Forthcoming fiction

The weird thing about writing for print as well as the web is the lag time. With the web you hit 'Publish Post' and it's out in the world. With print it disappears into a big machine and becomes a publication that's almost unrecognisable. In a good way.

I've got a short story coming out in the Big Issue fiction edition. An editor told me they were looking at how to illustrate the piece which stretched my brain in the visual direction. The trigger for the story was seeing a Vietnamese kid doing his homework in the window of his parent's cafe. It was one of those "What's his life like?" moments that takes you off on a fictional tangent. It was a fairly mundane mental snapshot but that was where my brain went. But as an illustration it really wouldn't stand up.

As a reader it can be tough to see your favourite book adapted into a film and seeing how a director has represented a key scene or miscast your favourite character. It's best to just go with it and see the film as something different, another interpretation. So I'm thinking the same will happen with this piece. I wrote an article a while back about ethical footwear (image not re-produced here - but I'm pretty sure it was by Michael Weldon) for the Big Issue and it was published with this fantastic image of two guys with sneakers for heads just chatting. Best of all, it gave the piece a hipness and humour that my writing didn't have.

Either way, the whole visual representation wil be solved when the Fiction edition hits the streets on 14th of July. Also this week I answered a question for the Herald Sun's Travel section about how to get to Australia without taking a plane. I've got no idea what it will look like so I'll be standing outside the newsagency waiting for a glance at it. Maybe illustrations are one of those things that 'need to be read with newsprint on your hands'.