About The Author James WF Roberts (Red Wolf) , award winning poet Runner Up, Page Seventeen Poetry prize 2012 (Busy Bird Press Aust), Highly commended for the John Shaw Nielson poetry prize, Fellowship of Aust. Writers 2009/10. Performance Poet on stages around Melbourne and country Victoria, Australia.
Has appeared on Red Lobster Poetry TV show, hosts his own poetry and spoken word show radio show on www.phoenixfm.org.au Several times, James has been short-listed for the Fermoy International poetry prize (Republic of Ireland), has been in horror and poetry anthologies in the USA (Spirit of Poe Literary Land mark press 2011/12) and (Slaughter House vol. 3 the Serial Killer edition, Siren's call publications.
As well as many other poetry journals in print and online in Romania, India, the United Kingdom and Australia. (see inside for complete publishing details). He is also the editor and curator of the online literary journal: Red Wolf Press Australia, http://redwolfpressaustralia.blogspot.com.au/
About The Book Tuesday Suicide: Confessions
John Booker is dead. Or is he death? Faded, washed up late night TV host, drug addict, sex fiend, John Booker is bored to death. He wakes up one morning believing he is the king of the dead. Drug induced psychosis? Or something much scarier? Is he really falling through different realities? Is he really turning into the King of the Dead? Can he really see the sins and the secret desires, the hidden truths that lie in the heart's of all men? Told backwards through an email he sends to his partner in crime, the deviant, addict and tortured woman, Helena Huntington-Dale. A new party drug has hit the streets, Tuesday Suicide; more euphoric than smack, more demonic than Ice and Speed; the ultimate drug, aggressive sexual potency, almost super-human strength, demonic and satanic hallucinations. A mass murderer confesses his crimes, his sins. Is his confession the last ruse of a desperate man? Or his final act, before he must pay for his deeds, an act of love and protection for the one who loves the most? Join John Booker as he takes you on a ride of his lifetime.
My Review Of Tuesday Suicide
4 out of 5 Stars A rollercoaster ride with a lunatic, December 28, 2015 By Imagine The Possibilities This review is from: Tuesday Suicide: Confessions (Kindle Edition) Tuesday suicide defined as the lowest point of drug withdrawal. As you come down from your long weekend, a high like no other and slip past the Point of no return. Feeling as if death is the next logical choice for you.
The characters are well drawn with a deep, transcending emotional turmoil. Their lives spiraling out of control, from the daily mundane lifestyles they live into a dark and twisted illusion. Or is it real? Only the author James WF Roberts can illuminate the reality of this. Johnny and Helena are so not the pillars of the community, at least not the world's view of what one would be.
I was sucked into a mind blowing ride, a virtual tour you could say, into the mind of a lunatic. I was enthralled with the struggle I felt taking place within each character as the story progresses. The love and non complacent statute between Johnny and Helena is formed from their past. Helena, abused and Johnny forced into adult hood without knowing his father. Both unloved in the typical ways of life. Tortured and tormented by their past and brought together, with inimical results.
I would recommend this book for anyone 18+ ...it's a fascinating story.
Det. Danny Rogers is on the hunt for a mass murderer or is he hunting the very devil himself? John Booker has tasted blood. Now he wants more. Terror stalks the streets of Melbourne; will we all be judged for our actions, our dreams and our darkest desires? John Booker and Helena Huntington-Dale are falling through realities, falling through addictions, falling through lust, trust and blood. Are they evil or are they the virtuous? Corruption at every turn. Terror stalks the night. Organised Crime and drug barons are running scared. Will John and Helena bring down the secret child sex ring, that runs the city? Realities are crumbling all around John Booker and Helena. Why is darkness so much more seductive than light? The streets of Melbourne are running red in blood. John Booker is dead and Helena is on the edge of insanity and depravity. Why are so many realities crumbling? Converging around John and Helena? Is John Booker the new Messiah, in the next step of human evolution? Can they trust each other? Are they doomed to fail? What is stronger… love, lust, addiction or power? The bodies are piling up. The drugs are taking their toll and loyalty is put to the test. Tuesday Suicide: "Spree" The next chapter of the Tuesday Suicide saga, continued on from Confessions. What’s the price of desire? What’s the price of love?
