Sean Batman's Blog

The spring of 1988

My new novel - Retro Ray - is set in October 1988. The big question is where were you in '88? For some, they hadn't even been thought of. For others - '88 means a great deal. It means Bicentenary. It means Expo ‘88. It means Regan and Gorby at each other’s throats and potential nuclear war! But on a lighter note, it means Rick Astley, Kylie Monogue, INXS, Amiga computers, Powell Peralta, Vision Gator, Madonna, Michael Jackson, George Michael, Poison, Def Leppard, and those gorgeous women from

The beginning of the end

  So the 10-year anniversary of the Cronulla riots has come and gone – with nothing really going down – as expected. That means it’s time to put this project behind me and move on with a new one. And to be honest, I’m looking forward to it.   I was with SOTS for almost ten years. It was a wonderful, yet painful experience; lonely, challenging, but ultimately very fulfilling.  The last month or so has been pretty full on. I organised print copies through a print/publisher and did that from

A Brief History of The Sutherland Shire

  The 10th anniversary of the Cronulla riots is on December 11th and still to this day I'm often asked why I think the riots occurred. Truth be told, I've often recited the passage below. This was actually the original prelude of the novel, Sons of The Shire, but I cut it. Why? I did so because I felt it took away from the reader discovering their own sense of 'why'. It gave my answer to the question and it did it in the first ten-pages...so why read the rest?   While many of you have read the

How Sons of The Shire came into being part 2: the writing...

The writing of SOTS…   Where to begin. Writing a large novel is like raising a child – and I know all about that. Now.   Unbeknownst to most, I wrote my first novel in 2004 and shelved it. Sounds disgusting, right? That’s okay because it was a horror novel that took me about four months to write. I did it because a) I wanted to see whether I could and b) boredom. I’d just moved to Bathurst and was only working four hours a day at the local radio station. Not long after writing it, I got some

How Sons of The Shire came to be: Part 1

        I thought I’d start the first blog post with some details around the novel – Sons of The Shire. It’s been a massive process, taking over eight years to write. And what a learning curve…The next book will come out a lot quicker than that…No, seriously, it will.   In the Beginning… Ten years ago, I received a text message. Would anyone like to guess what it said? Here’s the gist: “This Sunday, every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support Leb and Wog bashing day…” Pretty