Andrew Harris
Genre:
Skills:
Branch:
Auckland
Location:
Publications:
This Girl's Abroad
Samantha’s life is perfect – great clothes, great job, great boyfriend – until she finds her boss wants to shag her and her boyfriend is shagging someone else. But at least the clothes are still fabulous – and even more so if you’re a dog. Leaving town after dispensing some well-deserved revenge, Sam carves out a new career for herself in canine haute couture. Sam thinks she’s invincible, until she runs into a macho Italian with a penchant for garlic and an appendage named after a popular luncheon meat. By the time she’s finished with him, he’s only good for sandwiches. Set in Melbourne, Australia, in the late 70s, before email, mobile phones, FaceBook and Twitter, and before platform shoes and flares became retro, it was the time when The Pill became freely available to single women who took up the challenge of a changing world with gusto but not a lot of forethought. Samantha takes up this challenge with more gusto and a lot less forethought than most. Now if only she could just sort out her love life. A mix of comedy, romance, sex and violence, This Girl’s Abroad also covers the correct technique for defrosting a dead pug.
Mounted and Hung
Jennie’s life has always been planned to the nth degree, but no amount of planning could have prepared her for losing someone she loved. Someone she’d planned on spending the rest of her life with. She’d grieved, according to plan, and moving on. Actually, travelling to England was a hangover from Plan A. An addendum. A sub-clause she couldn’t let go of. It’s what Steve would have wanted. Wasn’t it? She and her best friend, Samantha, had had an interesting time in Australia, and now they’re in London, things are sure to get even more exciting. For one thing Jennie falls back on her long-ignored artistic talents as a means of making money. Painting portraits of the spoiled mutts Sam is making outfits for pays really well. Things are still going according to plan, at least in spirit, until she runs into Rupert Smythe-Brown, a Hooray Henry who’s missing a chin. Then any guidelines, addendums and sub-clause, paragraph 3.4s are thrown out the window. From being someone who’s always backed away from confrontation, Jennie turns feral, with hilarious results. And then there’s Mark, who doesn’t know when to quit. Jennie hadn’t planned on him at all.
Screwed for Money
Since puberty, Brenda has never had any issues with money: she’s always been well cared for by the old guys she’s latched onto. She provides the company and kudos, while they provide the cash. So for her to be screwed out of her own money by a bloke is both ironic and very inconvenient. If she’s to survive in London, she needs a job. But Brenda has issues with nine-to-five, preferring the nine-ty-five-and-loaded approach to income. Teaching others the art of relieving rich old gents of their spare change is one that’s born out of desperation. Craving security, as only a child of larcenous parents can, Brenda hopes to hell her school for girls pans out. Apart from the financial implications, she doesn’t much fancy a love life that’s destined to be littered with dodgy prostates and emergency CPR. Of course, Julian is someone and something Brenda could not possibly have anticipated.
Dietvale
WORK IN PROGRESS Following a quickie divorce due to her now late husband’s dodgy ticker, Marilyn Channing opts for the perfect accessory for the over-40 and recently-single, a new pair of boobs. That’s until the weight that’s cushioned her through years of infertility and marital neglect bites her on her plus-size arse. With her blood pressure being the most spectacular thing about her body, there’ll be no implanting without six to eight months’ of statins. No way is Marilyn waiting that long to jumpstart her new life and so after a rapid-fire google search and a ring around her girlfriends, she books into The Vale, haunt of B-list celebrities and those whose BMI is all BUM. The place is depressingly ‘tofu’ until the Clinical Director interrupts one of Marilyn’s regular whinge sessions. “Marilyn, when you say you’d do anything to lose the weight, do you really mean it.” She doesn’t hesitate and no sooner has a firm “Yes” slipped past her lips than she’s handed a legal document that’s far too long to read and she’s signing her body over to the clinic like a side of beef. Not that reading the fine print would have made any difference. Dietvale is a comic horror that explores the pressures placed on us by society to be thin and how unscrupulous those who prey on the vulnerable can truly be.