Hookers and hawkers. Mosques and mosquitos. Paul has had enough of Southeast Asia.
Welcome to one of the August 14th stops on the blog tour for The Lonely Australian of the Asian Night by Gregory Pakis with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.
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About the Book
The Lonely Australian of the Asian Night
by Gregory Pakis
Published 21 January 2017
G & G Publishing
Genre: Travel/Crime
Page Count: 19
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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.
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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.
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Giveaway Alert!
The author will be awarding a $25 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner.
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Thankyou for the post! I hope any readers find the story insightful about a culture different to ours in the West.
Thank you so much for featuring THE LONELY AUSTRALIAN OF THE ASIAN NIGHT today!
I liked the excerpt.
Thanks, Rita. My writing isn’t very flowery, more direct to the point 😊
The story sounds really interesting.
Thanks, Marcy, it’s based on my and other people’s experiences travelling India and southeast Asia. Always a bit of culture shock when you travel in 3rd world cultures and don’t stay in 5-star hotels 🙂
Fascinated by this
Thanks, Nancy. Good to hear :). I find the whole culture clash between east and the west fascinating. Australia is quite unique, a now western culture plonked on the edge of southeast Asia. It’s close to us so we visit. I feel that I learn more about Australia and the west, than I do about the countries I have visited in that region.