for my next books, and sold the film and TV rights for Invisible Boys, which is now in development as a ten-episode TV series. This stuff was fucken awesome, especially against the backdrop of a heinous year.

That said, despite the luminosity of career highlights, this year was a bit of an annus horribilis for me personally. I started the year with an injury, dislocating my shoulder for a second time, which derailed my health and fitness for months. The gym and footy do a lot to keep my head above water, and losing both was a major struggle. After that was a two-month lockdown, financial strife as my income dried up for the year, the death of a family member, a car accident that injured my back, a house flood and insurance battles, then a very public legal quagmire. From January through to December, my mental health was the worst it’s been in ages. This stuff was fucken terrible, especially against the backdrop of a heinous year.

The mix of light and dark in 2020 was starker than in most years, and there was a chasm between people’s perceptions of how good my life must be and how shit I actually felt. But upon reflection after a strange year, I have my health, I have my husband, I have a career I love, and I live in a relatively safe part of the world. I am lucky.

And despite a year of thwarted dreams for many, people across the globe are arming themselves with the usual December hope that next year will be better. I share this hope. Setting goals helps me take stock of how far I’ve come and refocus my energies. Looking back and looking forward is how I stay motivated.

So, I set 10 goals for 2020, split between writing goals and personal life goals.

Here’s how I went:

2020 WRITING GOALS

1. Sign a contract for Book 2 and do edits for that.

Well, this didn’t happen. My first agent left the publishing business, and so I signed with a new agent mid-year: the brilliant Gaby Naher of Left Bank Literary. Gaby requested edits to the manuscript, and this led to an extensive rewrite. Technically, I did sign a contract with my agent for Book 2, and I did do edits for it. But the goal was to sign a contract with a publisher, which hasn’t yet happened. Book 2 will be pitched to publishers in 2021.

Result: FAIL (but PROGRESS).

2. Promote IB until it has been flogged to death (NB: may have already happened).

I reckon I did what I set out to do here. Despite the pandemic leading to the cancellation of loads of gigs, including events and festivals over east, I still landed a bunch of gigs, many of them online, to sustain myself and promote the book. There was loads of media to promote the book and heaps of good word of mouth. I worked hard on this one, and I achieved my goal.

Result: SUCCESS.

3. Get 1 piece of short fiction & 1 piece of journalism published.

My short story “Irreversible” was published in a special edition of Westerly in February 2020, so I got the first part done. However, the journalistic piece eluded me. I did have an offer of a commissioned piece mid-year, but I had to turn it down as the deadline was impossible given what I was juggling at the time. I enjoy writing articles, though, so I’ll keep this on the backburner for the future.

Result: HALF SUCCESS, HALF FAIL (note to self: don’t put two different goals in one next time).

4. Start work on Book 3.

This is one goal the pandemic actually made easier. I didn’t just start Book 3 – I wrote the whole thing in five weeks while we were in lockdown in April-May. I have hardly glanced at this manuscript since I finished it and I feel I’ve really benefited from staying away from reading it for more than six months. I’ll have a fresh perspective when I dive into rereading and editing it in 2021.  

Result: SUCCESS.

5. Super Secret Project X!!!

This referred to the adaptation of Invisible Boys as a film or TV series, which I was having conversations about last December but hadn’t yet signed a deal. In August, we announced these rights were optioned by Nick Verso and Tania Chambers, and earlier this month, we received development funding from Screenwest. I am so stoked the TV series is going into development in 2021 and can’t wait to see how it unfolds.  

Result: SUCCESS.

2020 LIFE GOALS

6. Maintain average 5 workouts per week (weightlifting and cardio).

Somehow, I actually managed this. For most of the year it was 6 days per week, helped by the fact that footy counts as cardio. There were some crap weeks where I only exercised two or three times, but overall I maintained a steady level of regular near-daily fitness this year and I’m proud of that. I want to keep going with this into 2021.  

Result: SUCCESS.

7. Shred up & reach goal weight of 73 kg by 30 June 2020.

Not sure whether to laugh or cry at this one. I weighed 86 kg when I made this goal. Despite exercising like a muthafucka all year, I also started comfort eating and drinking bulk alcohol during lockdown. By July, I was 87 kg – even heavier than December. I got my shit together in October, gained some muscle and lost some fat, and consequently weighed in at 83 kg last week. Considering the year I had, this is good progress, but still a far cry from my ambitions of major shreddage.

Result: EPIC FAIL.

8. Get tattoos – July 2020. 😊

This goal is also in tatters. The plan was get ripped, then get inked. I haven’t achieved the first so the second hasn’t followed. Bum-bow. I know I can get tattoos whatever my body shape, but my vain heart wants what it wants.

Result: FAIL.

9. Train harder at footy, get less shit & play at least 1 whole AFL 9s season with the Hornets.

Despite my injuries, I trained harder at footy than in 2019. I played a whole season of AFL 9s with the Hornets, save for a couple of games when I had work. And I ultimately got a bit less shit: I am still not a stellar footy player, but I’m better than I was twelve months ago. I can only try to keep improving and hopefully, over time, become a more useful and competitive player.

Result: SUCCESS.

10. Do 1 whole term of guitar lessons (10 weeks).

Okay, this one completely fell by the wayside. I was too busy to dedicate time to this every week for a whole school term. I do still really want to learn guitar, though.

RESULT: FAIL.

Ultimately, I succeeded at about half my goals and failed at the remaining half. That’s a pass mark overall, right?

I am not fazed by the failures. Every year, I set goals knowing I will achieve some and fall short of others. This is the nature of goal setting and life. It doesn’t stop me enjoying the process of aiming high and it helps me work out which goals I don’t feel passionate about and which I really want to work harder at next time.

2020 hampered a lot of my goals, so my list for 2021 looks very similar, with some minor tweaks:

GOALS FOR 2021

WRITING

1. Sign a publishing contract for Book 2 and do further edits on it.

2. Complete the second draft of Book 3.

3. Progress the TV Series adaptation of Invisible Boys.

4. Get 1 piece of short fiction OR journalism commissioned, contracted or published.

LIFE

5. Maintain an average of 5 workouts per week (between weightlifting, footy and cardio).

6. Get nutrition sorted to shred up and reach goal weight of 75 kg by 30 June 2021.

7. Get first tattoos in 2021.

8. Train harder at footy and grow more confident and useful to the team in games.

9. Do at least one guitar lesson.

10. Do some fun shit for pure enjoyment.

When I look at these goals, I feel strongly about making them all a reality. I’ll do my level best. I love having goals to chase and I can’t wait to get started on all of these.

What are your goals for 2021? Are they focused mostly on career, or on life, or a mix of both?

Here’s to a better year ahead for all of us.

Holden