• Contemporaneous: A Living Novel

    Contemporaneous: Chapters 56 – 57

    56. I’ll skim through all the stuff that it took me six hours to do: battle traffic to get to the airport find it impossible to get parking, so I leave the airport, drive out to Tullamarine, and get some street parking try to hail a taxi and, then summon an Uber – neither app worked, and the phone for the taxi was never answered walk an hour back to the airport, then try to buy a domestic ticket there. Their system went down. I waited five minutes, but then panicked that I was disrupting everybody’s else’s lives once I walked back to my car, traffic was clear all the…

  • This Writing Journey

    The Big Goodbye

    It wasn’t long after I finished my typewritten novel that I started experiencing panic attacks. The first one woke me in the middle of the night, terrifying me, and leaving me seething with anxiety. I was sure something had broken inside my head. I thought the anxiety would run it’s course, the way a cold would, but it remained omnipresent. The nights became a horror; I dreaded the quiet, where the anxiety could just spill out into the emptiness. But, conversely, sleep brought the only refuge. Finally, I decided I needed to see a GP – just not my GP, who knew my parents well. I didn’t want to risk…