Skydekkerix

Alright I am having trouble organising a night where I can get rogered on Irish Cream and write stupid poetry. You think it would be easier for a fucking unemployed alcoholic to find a night to get drunk. The night is coming though. Be prepared.

To stop you guys forgetting about me I have decided to post some euphemisms I use regularly because I am uncomfortable talking about things. Some of the are themed! Some of them are original! All of them make me seem like a terrible person!

Pissing:

Shake hands with the president.

Send some coffees/beers to breakfast heaven.

See a man about a famous urinating horse which I am considering buying.

Wash away the filth of Saruman.

Opposite drink.

Make Sauron cry.

Shitting:

Push a Wookie down a garbage chute.

Drop some rebels into the sarlaac pit.

Blast nasty.

Butt scream.

Drop off the Cosby kids at the pool.

Dump the warp core.

Send a present to the pipe children.

Bulls-eye a wamp rat in my T-16.

Release the hounds.

Dump my cargo at the first sign of an imperial star-cruiser.

Sex:

Do the horrendous necessary.

Bump uglies.

Make a two person Voltron.

Put on the one ring.

Pierce Boromir with many arrows.

Slay a dragon.

Sheath my lightsaber.

Show a hobbit the secret path into Mordor. (This one is almost too terrible.)

Masturbation:

Choke Jabba.

Beat some information out of The Joker.

Spend time with the baby sausage.

Ok that is enough of that. If you think of any better ones comment and I will comment back saying “hahaha”. If you want to hurl abuse at me also comment. If you love my body and want to party, please feel free to leave me the hell alone.

Sometimes your muse just kicks the fucking bucket and you get blue writer’s balls. This is me. I am the one with no word-love at the moment. A lot of factors cause this. For me it is no money, shitty weather and a pinch of not giving a fuck. For the major part, though, it is because I seem to be doing well. Instead of a necessity for change driving my writing, being content has bred apathy. So now there is only one solution. One dark path.

I have to get real down on myself.

I am a real dick sometimes.

I like to drink whiskey neat because it makes me feel like I have a bigger penis.

I do not have as big of an alcohol problem as I would like.

Sometimes I like posts on facebook without reading them.

I constantly look up words on the internet to make sure I am not making them up.

Sometimes I do not listen to people while they are talking to me because I am thinking about mountains.

I do not understand how music is made.

I do not wear sunglasses not because I think they’re lame but because I do not know how to buy cool ones.

I like to pretend I am bad at sport because I was bullied in primary school.

I am bad at sport.

I am a terrible dancer.

I am a terrible cook.

I do not kill animals because I think that an evil one will come back and kill me later.

I am afraid of ghosts.

There is a cupboard in my house that I will not open. Ever.

Aaaand self loathing has kicked back in again. I will be back in form as soon as I get rogered on vodka and write some terrible poetry. My next post will be me getting dangerously drunk and posting up poetry. I am as serious as a heart attack. Stay with me people.

I don’t really remember much of the drive to Orange, the only town in Australia who’s name doesn’t rhyme with anything. I do remember seeing the only difference between QLD and NSW. It’s the rocks. You don’t get a lot of rocks where I come from, and the ones you do get are big and sharp and dirt coloured. The rocks in NSW are old school. Grey and smooth. There were outcrops. I had never seen a proper outcrop before. It blew my mind. Considering the state my mind was in it was easily blown.

The animals were different too. Instead of big horned ones there were little wooly ones. The grass was green and the hills rolled. In Queensland the grass is brown and the hills stick upwards like mother nature flipping you the bird.

I told my brother all this and he didn’t reply.

I tried to get back to reading The Lord of the Rings but I couldn’t. As far as I was concerned I was living it. So I got out my notepad and pen and started doing something I had never done before. Planning a novel. At that point I had no idea how long it should be, how I should break up the chapters or even whether to do it from first or third person. I hardly new what any of those meant. I hadn’t read a lot of novels, not a good start for a writer.

I didn’t even think about all these things. I just got lost in the story. It seemed the right way to go about it. Later I would discover a lot of things and techniques and skills that would be used to write well, but I would never lose that way of thinking. To me the whole point of writing was to tell a story. Whether you wrote simple or complicated, well or like a two year old, the story was the most important part.

