Timeline
Writing, current and past.
2023
December
Nights Under the Sun is published in ebook and print.
See the map illustrated by Arthur Bowling.November
Turtlespear and its accompanying essay are published in the anthology Inner Workings.
2021
October
March
Selfless (5,000 words) is published in the online science-fiction magazine Teleport.
January
Work begins on a new near-future science fiction novel, America and America.
2020
September
The End is published as the closing story of Empty Sky: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2020.
July
Second draft of 1001 Nights Under the Sun completed.
2019
December
Chris’s first-contact story The Trade wins first place in his quarter of Writers of the Future. He will attend the week-long workshop and ceremony in LA the next March (delayed due to COVID-19).
Late
Chris begins a thorough edit of All for Birth, removing 30,000 words.
October
The poem Today on the Floor is published in the local anthology ZineWest. During the ceremony, Chris’s performance of his poem The Machinist earns a highly commended prize.
January
Discovers Locus magazine, which gives much-needed perspective on the state of fantasy and science fiction, including recommendations for the most intriguing reading coming out right now.
2018
December
Completes the Master of Creative Writing at UTS.
September
After many years of literary short stories and sci-fi novels, Chris decides to combine these skills and begin writing sci-fi short stories. He also becomes enraptured by sci-fi magazines such as Interzone, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
June
A suite of poems completed while on cross-institutional study at USYD.
February
Attends the Varuna Fellowship for one week, courtesy of the NSW Writers’ Centre. Fellow authors at the house included Lisa Fuller, Emily O’Grady, Hoa Pham, Wendy Searle and Carol Major.
First draft of 1001 Nights Under the Sun completed. Shortly after the fellowship, the third draft of The Lightreaders is completed. Submission material to follow.
2017
November
The Lightreaders is awarded the NSW Writers’ Centre Varuna Fellowship (under-30s category).
March
Second draft of The Lightreaders complete. A new project begins: a sexy fantasy based on the 1001 Arabian Nights, titled 1001 Nights Under the Sun.
2016
September
The Market is published in the Short and Twisted anthology.
June
Chris begins work on his third novel, The Lightreaders, about crime, fortune-telling, fate and choice. He writes this first draft while submitting The Hanging Gardens.
April
No More Piano Lessons receives a prize from the Rhonda Jankovic Literary Awards.
March
Third draft of The Hanging Gardens complete and ready for submission.
2015
October
The Market receives a Highly Commended prize from the Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre in their Anniversary Competition.
The same month, No More Piano Lessons is shortlisted for the QUT Postgraduate Prize.March
Chris begins a Master of Creative Writing at UTS.
2014
First draft of Hanging Gardens completed.
2013
Work widens from poetry (Is, The Rich and the Homeless) and short stories (Officer Campbell) to include articles: The dangers of globalisation and C. D. McDonald reviews Aladdin.
Work begins in earnest on a new novel under the working title Tirus Hanging Gardens, later changed to All for Birth. The title is the name of a spacecraft that researches bio-engineered crops for space colonisation. Jason Marquez is part of an emergency maintenance crew sent to replace the Hanging Gardens’ environmental controls, when they learn that the damage was sabotage. Soon Jason finds himself not only struggling to repair the vessel, but investigating a conspiracy. He’s a rescue officer, but even he’s not trained to deal with augmented commandos, unrestrained AIs, hungry biological experiments, mind-controlling psychics or deception from within his own team.
All for Birth plays with these tropes, creating an anthology of sci-fi’s themes condensed into one action-packed story.
2012
Design degree concludes. Outlining of a new novel-length work begins.
Winter in Japan and Sailor to the Blizzard are examples of poems also written this year.
2011
Chris travels to Korea on exchange to Yonsei University and takes a poetry and fiction class taught by the American poet Loren Goodman. Work written for that class includes:
Two Planes out of Sydney, a story about breaking up and saying goodbye; Retreat, a Hemingway imitation that subtly depicts a couple’s stay in the bush and their thoughts about their future; and the poems El Toro Blanco and The Way It Works, the beginning of a poetry streak that would continue into the future.
2010
Advocate is rewritten and reworked, growing to over 200,000 words. As is natural for first novels, it is submitted but does not find a place with a publisher. Chris begins a Bachelor of Design at UTS, majoring in Architecture.
2009
Chris travels throughout South America, spending most of his time in Peru but also visiting Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Cuba and Argentina.
2008
The short story Stormtossed is completed. A contemporary Da Vinci figure is brought back to life in the future to complete one of his most ambitious inventions. However, the melancholy of the future and his many-times-great-granddaughter convince him to sabotage the machine.
2005
Starts work on Advocate, an epic action novel about an Australian conscripted into war in 2035. Tom Jacka deceives the invaders, intentionally shutting down the SAM station he commands to draw in the enemy’s jets. He then reactivates the defences and destroys a significant portion of the enemy’s paratroopers. The events make him a poster boy for the Australian defence, a hero. Yet as he engages the invaders in brutal infantry-on-infantry combat, Jacka finds that the ideal of a hero is very different from his experience as a soldier.