Fiction
Selected work
A novella, an award-winning short screenplay, and excerpts from the novel Step Back.
A Novella
The Keeping
Salt & Silver
A stone worn smooth by the tide, a village that keeps its secrets in the dark between the harbour lights. The Keeping is a novella of salt, silver, and the things we carry so they are never quite lost.
Melbourne International Screenplay Awards
Same Time Next Year
By Brandon Smith
"Same Time Next Year is a beautifully realised screenplay that approaches love, grief and remembrance with remarkable confidence and emotional maturity. Through its understated storytelling and evocative visual language, the script creates an intimate world where every moment feels purposeful, allowing the emotional journey to unfold with quiet authenticity. The result is a deeply affecting story that lingers long after the final page.
The screenplay demonstrates a sophisticated command of atmosphere and character, balancing lyrical imagery with genuine emotional truth. Martin's grief is explored with restraint and compassion, while the supporting characters enrich the narrative through their warmth and quiet humanity. Rather than relying on exposition, the screenplay trusts visual storytelling and silence, creating moments that resonate through subtlety rather than sentimentality.
What ultimately distinguishes Same Time Next Year is the way its craftsmanship serves the story rather than drawing attention to itself. Beneath its elegant structure lies a deeply human exploration of loss, acceptance and enduring love, resulting in a screenplay that feels both emotionally resonant and cinematically assured."
The novel — Step Back
These are excerpts from the fictional novel Step Back — a Gen Xer's journey through the 90s and naughties, inner Sydney to London, Paris, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and the kind of nights that take thirty years to make sense of.
Fiction. Names changed, characters combined, years compressed. The famous appear only in scenes that never happened; all dialogue is invented. No statement of fact is made about any real person, living or dead.
"Every brush with celebrity left a scar."
Prose Fiction
4 pieces-
01
→Table DancingA fortnightly grind between London and Paris, a relationship that was already over, and a private basement gig where Mr. K danced across the tables. Paris, 2002.
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02
→CalifornicationFour weeks in the back of a car, a short woman with wrecking-ball enthusiasm, Tim Robbins in a hotel lobby, and Macy Gray dripping sweat from a foot-high stage. Hollywood, circa the 90s.
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03
→Cranberry ShirtA weekend that lasted a summer — Oxford Street, a flat in Bexley, and a cranberry shirt that told a story its owner never quite admitted to. Sydney, circa 1992.
Step Back
The records that made the journey
Not a playlist. A paper trail — the music that was playing when things happened, or should have been. Jamiroquai, Pulp, Daft Punk, The Verve, and the rest.
The Step Back Soundtrack →