The novel I was writing was dog shit. Terrible. Some fantasy story set in a medieval version of Australia. It was more a shitty Dungeons and Dragons campaign than a novel. I didn’t give a fuck. I was enjoying myself.

We got to Orange. It was a nice place. About the size of Ipswich but with less drugs and stabbings and youths yelling. About thirty degrees cooler as well. We had only had a four hour drive so we had plenty of daylight to kill. We did our usual thing where we don’t call ahead so we end up driving around for hours looking for a place to stay that won’t cost us our food and petrol and booze money. We eventually found a small caravan park next to a wrecker’s. We got a cabin instead of a camping site. It cost us 700% more. We did not care. We were as sick as a Victorian waif.

We sat in the cabin with the heater on full. We were on our fourth cup of tea each. The television was on and showing something terrible. We decided that this was not the way to go about things. We did not drive hundreds of kilometres to sit and watch television. We decided to go out and do something. It turned out to be a Sunday. None of the shops were open. No-one was on the streets. We didn’t know where any pubs were. The only thing we could find was a shitty movie theatre that was playing movies we had seen before and movies we didn’t want to see. We ended up watching “Don’t Mess with the Zohan” in a deserted movie theatre, sitting a seat apart so if anybody did turn up they wouldn’t think we were a couple.

We got up from the movie seats before the credits rolled. We walked out to the street, ignoring the looks from the guy behind the counter. We walked to where we parked a few blocks away in a cold and bitter wind. My brother shouted something above the wind. I yelled back at him.

“What?”

“I said that chick in the movie was pretty hot.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

We went back to our cabin and slept the rest of Orange away.

I felt like a bushranger. My brother and I sat around a campfire, eating soup out of burnt cans and swapping lies. The fire was perfect. Years of camping with our different sets of parents had prepared us. It was tight and controlled and about the only thing we did right that trip. We drank billy tea. We watched the fire and sang our shitty songs. Then it was cold. Cold is not a strong enough word to describe it. It was anti-heat. It sapped your will and your strength. I was wearing every set of clothes I had. But it was still good. The fire burned small and intensely.

At about midnight a four-wheeled drive pulled up. Two men got out and started putting up tents. My brother and I watched from our campsite. Then they set up a fire. It was monstrous. Made out of the biggest logs they could  find. They put branches covered in green leaves all over it. It stood about the same size as a basketball player. They poured some petrol over it and lit it. It exploded into flames. Smoke poured out of it, thick and grey. The wind picked up, freezing us to the bone. It was blowing the smoke right in our direction.

We could barely see. Our eyes watered and we coughed violently. The peace of the night was violently disturbed. We argued about who should go over to their site and tell them to fuck off. Neither of us were game. We went to bed instead. The pump for the air mattresses was out of battery. We slept on the cold bare earth. The sleeping bags were not enough. They were five degree ones and the temperature was at least negative five. I stuffed blankets into them. It was not enough. We stuffed all our clothing into them. It was not enough. Every time I moved a freezing cold patch would open up onto me. The smoke drifted into our tents. We couldn’t sleep. We were choking and freezing to death. The night went on. We spent hours wide awake. It was too cold to talk. Our heads were stuffed into our sleeping bags. I laid in the fetal position, wishing that I had never been born.

We not so much as woke up as stopped lying down. It was about six. Our fire still had hot coals left. Their fire had long since burnt out. We both we terribly sick. Both coughing and sneezing and spitting up phlegm. I had a headache the size of a small moon. We stoked the fire back up and drank some tea. We were both angry. Mainly at me. We left about ten, waiting for the owners of the camp site to get back from dropping their kids at school. We gave them the keys to the bathroom and left.

We were silent for an hour or so. I turned to my brother. His nose was red. He was coughing. He radiated sickness. I spoke.

“Motel next time?”

He turned to me. His eyes burned like angry wicker men.

“You’re an asshole.”

