Fiction
Snippets from
Step Back
A hyperbolic uber-drama — a Gen X journey from obscurity to Hollywood and back again, where every brush with celebrity left a scar.
These are excerpts from the fictional novel Step Back — a Gen Xer's journey through the 90s and naughties, inner Sydney to London, Paris, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and the kind of nights that take thirty years to make sense of.
Fiction. Names changed, characters combined, years compressed. The famous appear only in scenes that never happened; all dialogue is invented. No statement of fact is made about any real person, living or dead.
"Every brush with celebrity left a scar."
Prose Fiction
4 pieces-
01
→Table DancingA fortnightly grind between London and Paris, a relationship that was already over, and a private basement gig where Mr. K danced across the tables. Paris, 2002.
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02
→CalifornicationFour weeks in the back of a car, a short woman with wrecking-ball enthusiasm, Tim Robbins in a hotel lobby, and Macy Gray dripping sweat from a foot-high stage. Hollywood, circa the 90s.
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03
→Cranberry ShirtA weekend that lasted a summer — Oxford Street, a flat in Bexley, and a cranberry shirt that told a story its owner never quite admitted to. Sydney, circa 1992.
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04
→This Is ItA train driver with PTSD, a limo that was probably a mistake, and an accidental dance with Kylie Minogue at the Metro in Melbourne. 1993.
The poems live on their own page — words that exist outside the novel.
View Poetry →Step Back
The records that made the journey
Not a playlist. A paper trail — the music that was playing when things happened, or should have been. Jamiroquai, Pulp, Daft Punk, The Verve, and the rest.
The Step Back Soundtrack →New stories
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Occasional dispatches — never more than one a month. Just a story and a line or two of context.
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