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Hookers and hawkers.
Mosques and mosquitos.
Paul has had enough of Southeast Asia.
He's only here ‘cos it's cheap.
He's on the run from police after leaving Australia.
No, that place wasn't much better either.
Well, it was when he was young.
When his life was full of promise. An up-and-coming boxer. And he had friends. And fun.
Then a bit of bad luck later and he found himself on the run in outback Australia. Paranoid. Hiding from shadows. The heat. The dust. The sweat.
Next stop, Southeast Asia.
As a teenager he was always cool headed. When doing all the typical stuff like shoplifting, it was all automatic; Paul never even thought about getting caught and he didn’t. But he wasn’t always on the wrong side of the tracks. For a while there, he straightened up, boxing at a local gym, even challenging for a state title, but after that things seemed to fall apart. It started when his coach passed away. For some reason, the gym closed its doors and most of the fighters relocated to another stable. Many went their own way or just quit all boxing altogether. None of the coaches from other gyms approached Paul, so he went his own way too.
His coach was special. Though he was a tall, intimidating presence, he held the boys together, commanding them with something in his voice. He also applauded them, laughed with them, and when the time was right, exposed them. “Youse bullshitters, youse,” Paul remembered him saying to a bunch of them when they were sitting around trying to impress each other. Those were the days when Paul was forging a new body; when he felt it begin to tighten and move with purpose and poise. He could barely remember how his teenage body felt before that. He now still carried some of that poise in his body but it wasn’t as wiry and fit as it used to be. He hadn’t trained in three years. The beer had added as well.
Gregory Pakis is an Australian author, film-maker, actor and wacky vlogger. He has written the short story, The Lonely Australian of the Asian Night; the soon to be released horror-suspense novellas, The Regressor and He., and Memoir of a Suburban Hoe-Bo, which is partly an account of when he lived out of a van for ten years in Melbourne.
Gregory Pakis is also the writer / director of the feature films, The Garth Method (2005) and The Joe Manifesto (2013), which have won national and international awards and been distributed through Accent Entertainment, Label, Vanguard Cinema.
Gregory's more informal video projects are the feature documentaries, Garth Goes Hitch-Hiking (2007) and Garth Lives in a Van (2011) which have screened at film festivals in Australia.
More recently, he has created the comedy series, suBURPieS and his Wacky Vlog which can found on his socials.
Gregory has been featured in articles in newspapers, The Age, The Herald Sun, Beat Magazine, Inpress, FILMINK, and the Neos Kosmos. He has been interviewed on radio by the ABC, 3RRR, SYN FM, 3CR.
THE LONELY AUSTRALIAN OF THE ASIAN NIGHT - LINKS
AMAZON SALES LINK: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01N36UWYK
BOOK TRAILER: https://youtu.be/ZE0JH1EdGfc?si=-zroVl6rV8Sd3OyH
AUTHOR CHAT TO CAMERA VIDEO: https://youtu.be/uTd0-Y_FT7Y?si=dz0NzUnpoYUYoNmw
WEB PAGE (WITH MEDIA KIT): https://www.gpak.org/books/thelonelyaustralianoftheasiannight
WEBSITES
BOOKS https://www.gpak.org/
FILMS https://guerillafilmnite.com/
SOCIALS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gregorypakis/
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gregorypakis
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gpakis
Twitter: https://x.com/GPakis
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ReplyDeleteThanks, Judith for the post. If it resonates with any readers, some of my favourite writers are Kerouac, H Miller, Orwell, and I tried to employ that lean kind of prose in writing this story to get to the point about the grit pf Southeast Asia and the Aussie outback.
ReplyDeleteWe appreciate you featuring THE LONELY AUSTRALIAN OF THE ASIAN NIGHT. Thank you.
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