My Extraordinary Life and Death

What exactly is The Tight Trouser Club? Where do you buy children at bargain prices? How do you survive a father who buries you in the garden whenever you misbehave? And whom do you contact when your wife starts to shrink?
None of these questions are answered in My Extraordinary Life and Death, though what do you expect if the author admits he is dead? A roller-coaster of madness and surreal comedy awaits the reader brave enough to open the pages of this truly remarkable book. Based on a false story.

The Youth Literature Centre at The State Library of Victoria paid me some money to blog for a month. I’d never done it before, but had to supply three blog entries per week. Here’s an edited highlight:

Now, I don’t know why people didn’t find that riveting, but they didn’t. So I did what most writers do, and started telling fibs. I made up an exciting new life for myself, using old woodcut pictures as inspiration. Originally, I planned on just one instalment, then dying at the end of the story. But people started leaving nice comments on my blog, so I came back to life and put together three more chapters. It was turned into a book and here is an excerpt.

I was amazed when Paul Collins from Ford Street offered to publish. I didn’t want him to. I thought the tight trouser stuff wasn’t appropriate. I still do. But then Paul told me his plans to make it into a little square book and it really seemed a sweet idea, even with the tight trousers. And he offered me some money. That helped. I was especially happy with the book’s designer Grant Gittus. Grant is also the designer of this website. Here is a painting he did recently. The title is Gladys Makes a Break for It. It gives you an idea of how his brain works.

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My Extraordinary Life and Death was, believe it or not, a difficult book to edit. Everyone has a different sense of humour that they are quite convinced is perfect, myself included. Just visit the website where you can see some of the rejected stuff. There’s rather a lot of it. http://www.fordstreetpublishing.com/melad/index.html

In a sensational development, the book’s release made headline news on page 31 of The Port Phillip Leader, top left hand corner. At last I am famous.