Hey dudes and ladies I have some of my older short stories published in New Horizons on http://jaffabooks.com.au/ Check them out. I am happy with at least some of them.

Writing is not something that comes easy to me or, up until a year ago, even naturally. Every time I sit down to write my guts wrench and tie up in knots, words start running through my head. Not the quality coherent sentences of a now qualified journalist, but a jumble of meaningless drivel. But I do enjoy writing. Once I get past the initial, “No Mum PLEASE I don’t want to go and write today, please don’t make me,” I do truly like it.

I’m not really sure how to write about writing, I’ve never done it before. In fact, until last year, I didn’t even know I could write. So I guess there have been and will be a lot of firsts for me on the writing front. The inception of my writing career has everything to do with my brother and his perseverance that, yes I could write if a just gave it a go. I knew he was lying. He had started a writers club and was desperate for me to attend. He convinced me by saying that I didn’t actually have to write anything, it’s just that he appreciated my opinion so much he thought it would be helpful to have me along to critique other peoples work. I was defenceless against the flattery.

I was adamant that as soon as I showed up to this writers club all his ‘writer’ friends would take one look as me and hiss me out of the room, like little vampires, knowing I was an impostor. As you can probably guess (as I accept you are intelligent human beings that can put one and two together) I was not hissed and booed at. In fact, I knew most of the people in attendance, they weren’t the writer wankers I was expecting. They were Sam’s friends that I had met at one time or another. The encouragement I received for my exercise that night led me to flesh it out in the car on the way home and then sit down for two hours and manically write what would be my first short story, one which, for everyone who has read it, has been very quiet after doing so.

I guess it was a little dark. A white and black snapshot of the way I was living my life at the time. Raw and honest, that’s all I knew how to do. However, the feedback for it was undeniably good.

Though the piece felt gratifying to write and I’ve now entered it into my first writers competition (I told you there would be a lot of firsts) it seemed I much preferred to help people improve their work (I think I only wrote one more story for Sam’s writers club). I was regularly critiquing my brother’s stories, reading loads of feature pieces in magazines and reading one particular blog by Jack Marx, a cynical bastard and a journalist. He was the catalyst into my foray as career writer.

Jack Marx wrote one particular blog about the unfairness of sub-editors not being recognised for their work at annual awards. I didn’t know what a sub-editor was so I researched it. From what read it it was ‘someone who read other people’s work and told them how they thought it could be better’. I had a “holy shit!” moment and realised that at 24, after years of meandering around the work force, there was a job that was exactly what I like doing. I had never considered journalism before, not realising the many, many feature articles I devoured were a part of that world, only seeing the hard news and thinking that is not a job for the soft hearted i.e. me.

If you haven’t already worked out I’m big on research and when I decided to study journalism I did do a lot of it, but it was a friend of mine, who had completed a one year course the year before and received one of the coveted cadetships with The Courier Mail, who convinced me that JSchool was my best chance at a getting my foot into the door of this very competitive world. I’m glad a took his advice. I’ve gone from writing noob to (fairly) confident writer in less than a year. I’ve had news stories published and was able to intern with the likes of Trent Dalton and Frances Whiting, so in a little plug for JSchool, if you are considering studying Journalism and you are willing to work hard there’s no better place to go.

I should probably speak a little about how I write. Mostly I do it inside my head (haha, I just realised so does everyone else), while I’m driving or while I’m trying to get to sleep. I now leave a note book or my computer beside my bed because some of my best writing is done just before I nod off and if I don’t write it down it’s lost forever. Another trick I discovered the other day was to use my voice recorder on my phone. It felt a little weird at first, in fact I felt like a complete wanker. It felt like I was on CSI doing an autopsy. But like I said I do some of my best writing while I’m driving and as much as I’d like to write it (and yes I’ve tried) it’s a dangerous past time to do while driving. So for the first time I verbally wrote something, a review about the movie Bridesmaids, on my voice recorder. It worked quite well actually.

I guess what I’m getting at is that writing, the best kind, often comes at the most inconvenient times. This means you should always be prepared. I now carry a note book, several pens (in case six of the seven decide not to work), a digital recorder, my ipod touch which has a voice recorder, my iphone which has a voice recorder and a camera. Preparation for pretending to know what your doing is key to people thinking you know what your doing and I think most of us all feel like pretenders most of the time,  but for me all of the time.

