“Now a narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are the whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. “Storyteller” and at the same time “character”. It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.”

— Haruki Murakami, Underground, Vintage, London, 2003, p.201.

“You become a different person, you are no longer an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things, you go into a completely different world. I personally draw all the curtains in the room, so that I don’t see out the window and put on a little light which shines on my board. Everything else in your life disappears and you look at your bit of paper and get completely lost in what you’re doing. You do become another person for a moment. Time disappears completely. You may start at nine in the morning and the next time you look at your watch, when you’re getting hungry, it can be lunchtime. And you’ve absolutely no idea that three or four hours have gone by. So when you meet a musician or a writer, you shouldn’t be surprised that they look exactly like ordinary people, because in that part of their lives they are … All the best artists that I’ve known, like Hemingway and Steinbeck and EB White and Thurber, behave very normally in their private lives … They are ordinary people who have a secret compartment somewhere in their brain which they can switch on when they become quite alone and go to work.”

— Roald Dahl, quoted in Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, HarperPress, London, 2010, p.521.

“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder. To put it in a nutshell, leaving the novelist to smooth out the crumpled silk and all its implications, he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature. Many people of his time, still more of his rank, escaped the infection and were thus free to run or ride or make love at their own sweet will. But some were early infected by a germ said to be bred of the pollen of the asphodel and to be blown out of Greece and Italy, which was of so deadly a nature that it would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, and cloud the eye as it sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift — plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion — had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man.”

— Orlando, Virginia Woolf.

This new website has been under construction for a while but is finally finished! It was designed by the immensely talented Connor Tomas O’Brien, who is not only a website designer but also a writer, co-founder of Tomely and director of the inaugural Digital Writers’ Festival, which runs from 13 to 24 February. The program […]

Geoff Orton and I met because we happened to be sitting next to each other at a Sydney Writers’ Festival session, Singapore Sling, in May 2011. It was the week after I’d quit corporate law to give myself more time to write, and it was encouraging to see that one of the panellists, the writer Shamini Flint, […]

I had a brilliant time last Thursday at the launch of The Sleepers Almanac No. 8 at Trades Hall in Melbourne. In the Almanac is a long short story of mine called ‘Two’ — I wrote a little bit about in my last blog post. The directors of Sleepers Publishing, Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn: Sam Twyford-Moore, writer and […]

I hope the year has started brilliantly for all of you. UK writer Samantha Memi has asked me to interview myself about my next big thing, which is a long short story due out in March. 1.  WHAT IS THE TITLE OF THE STORY? Two. 2.  WHERE DO YOU GET THE IDEAS FOR YOUR STORIES? […]

This is a short story by Eric Yoshiaki Dando, first published by Sleepers Publishing in 2006 and reproduced here with Eric’s kind permission. A Shortage of Santas A friend of a friend is recruiting Santas for shopping centres and says that they are having trouble finding them.  The money is slightly better than my labouring job. […]

Samantha Memi‘s chapbook, Kate Moss & Other Heroines, has just been published by Black Scat Books as part of its Absurdist Texts & Documents series. The chapbook includes Samantha’s short story ‘Bouffant’, which has previously appeared on this blog, and other gems like ‘Kate Moss versus the Millipede’. Samantha sent me a surprise gift from the UK, […]