Meet The Characters From The Book Trailer For Tuesday Suicide
Mikey Sutherland as John Booker and Rebecca Lee as Helena Huntington-dale by James WF Roberts
Helena Mono
John & Helena
Dead Helena (Becca Lee)
Please Enjoy The Book Trailer
Now Let's take another deeper journey into the life of the author as we sit down for an exclusive Interview with James WF Roberts.
Hello and thanks for having me again, so soon. My name is James WF Roberts, I am 33 and am a Melbourne based writer and spoken-word artist, involved in the Melbourne poetry scene. Today we are talking about my Transgressive/meta-horror/erotic fiction series ‘Tuesday Suicide’. So far parts, or acts 1 and 2: Confessions and Spree have been released in e-book and paperback formats, available through all leading retailers, published through Black Beauty Presents LLC.
Tell us about your books.
“Sexy, edgy, beautifully written with masterful twists and turns”. Vanessa de Largie Australian Actress and Author.
Tuesday Suicide—the ultimate party drug has hit the streets of Melbourne. More euphoric than smack, more addictive than crystal meth—does Tuesday Suicide really turn you into a vengeful God, or is it all a drug induced psychosis? John Booker is dead! Or is he death? Fading late night TV star John Booker is bored to death with life. No drug, no sexual conquest, nothing fulfils him anymore. He wakes up one Friday with the clarity seldom found in the modern world... What would push you over the edge? What if you were losing your grip on sanity? What if you could travel through time, space and reality randomly without control? The first act of the Tuesday Suicide saga, Confessions sets up the narrative structure, sets up the motivations of John Booker and his only companion Helena Huntington-Dale—a dark angel of desire, lost, troubled, Heroin addict and the love of John’s life. As they embark on a drug fuelled violent and sexual frenzy through the streets of Melbourne on a quest for purity, justice and revenge. On the hunt for the leaders of a notorious ring, will revenge bring clarity and transcendence or will their blood lust know no end? Who can they trust? Will their obsession, their devotion to each other, be their undoing? And will Helena learn the truth about her best friend and drug dealer Ursula before it is too late? It is a strange hybrid book series, part police procedural, part confession, part women’s melodrama, part erotic memoir, with classical and philosophical allusions all the way through. I have been working on the idea of this series for several years, 2005 is when I first started writing a novella called Escape to the New Dawn, which became Voice, then became zombie zeitgeist, which became morte de poet then became Flesh and then I settled on the title Tuesday Suicide. The main inspiration for the heroin, Helena Huntington-Dale; Helen of Troy, the Arthur Legend, Mallory Knox from Natural Born Killers, Rosemary West; but the most important influence on Helena would be two good friends and colleagues of mine, Rebecca Lee, who plays Helena in the book trailer and publicity stills I took, she is a model so it helps having a model as the basis of a character—and her personality is based on my mentor and friend Vanessa de Largie (Australian actress, writer and Huffington post blogger), who gave me a little bit of a blurb for Confessions when it came out. And John Booker is based on myself of course and the actual astrologer, soldier and mathematician John Booker who fought in the English civil as well as the poor unfortunate man, John Booker, the US Marine who attacked a base a few years ago. I like splicing things together. But the influences of the book itself run from everything, from Dante’s Divine Comedy to the American Psycho to Natural Born Killers, I basically set out to write an old fashioned anti-hero myth, a Hercules, Arthur or Odysseus for the Cyber age. It is extremely violent, sexy, edgy, philosophical and quite sad and beautiful towards the end and the end is not what the readers are going to expect.
