Recent Articles
How My Life Has Changed Since Australia Voted YES
Tuesday, 15 May 2018
Ten Daily
Holden Sheppard
I didn’t want to cry when I saw the ‘yes’ vote come through last November. For one thing, I still subconsciously think it’s unmanly to cry. For another, I wanted to inoculate myself against getting too excited. I wanted to wait until good ol’ Queen Liz had given it her royal OK.
But when the result broke, a cloud of endorphins and adrenaline and pent-up pain cut loose on my nervous system. There I was, sobbing into my morning oats like a total lumberjack.
My fiancé and I stood in the lounge room, hugging and crying. Finally, after 10 years together, we could get married.
A Note to Anyone Thinking of Voting 'No' to Same-Sex Marriage
Thursday, 17 August 2017
Huffington Post Australia
Holden Sheppard
The rule in the business world is, when you get an email that makes you mad, you don't reply immediately. You sit on it. Maybe you sleep on it. Maybe you mutter all kinds of epithets about the pain who sent it to you. You only respond when you're calm, and you have removed all emotion from the equation.
When the news broke about this government's same-sex marriage postal vote, I tried to apply this principle. Although the story was at its most newsworthy last week, I couldn't bring myself to write about it. I was dumbfounded that the whole country had been invited to vote on my rights. I couldn't marshal my thoughts. There was so much noise coming from my silent laptop screen as I read all the vitriolic screeds in the press.
10 Things I Wish I Knew About Being an Author When I Started
Friday, 13 October 2017
The Writers' Corner
Holden Sheppard
As a boy, I was easily duped by some of the myths that swirl around becoming an author. The Myth of Overnight Success. The Myth of the Rich and Famous Author. The Myth of the Divine Muse and Her Timely Inspiration. The Myth of the Validation of Publication.
It's 20 Years Since The First Harry Potter And I'm Still Under J.K.Rowling's Spell
Monday, 26 June 2017
Huffington Post Australia
Holden Sheppard
I remember the first time I heard of Harry Potter. It was at school in the year 2000 and a boy at my table whipped out a novel called 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire' during silent reading time.
"Harry Potter? More like Harry Pothead. Ha ha," I jeered, like a pre-pubescent, bogan version of Nelson Muntz from 'The Simpsons'.
I'm not sure what I'm more ashamed of here: mocking someone for being bookish when I was often teased for being the same (call it a defence mechanism); the witless substitution of "Potter" for "Pothead"; or the fact that, being 12, I didn't actually know what pothead meant. Insult fail.
