Yes! F***ing yes!!!!!
I've been writing this novel for over a year now but it's all been in bits and pieces. NOTHING is in chronological order. Until now! I have finally completed the prologue to my satisfaction! My main character, Jason, wakes up in his own back yard the day after his thirtieth birthday - with a dick drawn on the side of his face - and resolves to change his life after realising that after thirty years, all he's got to show for it is a dead-end job at the local hardware joint. Anyway, have a read and give us some feedback eh? I'm supposed to be writing from a bloke's viewpoint but being a sheila, I don't know if I've got the voice down right.
By the way, this stuff is copyright.

I fully intend to publish this one day if I can, so just thought I'd get that one out of the way.
PROLOGUE
Thirty.
You hear all the time about the perils of adolescence. The pimples, the peer pressure, the staggering realisation that sex isn’t quite the same thing as putting a condom on a carrot in Health Ed. A mate of mine nearly crapped himself on his first day at high school because his mother told him that kids would try and force him to smoke cigarettes. ‘What’s so bad about smoking anyway?’ he asked me. I told him it starves your blood cells of oxygen, and that if you inhaled too much in one go your dick would drop off.
Then there’s the whole mid-life crisis phenomenon. Not having reached that zenith yet, I can’t confirm anything for certain, but I’ve heard plenty. Apparently it’ll hit me in my forties. After ten or twenty years of the same routine – going off to work in the morning, coming home again at night, scoffing down sausage and veg for dins and then nodding off with a beer in front of the telly – I’ll suddenly feel the need to take up five or six completely random hobbies, dress in pastel T-shirts, drink expensive designer imported beer and watch
Two and a Half Men or its equivalent religiously even though by then I’ll probably feel more comfortable with
Australian Story or
The 7:30 Report. If that doesn’t fall under the heading of ‘mid-life crisis’, I don’t know what does. But there’s obviously been a lot of research done on the subject, so at least I know what to expect.
Nothing prepares you for when you hit thirty. Or when it hits you.
In my case, it hit me a day late, because I spent most of my thirtieth birthday pissed and consequently in a state of relative euphoria. The harsh realisation, that I was
thirty years old and had absolutely bugger-all to show for it, came the morning after the big birthday party, when I awoke in the backyard with a dick drawn on the side of my face and a headache bigger than a blue whale’s arse.
I panicked. All these thoughts were racing through my head at once, and I tried to put them in some sort of order, but I just couldn’t get past the one that screamed,
Holy s***! You’re an old man now! I got up and ran for the tap by the back door, hoping a cold shower on the back of the head might calm me down. On the way I tripped over the end of the keg I’d bought for the party – someone had rolled it under the barbie after we’d emptied it, but they’d left half of it sticking out into harm’s way – and collapsed to the ground clutching my stubbed toe and howling like an absolute madman. F***ing hell. At that moment it seemed like I couldn’t do anything right.
I suppose what it all boiled down to was the fact that I’d always gone through life with these fantastic plans for the future rolling around in my head, and that by the time I was thirty – big round number, ya know? and all the time in the world to get there – my dreams would be fulfilled. For instance, I’d be telling myself about the boat I’d buy one day when I had money. It became quite an obsession with me; even now, I could still tell you all about my beautiful catamaran, her measurements, the engine make, right down to the colour of the paint. The trouble was that I had never really considered just how I was going to
get the money to buy it. I just assumed that it would come along, much like the dream career and the family would come along. Never mind that at the time I turned thirty, I was working a part-time sales job at Rocky’s Home Hardware, where I was the oldest person by miles and the high-school kids who made up the rest of the taskforce were always giving me s***, because they were working for extra pocket money and I was working
because I had to; as for the family, the only time I’d ever brought up the idea of kids to Marty – whom I suppose you’d call my girlfriend for lack of a better word, we didn’t exactly set the world on fire with romance – she laughed so hard that she sprayed beer out of her nose, and I had to wipe it up with my Rocky’s Home Hardware apron because we were out of paper towels. About all the f***ing thing was good for anyway.
Thirty. S***. What could you do?
There was really only one option at this point, unless I wanted to further demean myself by crawling under the barbecue to suck out the last dregs of the keg. I got up and dusted myself off, then went inside to the bathroom so I could clean the artwork off my face. Staring into the mirror, two pairs of bloodshot blue eyes locked together in mutual abhorrence, I decided that this year was going to be
it. The year I cleaned my act up. The year I made something of my life.
That texta just wouldn’t f***ing come off. I ended up having to go to work an hour later, dick and all. At least the high-school kids got a laugh out of it.