Joy Ride
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"When your world falls apart through no fault of your own, what can you do? And who understands anyway? Sometimes anger doesn’t make sense. You’re just angry. And you have to get it out of you. Somehow.
Scott wakes one morning to find he no longer has the family he thought he had. His whole world changes and he hates it. And no-one understands. Except Jason. This is Scott’s story of the year and events that changed him. Forever." Joy Ride was first published in 1999 by Wakefield Press. The artwork for the original cover was a photo taken of wall art by Craig James and the design was completed by Lia Nicholson. |
Set in the mid 1990s in Adelaide, South Australia, the inspiration for Joy Ride came from multiple sources:
- students with broken families who I worked with as a teacher and counsellor
- multiple news stories around youth crime in the 1990s
- a real incident where two kids stole a bus and headed up the freeway
I wanted to give a voice to kids whose lives are messed up by the selfish actions of their parents. Too many times, I heard parents say, 'It's between us. But the kids will be alright,' when in fact the kids are seldom alright, especially if they are caught in marriage breakups in their early teens when they are struggling with their own transition from childhood to young adulthood and need stability and security. Sadly, after writing his book, my kids went through the same tragedy.
When the book was first published, the reader reaction to Joy Ride was fascinating. Readers under thirty sent me fan mail and thanked me for telling their stories. Readers over thirty, including teaching colleagues, hated the book because Jason and Scott represent the very boys they detest in their classes and suburbs. Go figure the truth.
Joy Ride was republished in 2025 by Millswood Books. Cover art and design is a combination of multiple AI generated images reimagined through Photoshop.
Print copies at $25 each plus postage can be ordered directly from me by emailing [email protected]. I will provide an invoice with details for payment and, upon payment, I will send you the books you order. Depending on the printer, the turnaround is usually 2-3 weeks.
ebook and print copies can be ordered from various publishers via this link: https://books2read.com/u/bxykBv
Print and ebook versions can also be ordered through Amazon by clicking on the following link:
JOY RIDE
- students with broken families who I worked with as a teacher and counsellor
- multiple news stories around youth crime in the 1990s
- a real incident where two kids stole a bus and headed up the freeway
I wanted to give a voice to kids whose lives are messed up by the selfish actions of their parents. Too many times, I heard parents say, 'It's between us. But the kids will be alright,' when in fact the kids are seldom alright, especially if they are caught in marriage breakups in their early teens when they are struggling with their own transition from childhood to young adulthood and need stability and security. Sadly, after writing his book, my kids went through the same tragedy.
When the book was first published, the reader reaction to Joy Ride was fascinating. Readers under thirty sent me fan mail and thanked me for telling their stories. Readers over thirty, including teaching colleagues, hated the book because Jason and Scott represent the very boys they detest in their classes and suburbs. Go figure the truth.
Joy Ride was republished in 2025 by Millswood Books. Cover art and design is a combination of multiple AI generated images reimagined through Photoshop.
Print copies at $25 each plus postage can be ordered directly from me by emailing [email protected]. I will provide an invoice with details for payment and, upon payment, I will send you the books you order. Depending on the printer, the turnaround is usually 2-3 weeks.
ebook and print copies can be ordered from various publishers via this link: https://books2read.com/u/bxykBv
Print and ebook versions can also be ordered through Amazon by clicking on the following link:
JOY RIDE
Sample chapter:
Prologue
If you’re reading this, miracles happen. See, my girlfriend, Cassie, helped me with drafting, by checking my spelling and grammar, but when I asked her if she thought I should get it published she laughed and told me she didn’t think anyone would read what I’ve written.
‘It’s too real,’ she said. ‘Oldies won’t let kids read it.’
I got angry about that, but she said she was sorry and that she was only trying to be honest.
‘A lot of adults don’t like kids knowing the whole truth about growing up. They like kids to believe in happy endings and see people winning. They don’t want us to know some kids don’t have a perfect life.’
I told her my story is about winning, but she couldn’t see that in what she read. Then, again, I haven’t let her read the whole story yet, but that’s because I know she would spit badly if she read certain bits.
