Just Another Week in Suburbia: The Sex Scenes
The first real sex scene I tackled was in my YA novel Pride (the first draft was written in 2002). Early drafts implied that the protagonist, Luke, and his girlfriend, Amanda, had sex. It was the typical consummation of intimacy that was kept off the page. Pride was selected for the 2009 Olvar Wood Fellowship. Queensland author, Inga Simpson, mentored me through a redraft, in which I added this vague sex scene. She highlighted its shapelessness – the scene acted as this general overview that embodied the relationship as a whole. In the redraft(s) that scene gained definition, showing a young couple’s first time. When Busybird Publishing were trying to place Pride…
Song of the Curlew
In early 2017, I published a young adult novel – Pride – under my YA moniker of ‘Lazaros Zigomanis’. This is actually the name I was baptised under. To provide some background, it was 2002. I ran a football website and the season had just finished. Collingwood had lost the grand final (there’s a shock), and I needed content for the off-season so I could maintain some readership. Therefore, I decided to serialise a story, and since my website was football-centric, I decided it was going to be a football story. I’d already had this vague idea for about ten years, but it was originally going to be based in…