Hello there! If you'll allow me to be presumptuous, I'll assume that you've come to this page for one of 2 reasons: (a) you've clicked the wrong link; or (b) you're wondering what exactly the hell this site is all about. You're smart enough to find a solution to scenario (a) by yourself, which just leaves me to deal with scenario (b) . . .

Instant Life Substitute is a work of open-ended serial fiction following the lives of a bunch of friends in their mid-to-late-20s (at the moment, anyway) living in inner-city Melbourne (the fact that this is the same situation in which I currently find myself is not exactly coincidental, but I'd like to emphasise at this stage that I.L.S. is very much a work of fiction: if you're reading this and thinking that one of the characters sounds like it's based on you - sorry, no, you're wrong). The version of Melbourne in I.L.S. is slightly fictionalised - none of the pubs, clubs, bands, etc. mentioned in the story actually exist - but that's for personal reasons which really are too arcane to go into here. I think the city is still recognisable in the text, all the same.

I.L.S. had its genesis in a short novel entitled Small Moments which I wrote in 2003/04, and which was published by Ginninderra Press in 2007 (see the "Further Reading" page). As happens occasionally, I grew quite attached to one of the characters in the novel, a young woman named Sacha. She was the main character in Small Moments and I found, when I'd finished the novel, that I didn't really want to stop writing about her. At the same time, I was feeling somewhat disatisfied with what I perceived as the artificiality of the short story/novella/novel formats - the way a character's life is followed from point A to point B and then abandoned when the story finished, as if nothing would ever happen again in that character's life. I was interested in what happened next.

That's where the notion of the serial came in - something of an abandoned format. It took me a surprisingly long amount of time to realise that the Web was ideal for serial fiction - especially for something like I.L.S., which I've always conceived as having effectively no end in sight: I'm going to write it for as long as I feel like writing it. It's rough and ready, I haven't gone back and edited it so there may be continuity errors in there, some episodes are undoubtedly stronger than others - but, hey, it's a learning experience. I've never written anything like this before and I hope you've never read anything quite like it before. Take your time: the story - such as it is - develops slowly but surely. Like life, there are no dramatic climaxes here: only peaks and valleys. I hope you enjoy them.