When I showed her the very first draft, she gave me a book called The Catcher in the Rye. She told me the guy who wrote it tried to tell the truth about what it was like being a teenage boy in the 1950s, but he couldn’t sell his book because people kept banning it, or demanding it be censored. She said lots of people back in the day thought it was wrong to let teenagers read about the kinds of hassles some kids have to go through.
I don’t think much has changed. Adults hate seeing us talking about stuff or hanging around together without their constant vigilance. It scares them. If The Catcher in the Rye story that Cassie told me is true, it must have really scared adults back in the 1950s and 1960s when being teenagers was really a new thing – which is weird when I realised that the kids the adults way back then were scared of are the adults who are scared of us now.
Cassie said my story was going to be like that book, so I tried reading The Catcher in the Rye, but it’s way too old, and the kid in the novel is a lost-it, you know, a kid who totally doesn’t know what he wants to be. But, then, who really does?
Cassie asked me who I was writing my story for. At the time, I told her I didn’t know. But that’s not true. I know who it’s for. I wrote it for lots of people. I wrote it for guys like Jason and me, guys who keep getting screwed by parents like my mother, who forget about loving their kids, and my old man, who’s so selfish he screwed up everybody else’s life so he can go and do whatever he wants. And I wrote it for all those adults who hate kids like us; the teachers, the cops, the do-gooders, the adults who want kids like us to disappear and not be heard from. Bad luck. We exist. Adults create us.
I wrote this story for all the kids I met in the last couple of years, who’ve been through court like we have, kids who have lousy parents, kids who have to struggle to get a life together on their own.
And I guess I really wrote it mostly for Jason and me, because it’s our story and I want to make sense of it. It’s our story – we’re in it – it’s us as we were, two years ago.
I was always into writing little stories and stuff when I was in primary school. Even in Year Eight, at the old school, before I was made to leave, I liked writing stories over everything else. I even had an idea, once, that I could be a journalist, or maybe a writer like Stephen King. I really liked creating stories about people getting mangled by psychos, and stuff like that, but none of the teachers ever liked what I wrote. They told me my stories were too graphic, too brutal and they asked why I couldn’t write more interesting stories, like mysteries or heroic tales, stories they would like to read, As if I cared what they liked. I wrote what I liked to write. I was proud of my stories.
I ended up hating English in Year Nine because I was stuck with Dork Reynolds who kept sticking his nose in every piece of work I did.
‘That’s spelt this way,’ he’d say, or, ‘I get it, Scott, but it would read better if you added this, or rearranged that,’ and he’d change what I wrote, and I hated that. It’s my work, I used to think. Leave it alone. But he wouldn’t. He kept telling me I had real talent as a writer, but then he’d go on changing everything I wrote. He insisted we all wrote poems to learn about imagery, and some other stuff. Seriously, the poems the teachers choose for classes suck. The best poems can’t be repeated in classrooms because as soon as we hook up a rhyme for ‘luck’ the teachers have hysterics.
I remember Reynolds read a moronic piece to us called ‘I’m a Nooligan’, or some title like that, and another one called ‘Dumb Insolence’, and he said some kids were just like the ones in the poems. And then I realised Reynolds was reading those poems about us – not to us, but about us. That got to me. That’s when I knew he was no different from every other teacher in my old school, and that he couldn’t stand kids like me.
Then all the other stuff happened, and I stopped writing. Until now.
Maybe I just need to get all this out, like therapy. I read some article in class last term that said it was good to write down things that are getting at me. Maybe all this stuff’s been annoying me for way too long. I don’t know. But it’s out now. I just hope someone gets to read this, will see what happened – what is still happening to heaps of kids – and understand why we do what we do. I’m not looking for anything – no way am I asking for sympathy. I just want people to see it as it is for kids like Jason and me – as it really is.
If you’re reading this, miracles happen. See, my girlfriend, Cassie, helped me with drafting, by checking my spelling and grammar, but when I asked her if she thought I should get it published she laughed and told me she didn’t think anyone would read what I’ve written.
‘It’s too real,’ she said. ‘Oldies won’t let kids read it.’
I got angry about that, but she said she was sorry and that she was only trying to be honest.
