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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.
Purchase THE LONELY AUSTRALIAN OF THE ASIAN NIGHT @ AMAZON
Read an Excerpt
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.
About the Author:
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.
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.
Connect with Gregory Pakis
WEBSITES
SOCIALS
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10 comments:
Thanks for sharing. The excerpt sounds really interesting.
We appreciate you featuring THE LONELY AUSTRALIAN OF THE ASIAN NIGHT. Thank you.
Thanks, Marcy. I'm assuming that most readers of this site are probably from the USA so yes my story is about Australia and South East Asia both east and western cultures caught within a very close geographical span. Culturally so different so it's always interesting to bounce between the two cultures.
Actually I just realised that the excerpt was more about the character's nostalgia for the past which the story is very much about - lost youth. The coach described was a real boxing coach who had a real inspiring presence. And he did pass away in real life as mentioned in the story.
This looks like one I would really enjoy and I like the cover too.
This should be a very good read. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Sherry and Michael. The cover photo is one I took in 2019 in Cambodia, I then fed it into photoshop and put a bit of grain on. Sunsets in Southeast Asia are incredible. I took a lot of photos while on trips, little did I know they would become the artwork for future books :). I'm also working on a longer story about alienation in SE Asia. It's written in the first person and has a paranormal there.
It sounds like a very interesting story.
Thanks, Leonie. It's a story based in reality. But why tell it? I think I just like gritty desperate stories about westerners lost in the east :)
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