ABOUT

I'm a Perth-born writer and former academic returning to writerly roots by dusting off old work and writing new material. Coradel Press is a brand of Lost Isle Media, through which I print and promote my work. 

My early juvenile work was Tolkein-esque fantasy, with a derivative and melodramatic bent, which subsequently was conflated with the topics and tone of role-playing games and Terry Pratchett's work. ​However, I then took a more surrealist, literary and philosophical bent with my prose poetry, short stories and novels. While I doubt I ever will have the courage to share my earliest juvenilia, I've collected my later prose writing in Pretty Dead Things.

My first completed novel was The Third Customer, a surreal urban fantasy set in a small town, Runacres Waring, in an undefined but vaguely post-apocalyptic future in which 1990s style towns and cities can be found across an orange wasteland. It follows an ensemble cast around the town's political conspiracy as well as an emerging supernatural mystery.

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My collection of fantasy stories Rapanoikhi and Other Tales is probably my most accessible work. Some of the tales in Rapanoikhi overlap with the worldbuilding in my tabletop roleplaying game Io, which effectively adopted them into its lore, but they are not explicitly in the same universe.

My literary fantasy The Pulkin Dresser is an at turns whimisical philosophical work about a tailor who plans a career from the medieval-style Outer District into the service of Lady Pulkin, the matriarch who rules within the Inner District and its monolithic Keep. However, he discovers that those within the Keep have their own intrigues, some of which have been in play for generations.

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In terms of my academic background, I studied Cultural Studies and Creative Writing, gained a strong interest in the genres of speculative fiction, especially the fantastic, and then leaned into computer games and studied disciplines, notably psychology, as a means of reconciling gaps in the literature. I had planned to release articles based on each chapter of my PhD (Meaning and Emotion in FFX: Re-Theorising Realism and Identification in Video Games), but was waylaid by teaching, curriculum design, and the interminable turnaround for publication, and found it more useful to present them at forums or conferences. In the end I only published one article from my PhD, based on my general conclusions around the disjunctive and existential qualities of computer gameplay. Also, by then I felt I had developed a theoretical framework adequate to answer all the questions that had genuinely troubled me, and my subsequent research served the purposes of unit design, postgraduate supervision, and my own creative aims. 

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At present I'm editing the above stories for publication, reviewing some older unpublished academic work, and quietly ruminating on some more short stories in the vein of Rapanoikhi as part of the world-building around Io.  

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I hope you enjoy my work! If you have any issues, contact me via coraldelpress@gmail.com or lostislemedia@gmail.com