What are three of your Favourite lines:
A difficult question. I guess my favourite three lines of Tuesday Suicide, are the first three lines in Confessions, because they open the book, they set everything up that you need to know, fire the gun and the racers are off.
“Have you ever wondered what a bullet tastes like? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to stare down the barrel of the gun? The barrel in your mouth, the metal on your tongue, just barely touching your lips? I wonder why they call suicide a coward’s way out—do you know how brave it is to end things on your own terms?”
Tell us about your writing process:
I really hate this question. You hear it all the time on panel shows and writer’s festivals and fellow writers and readers always ask me this. I don’t know what my process is really. I wish I had a really clever and inspiring thing to say, but I guess I am too busy writing, to actually notice how I do it—wow there’s a pretentious answer for you. I do have a few ideas here and there where I want things to go and what I want to happen. Sometimes I will draft the one chapter over and over again for months or years, and sometimes I will just write a few hundred words here, a few thousand words there and insert them, in what I would imagine sometimes seems randomly. Because there is no true timeline in Tuesday Suicide; everything that happens in the series is happening at once, a bit like the idea in the World Atlas book and movie—in many ways I think my process is a bit like the later years of William S. Burroughs, his whole shot gun or scatter-gun approach to work, you know loading paint pellets into a double barrel shot gun and firing the colours at famous works of art, or a wall or a person and hoping like Hell that it all works and fits. The writing process is so different and so distinct for every writer that is hard to isolate one thing and talk about it. The best thing about being a writer is that you can spend all day looking out the window, but you are actually working—that is also the biggest problem with being a writer, how the Hell do you switch off? Every person I talk to, interact with, or have ever met in my life, every conversation or situation I am in, I have always imagined like that scene was on TV and I am an active participant and a passive observer. I hope that makes sense. So, it is really hard for me to switch off.
What is your favourite genre to read?
I actually don’t read all that much fiction. I mainly read philosophical journals and books, poetry anthologies, poetry criticisms and books on or about people like Rilke, William Blake, Ginsberg, Kafka, Jung, Freud, Masters and Johnsons, the joy of sex, those kinds of things. I guess from an academic standpoint, everything I read, I re-imagine or re-interpret into a fictional portrayal. Having said that though I do love a good horror short story or an anthology of stories, some classic science fiction here and there.
What would you say is the one thing are you most passionate about?
I would have to say Transgressive art. I am not a person for rules or constraints, or boundaries and I am most passionate about characters and ideas that break away the bonds of limitations, the boundaries or conventions of form or style. People like Seth Macfarlane, Freddie Mercury, Allen Ginsberg, Brett Ellis Eaton, W.S. Burroughs and Vanessa de Largie have always been huge influences on my work and my life.
Can you name something you cannot live without?
Oh yes. Two very strong addictions, I know you said one thing, but for me it would have to be two things equally, coffee and cigarettes.
Has writing this series had an effect on you and how you now live your life?
I like to think of writing, especially my style of writing to be somewhere similar to ‘method acting’; I don’t think you can be a writer without having some sort of neurosis or psychosis—and I certainly don’t think you can write dark and twisted, erotic, transgressive things like the Tuesday Suicide—without some sort of adverse effect lingering around. It sounds strange but I sometimes think that writers are more than just a little dissociative, I actually think that they inhabit the worlds they create—that writers create worlds and populate the worlds with real flesh and blood characters—and sadly that takes a toll on relationships, emotions, lifestyles and sadly one’s own emotional health.
If someone who hasn’t read any your book and they asked you to describe it (the elevator pitch!) what would you say?
A very flawed man, a faded celebrity wakes up one day and thinks he is turning into the King of the Dead, the grim reaper. Imagine you were that man, could see and feel all the evils of the world, what would you do, how would you behave? Think of Natural Born Killers, meets Dante’s Divine Comedy, meets Junkie, meets American Psycho meets Requiem For a Dream. Imagine the strangest, darkest and most tragic love story, that is the closest you can get to where Tuesday Suicide inhabits.