We began what would be our regular road breakfast for pretty much the end of time. S&E muffin and coffee for me, B&E and coke for my brother. Drinking coke at 7:30 in the morning is disgusting. It is the wrong thing to do. I bugged my bro into buying shitty sunglasses from a servo, the kind you see eight year olds wearing on holidays up the sunshine coast with their dads. We pulled onto a highway that would take us up the spine of Australia’s east coast. I think we were listening to a Living End cd with a couple of the really good songs missing. We were in high spirits by then.

I was wearing a big jacket and an army jumper because I couldn’t maneuver my seat belt to take them off. My brother wore a t-shirt. I sweated like some kind of butter statue. The road we were on was empty except for tin windmills and tin sheds. Mountains, the shitty kind of large hills Australians call mountains, were on every horizon. I had expected all this. I was looking forward to it. I hadn’t expected how depressing the open road actually is. We ended up looking forward to the roadside speedo checks because it was something to do. We ran out of conversation topics pretty much instantly. There is only so much two brothers can talk about when they have lived together all of their lives. It was about an hour or two into the trip.

We hit Warwick. I had kind of been looking forward to it. I had seen the signs as a kid and always wanted to go there because I had a friend in pre-school of the same name. This is the friend that told me on the first day of grade 1 that we couldn’t be friends any more. The only friend I had in that year was a teacher that yelled at me for not colouring between the lines and tolerated me following him around at lunch times and picking up rubbish.

If I could describe Warwick in two words they would be single storey. That is the nicest thing I can say about it. There are about two roads in it. We took the wrong one. We were already lost in a country we had lived in but never really been to. Every side street we turned down seemed to lead to a cattle yard. It might all just have been the same cattle yard. A shitty google maps printout with smudged words from coffee stains is not a good tool on a long trip. Especially when it only shows the main highways. We pulled over at a service station and argued over who would get out of the car to ask directions. It ended up being me. It always ended up being me. The road out of town was huge and unmistakable and just at the end of the road where the service station was on. It was alright, I was used to looking stupid. Just not reeally used to being stupid.

We eventually got to Goondiwindi. I do not know how to pronounce that. I do not remember the drive there. I had just started reading The Lord of the Rings for the fourth time. I was still red-faced from Warwick and wishing I had a cloak and a pipe. I had managed to worm my way out of my extra layers though. The Goondiwindi McDonalds has very nice people in it. We ate in the parking lot. It felt like the edge of the world. I couldn’t remember ever crossing the border before. And yet there is was. New South Wales was a real place. And it did not have whales in it as I thought when I was a retarded child. We crossed.

There is not a lot of stuff in NSW. There is probably less stuff in the rest of Australia but Western NSW shows you really how empty this country is. That is because there is supposed to be towns there. It said so on our shitty map. We passed a town that a recognised from an Australian film I saw in uni. It consisted of a general store on the other side of the road from a bus stop. There were probably some house there. We were going really fast so I couldn’t sightsee.

We were going down a road that was more like a perfect line, dead straight and infinite in length. I lost track of time. Events, if they could be called that, re-arranged themselves. We only passed trucks. I didn’t even flinch when my brother overtook someone like I normally do. I could see when vehicles were coming from an hour off. I looked down at the map. We we halfway to a big green patch. A silo went by. And then… nothing.

Two brothers flew into the Sol system. They had heard good things about a little blue and green planet. Apparently there was good beer there. They landed on a large tropical island filled with happy, tanned people and cute animals. There had never been any civil wars there, no huge unrest. People mainly partied and bought shitty used cars and smoked terrible cigarettes. They landed in Western New South Wales. They stood looking at the open expanse of dirt from horizon to horizon. An eagle cried or something. They turned to each other and said “This is shit.” Then they took off in a spaceship and went and did something awesome…

I woke up. We were about to cross into the big green patch. I was excited. We had seen nothing but open dirt for about three hours, maybe four. Maybe more. The map said it was some kind of state forest in those words. I wanted it to be a magic forest full of elves and goblins so bad. Just as I was readying myself to slay some monsters we hit it.

