A small welcome, and farewell to 2024.

As the year draws to an end, I have decided to launch my personal site. This site is intended to balance my creative goals with my professional services. At some point, there may be a need to separate the two, as I balance the two sides of anyone willing to pursue a creative passion in the era of hyperinflation.

In the 6th grade, I was a finalist in the “Nestle: Write around Australia” competition, a national short story competition for primary school-aged children. Like many kids who grew up with a scholastic mail subscription and a love of books, I lived in my stories. Becoming a finalist in this competition all those years ago would create an enduring yearning to tell stories. A yearning that has followed me doggedly into my adult years, unrelenting in its insistence on beckoning me toward the blank page.  

I progressed through adult life as any responsible adult would, ignoring the monkey of storytelling on my back, endlessly telling me to get back to the thing I am good at, and the thing I love. Losing my job on the back of COVID turned out to be the spark (and the kick up the backside) that would reignite my passion. I enrolled in Novel Writing Essentials at the Australian Writers Centre, a tab I had long bookmarked to return to on my browser. Since completing that course I have been using that momentum to keep writing, with the ultimate goal of having a novel published and out in the world. From there, I continued onto the Write your Novel program, graduating and completing my first rough draft of a novel idea.

Science Fiction and Fantasy are genres that move me in the wonder and worlds they evoke. The sense that the world is bigger, braver and more fantastical than the world we experience every day. These worlds have been my haven my whole life, and I’ve yearned to create and inspire. Perhaps it is my naivety (Or some form of detachment personality), but I've always found that the greater creativity is allowed stretch the wider and deeper our connection may grow through story. We grant ourselves permission to speak about complex issues plaguing humanity through Science Fiction and Fantasy.

With this website and community, I hope to foster that sense of community within the Australian fantasy and science fiction writers of the future. I am currently working on what I hope will be my debut novel - a story about memory, power and loss - and will intermittently share snippets and short story ideas I submit through the year.

Daniel J Lavorato