Do you have a special place where you write?
My bedroom, is more of an office, library, TV room with a huge bed in the middle of it, rather than a normal bedroom I guess, that is where I mainly write and inhabit. But, I can write everywhere and anywhere. Trains, trams, buses, bars, cafes, strip clubs, night clubs; if you have a little notebook it’s easier to write in the las two places. I tend to write when I get an idea so anywhere is my study. My father used to write songs and music, strangely enough when he was on the toilet, he used to shout out to my mother to get him pen and paper when ‘hard at work’; but many people say that so, pretty much anywhere I guess. Like I said earlier, a writer can look out the window all day and still be working.
Do you write from an outline or a plan?
Sometimes I have a road map, kinda like I said before, sometimes I don’t. I think the writer often goes on the same experience as the reader, you have a start, a middle and an end. But how does the journey begin? What happens to put the stakes up? Where does it end and why does it end that way? Writing is very much like life, it is a journey and experience, the ending really doesn’t matter that much, especially in novels and novellas; writing in all long forms is about the destination and the construction, the mechanics of the text rather than the viewpoint or the images you are building. I think writing, especially poetry, but you could bring this into longer forms as well, is like what Claude Debussy said about music, that ““Music is the space between the notes”. I think poetry, or let’s say art for the sake of argument is what happens between the words, the negative force of the ‘white-space’ of the page is where most of the craft of the writer lies. It is what is not said, rather than what is said. Wow! Didn’t I just go off a strange naval gazing tangent.
If you had the opportunity to stay on a remote island for a month, with food, water and shelter provided, what would be your:
Must have item?
Stationary set: box of pens or pencils and a huge ream of paper.
Would like to have item?
A case of single malt whisky.
Luxury item to take with you?
A mattress.
Can you tell us about your new writing projects?
I am basically writing poetry all the time for gigs and submissions and of course will be doing the editing stuff for part 3 of Tuesday when I get it back from the editor, and then working on parts 4, 5 and 6. I am starting a Masters of Communication and Media next year so am trying to get a lot of stuff finished and finalised before that. And, I am toying around with some short horror movie ideas and a re-imaging of Puccini’s La Boehme, a new media style absurdist tragedy, where there is no opera, no Italian, just the main characters in a Bohemian section of Melbourne, called Brunswick, where an actor, a writer, a musician and playboy all share a house and a tantalizing, mysterious woman moves in upstairs, it is essentially the same idea of La Boheme but modernized and dealing with more contemporary issues like drug addiction and domestic violence, rather than consumption. And I have some interesting ideas about re-imaging the Canterbury tales, and doing a long form epic poetry style book or play, I always have lots of balls in the air, lots of fingers in different pies. Tuesday Suicide: Confessions: http://www.amazon.com/Tuesday-Suicide-Confessions-James-Roberts-ebook/dp/B00Y8ZBC4G
A way of promoting my blog and my publishing company I am going to start one day, and a great way of promoting my poetry books.
What do you find to be the greatest advantage of self-publishing?
The printing costs are relatively small and you can make more money.
Conversely, what do you think self-published authors might be missing out on?
The promotional and editorial help an established house can give you.
With the number of self-published books increasing, it can be difficult for authors to make their books stand out. How do you go about this? Poetry gigs, reviews, promos, guerrilla marketing tactics, online.
Who designed your book covers?
I design my own poetry book covers. For Tuesday Suicide my publisher and I discuss ideas and a designer does it.
Do you believe that self-published authors can produce books as high-quality as the traditional published?
Yes, but they don’t have the distribution and Amazon makes it quite difficult to promote self-published books, where Lulu is a lot more user friendly in that regard.
This has been a very enlightening experience. Thank you for being so open and forthcoming.
Thank you Sarah & Margaret, it has been my pleasure. To my fans: Thanks for reading, James.
For more information about James and his books, please take a look at the links below.