Introductions

My name is Sebastian Hales. I am a writer, a poet and a performer. Welcome to my writings and some of the characters and stories I have created over a lifetime of coaxing meaning from words and actions.

Being a writer means that I spend a great deal of time walking on the beach, gardening, talking, eating and sleeping. All those little daily adventures could be called 'musings' because from them spring the ideas and words that clutter my brain.

I have kept a diary much of my life. I started my first one right back in the 1960s and have continued to the present. In addition I have filled 82 2B5 exercise books with notes, ideas, diagrams, rough drafts, letters, lists – anything that I might want to recall in the future.

This blog is a new adventure for me, and a bit outside my comfort zone. You may need to bear with me if I get things a bit mixed up. But on it I will place a copy of my first novel, called 'I Play the Mermaid Song'. This book is written as an autobiography of a violin musician who finds it hard to conform to the norms of his society.

My second novel is called 'The Adventures of Henry Farthingale'. It is currently in production and should be available in December. It is a story about a town set in the middle of dense jungle and kept secret from the rest of the world. It is a humorous satire on our current society, and at the same time a rollicking set of adventures.

My current project is an autobiography, which I want to tell in instalments on the blog. I hope this can be interactive. I will write a few paragraphs each week. They may not be chronological – I start with my time at school in the 1960s – or sequential. They may not be entirely accurate, as I'm relying on my memories.

My poetry? I wrote many terrible poems in the 1960s. I also edited the Victoria University poetry magazine 'Argot' and published various broadsheets and entries in the university newspaper Salient'. But my poetry writing really started in the 1990s with a collection of poems, short stories and mementoes gathered for my mother's 80^th birthday. I wrote several books of poems through that time, but they were published for special family occasions and not publicly available. I'm developing a collection at present to be published in the new year.

Send me feedback. Join the discussions. Lend me your ears. Give me your thoughts.