The only thing more depressing than seeing nothing for large periods of time is seeing the same thing over and over again. The map had lied to us. This was not a state forest. This was one tree that someone had copied and pasted five-hundred million times. Exactly that number. I counted. My brother and I came up with a game to pass the time. Think of every word you can that started with A. We are not very creative. At some point in the forest we came upon something cool. It was a scale model of the solar system. we were at Pluto I think. The sun was hundreds of killometres away. At the time it seemed pretty cool.

We kept driving. It was getting late. We had forgotten to organise accomodation for the night. We argued about who would call the numbers on the list of places our mother had printed off. It ended up being me. I called the first place. They were full. I thought the guy was pretty rude for pointing out that I really should have prepared this earlier. The second place was full. And so was the third. We arrived in Coonabarabran, the coldest place in Australia, in the middle of Winter with no-where to stay. We drove around the town. There was nothing in it. Nowhere to buy food. Nowhere to drink. We saw a small house with some tents and caravans set up out the back. Turns out it was a camping ground. Turns out we went camping.

So a while back my older brother and I had watched a lot of Supernatural and decided we were going to go on a road trip. It was going to be awesome. We would pull into a sleepy little town, stay in a shitty motel and then hit the bar where we would pull random chicks and then maybe fight some ghosts. We were going to be a couple of tough men on the open road, grow beards and drink straight whiskey. It was mid way through the year, we had both moved back into our parents place until we could organise some new accomodation.

We started planning about three days before we left. We bought a tonne of canned soup and tents. We went to buy sleeping bags and realised they were hell of expensive. I convinced my brother that we didn’t need the expensive -5 degree sleeping bags because it was Australia. If it got cold we would just throw some blankets over ourselves. By the time we had bought everything it was the night before we had to leave. We hadn’t organised a route or anything. We just planned to go inland.

Our mother planned the route for us on google maps and printed it out for us. Already it was going badly. Bad-arse road-tripping bros do not get their mothers to plan road trips for them. We woke up at four in the morning. My brother stepped outside the little room my parents had set up for us in the shed. He stopped. He came back in the room.

“There is a rat out there.” He said.

“Is it moving?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s probably dead. Just kick it aside.”

“What if it’s alive?”

“How big is it?”

My brother held out his hands to indicate the size.

“You sure it’s not a possum?”

“No it’s definitely a rat. Can you come and get rid of it for me?”

“What?”

“Just come and kick it outside or something.”

“Jesus Christ. You are such a girl.”

I got up, put some  shoes on and walked over to the rat. It was average sized. I kicked it and it rolled under my mothers car.

We walked inside and our mother was already up worrying about us. She made us coffees and sent us away with a hug. It was not going well already. Instead of reclaiming my masculinity I was losing more of it. I hadn’t thought it was possible. We got to the car and realised we had no music. We quickly rushed and burnt about ten cd’s.

It was about seven when we left. We had planned to leave with the sun rise, while nobody was awake. The house was bustling by the time we left. We screamed out of Lowood in my brother’s black hyandai elantra. Shit was packed up to my knees in the front. My legs were already asleep. I couldn’t feel where they were wet from the water bottle leaking onto them. We had eight hours of driving ahead of us until we stopped. Two weeks to go to towns and drink and pick up girls. I was already asleep by the time we hit the first McDonalds, about twenty minutes away.

Sorry about the wait guys. Here is some stuff I wrote about living in my favourite city. I hope that you think this is an okay thing.

I have seen more of Brisbane by the eerie half-light ofstreet lamps than I have by the suns benevolent rays. I have seen tree-trolls, and void-houses and daemons, lots of daemons.

I moved out of home when I was seventeen. I left the country and moved back to the silver city with nothing but the promise of adventure and
a job at the Subway at Indooroopilly shopping centre. The promise of adventure could go fuck itself, all I wanted to do was play videogames and listen to My Chemical Romance.

