I don’t know whether to be extremely pleased or extremely jealous. My good friend Tom Taylor, the playwright from City Head, has been producing awards from everywhere. He’s been winning the Melbourne and Sydney Short & Sweet play competitions, his short plays have been performed around the world… and now he’s having his writing published!

Flinch is a series of short stories by a range of great writers, including Tom (list of authors below). The book includes artwork by Shaun Tan, for which you may remember was also the inspiration for The Arrival which I saw at UNIMA 2008 (a festival for which, UPDATE 30 July 2009: the site is no longer available). 

Tom’s certainly moving in the right circles, cause he’s also publishing a graphic novel, Brief Cases, which will also be illustrated by various artists, including Colin Wilson.

If you don’t know Tom, this will probably seem like a rather uninteresting blog post. However, being a good friend, and one who admires his comedic talents, I’d like to give him some publicity… Also because it’s pretty awesome that one of my friends is a published author and working with some well-known people. It’s one thing to write and produce scripts - pretty much every actor has to do produce their own work to get on - but it’s incredibly incredibly difficult for Aussie playwrights to get published, and it’s just as difficult for Aussie authors to get published. I wrote an article on the very subject for Arts Hub way back in ‘05 or ‘06 (the article is gone, but the Way Back Machine has a cache of the blurb of the article). So I have a fairly decent idea of both how much work Tom has done to get there, and how very very talented he must be. 

As for the jealousy, Tom’s making me feel quite completely lazy and not at all proactive about getting my own work out there. I guess in the microcosm of puppetry and my own site, I feel like I get a lot done. But there’s still so much to do! 

Anyway, congrats Tom and I hope you continue to do well… ah hell, hope has nothing to do with it. I know you’ll do well

(Flinch by Shaun Tan, Justin Randall, Ray Fawkes, Tom Taylor, James Barclay, Terry Dowling, Colin Wilson, Chris Bones, Christian Read, Mel Tregonning, Bobby.N, Anton McKay, Michael Katchan, Chris Bolton, Andrew Richardson)

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