‘A lot of adults don’t like kids knowing the whole truth about growing up. They like kids to believe in happy endings and see people winning. They don’t want us to know some kids don’t have a perfect life.’
I told her my story is about winning, but she couldn’t see that in what she read. Then, again, I haven’t let her read the whole story yet, but that’s because I know she would spit badly if she read certain bits.
When I showed her the very first draft, she gave me a book called The Catcher in the Rye. She told me the guy who wrote it tried to tell the truth about what it was like being a teenage boy in the 1950s, but he couldn’t sell his book because people kept banning it, or demanding it be censored. She said lots of people back in the day thought it was wrong to let teenagers read about the kinds of hassles some kids have to go through.
I don’t think much has changed. Adults hate seeing us talking about stuff or hanging around together without their constant vigilance. It scares them. If The Catcher in the Rye story that Cassie told me is true, it must have really scared adults back in the 1950s and 1960s when being teenagers was really a new thing – which is weird when I realised that the kids the adults way back then were scared of are the adults who are scared of us now.
Cassie said my story was going to be like that book, so I tried reading The Catcher in the Rye, but it’s way too old, and the kid in the novel is a lost-it, you know, a kid who totally doesn’t know what he wants to be. But, then, who really does?
Cassie asked me who I was writing my story for. At the time, I told her I didn’t know. But that’s not true. I know who it’s for. I wrote it for lots of people. I wrote it for guys like Jason and me, guys who keep getting screwed by parents like my mother, who forget about loving their kids, and my old man, who’s so selfish he screwed up everybody else’s life so he can go and do whatever he wants. And I wrote it for all those adults who hate kids like us; the teachers, the cops, the do-gooders, the adults who want kids like us to disappear and not be heard from. Bad luck. We exist. Adults create us.
I wrote this story for all the kids I met in the last couple of years, who’ve been through court like we have, kids who have lousy parents, kids who have to struggle to get a life together on their own.
And I guess I really wrote it mostly for Jason and me, because it’s our story and I want to make sense of it. It’s our story – we’re in it – it’s us as we were, two years ago.
I was always into writing little stories and stuff when I was in primary school. Even in Year Eight, at the old school, before I was made to leave, I liked writing stories over everything else. I even had an idea, once, that I could be a journalist, or maybe a writer like Stephen King. I really liked creating stories about people getting mangled by psychos, and stuff like that, but none of the teachers ever liked what I wrote. They told me my stories were too graphic, too brutal and they asked why I couldn’t write more interesting stories, like mysteries or heroic tales, stories they would like to read, As if I cared what they liked. I wrote what I liked to write. I was proud of my stories.
I ended up hating English in Year Nine because I was stuck with Dork Reynolds who kept sticking his nose in every piece of work I did.
‘That’s spelt this way,’ he’d say, or, ‘I get it, Scott, but it would read better if you added this, or rearranged that,’ and he’d change what I wrote, and I hated that. It’s my work, I used to think. Leave it alone. But he wouldn’t. He kept telling me I had real talent as a writer, but then he’d go on changing everything I wrote. He insisted we all wrote poems to learn about imagery, and some other stuff. Seriously, the poems the teachers choose for classes suck. The best poems can’t be repeated in classrooms because as soon as we hook up a rhyme for ‘luck’ the teachers have hysterics.
I remember Reynolds read a moronic piece to us called ‘I’m a Nooligan’, or some title like that, and another one called ‘Dumb Insolence’, and he said some kids were just like the ones in the poems. And then I realised Reynolds was reading those poems about us – not to us, but about us. That got to me. That’s when I knew he was no different from every other teacher in my old school, and that he couldn’t stand kids like me.
Then all the other stuff happened, and I stopped writing. Until now.
Maybe I just need to get all this out, like therapy. I read some article in class last term that said it was good to write down things that are getting at me. Maybe all this stuff’s been annoying me for way too long. I don’t know. But it’s out now. I just hope someone gets to read this, will see what happened – what is still happening to heaps of kids – and understand why we do what we do. I’m not looking for anything – no way am I asking for sympathy. I just want people to see it as it is for kids like Jason and me – as it really is.