These days my stories always begin with girls: one of the perils of writing novels about love is that in learning to understand it, it takes on an inflated significance in one’s own life. But then, as Morrissey sang, “if it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together.” I believe that [...]
Today, my first book, Kiss Me, Genius Boy, is out on Amazon. It’s still waiting on its official cover, coming from the wonderful Rebecca Cochrane, art director. Thanks to my impatience (and the promise I made to a girl I met in a bar that I’d gift her a free copy), it’s up with a [...]
A long time ago, when blogging was new and cool, I used to update here regularly. When I started work, I ended up getting confused about how to reconcile my relatively frank online persona with what I thought had to be a more sanitized version for public, and particularly workplace, consumption. Now those days of [...]
About two weeks I had my first ever paid-for article published. “Are Videogames Conservative?” appeared in the September edition of The IPA Review (57:3). Today, Libby Price, a presenter on Melbourne radio station 3LO, got in contact with me to do a radio interview. I managed to schedule a break in my Berlitz training so [...]
Last Tuesday, I confirmed that I had a job interview with Berlitz in Ôsaka, on Thursday. I called in my resignation from NOVA, with one day’s notice, at about 11:30. By 11:00 the next morning, I’d sent my luggage to a guest-house in Ôsaka, and was on the train to Tôkyô, ready to catch the [...]
After a whole weekend in Tôkyô, I was broke, and feeling like I couldn’t wait to get out of Ôta so I wouldn’t have to spend 4000¥ every time I wanted to do something interesting. Also, I’d finally settled in: I had internet access, a mobile phone, I’d finished my training, and I was working [...]
Note: I compressed the thumbnails too much when posting this, so please click on the the images to see the full-size, full-quality versions. Saturday 17 September Even though Tôkyô was 2 hours and about 3000¥ in train fares away, I could hardly not go, given that I’m a videogames researcher and all… Makuhari Messe, where [...]
Monday 12 September The LDP won the election! Hooray! Gotta love that Koizumi Junichiro: he’s a gutsy guy, and he’s got great hair. Monday, I got up early to climb Kanayama, the local mountain, as I’d intended to the day before but hadn’t been able to because of the rain. To call Kanayama a mountain [...]
So, I’ve been slack. What started out as a series of posts on two weeks in Japan still hasn’t been finished after a month here. It’s been long enough that I’ve started to forget what days I did things on, so this may be a little bit vague. On the plus-side, the boring bits have [...]
On 31 August 2005, I left Melbourne on a Malaysia airlines flight from Melbourne to Narita airport near Tokyo, to take up a job working in Japan as an English instructor at a NOVA language school. The last two weeks have been fairly hectic, but I’ve finally secured constant internet access and am settling down. [...]
About
Ben Hourigan is an indie novelist, the author of Kiss Me, Genius Boy (2011). He is also the manager of digital operations at a Melbourne design publisher, a freelance writer and editor, and the founder of ebook label hourigan.co.
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- â@lilithia: @benhourigan You're cool.â Just saw this. Can't remember if this was our spoiler discussion? <3
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