I moved into an apartment complex in Taringa. It was more like a concrete shelf than a house. I had no bed. The only furniture I had was
an old cupboard with a door that didn’t shut the full way. I spent most of the year scared that a dog would come out of it and eat me in my sleep. I was scared of a lot of things, being raised in the middle of nowhere with no troubles at all except the rats in my shed/room stealing and collecting my underwear. I was scared of being hit by cars, I was scared of being knifed by homeless people, I was scared of girls.

I spent most of my waking life in the small storefront of the Subway. Forty hours a week in the same three by five metre strip. The
weekends were saved for drinking with work friends and videogames. I would walk along Moggill road to get home, usually at about twelve at night after a closing shift.

One particular night I had walked up the long hill and reached the bottle shop in Taringa. I crossed the road and something strange
happened. Fear solidified in my subconscious and took physical form. Ectoplasm shot out of my left ear, unnoticed by me, and took the shape of something just crossing the road behind me. Some dude was following me.

I heard his footsteps behind me on the deserted streets. I chanced a look around. He was tall, with messy blonde hair in a mushroom shape
sitting on top of his head. He had a wide smile, a maw filled with shark teeth. His eyes were like tiny exploding babies burning in his eye sockets. He wore a white polo shirt and jeans.

I walked down a steep street to the train station. He was still following me. I thought “He’s probably just catching the train. Nothing
to worry about.” I climbed the stairs and crossed the train line. Walking down the side street next to the empty parking lot I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I heard the steady clunk of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs towards me. I knew it then. The daemons had finally come. They were here.

I started power walking. The rapid sound of my heartbeat drowned out everything else. I walked up another hill. I stopped and looked
back. Down the bottom of the hill, half lit by a street lamp, was the man. He was smiling. I think.

I ran the rest of the way home; down another hill, almost being hit by an angry man driving a woman’s car.  Past a construction site that started up at six in the morning every morning. I ran to the front of the apartment block, avoiding all the dark areas of the garage and the laundry. I fumbled with my keys, the lock jammed. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs behind me. I balled my fists. I summoned up all the grim resolution I could. I turned to face him.

It was just a fat man in his underwear carrying a load of washing to his apartment. I turned back slowly, unlocked the door and went
inside. I turned on all the lights in the apartment and sat down and played videogames until my morning, trying not to look at the windows. The sun roseslowly and I thought to myself. I love Brisbane, because everywhere else scares the shit out of me.

One of the best ways to convey character through dialogue is swearing. You can tell a lot about a person by how and when they swear. A lot of people are of the opinion that swearing is just a lazy and unimaginative way of writing dialogue. I disagree. Swearing is a tool, just like any other writing device. Basically if it is natural for your character to swear at a given point the god fucking damn it they should swear. I’ll give you some examples of characters in the novel that I am writing and how I use swearing to help build their personas.

First off I’ll start with the main character. This one is a classic knight in sour armour. He is generally rude or violent but not because he is an arsehole, just because of his ways. He only swears when he is distracted or confused, he doesn’t actually use swearing to hurt people. Unfortunately he is confused a lot. When something doesn’t go his way he swears at it to release his anger. When he swears he swears well. He uses the right kind of word at the right time. He doesn’t swear like a teenager. He doesn’t swear just because he can. He swears because it is the right time to do so.

Now we go onto Jasmine. She is a girl in her late teens/early twenties. She is intelligent and uses her speech wisely, though she doesn’t speak overly flowery. When she swears she always has a smile on her face. She swears for comedic value, always at inappropriate times to get the best effect. When she swears she uses the worst word possible for the situation, just to get a reaction.

And finally onto James Withers. He is a happy-go-lucky ship captain who speaks entirely in slang. He rarely ever swears. He tries to think of more creative ways to use language. He only ever swears when he is angry, which is almost never. He never swears at a person, it is always a more general reaction to a situation. When he swears he uses classic and softer words. Words like bloody, hell and damn. Things that have lost their effect with time.

That being said I would avoid swearing outside of dialogue except for if you are using first person and the situation calls for it. Swearing outside of dialogue can be used for comedic effect but it tends to break the fourth wall and ruin the immersion.