James West thought he had the perfect surname for writing an expatriate's memoirs set in China. But now that Beijing Blur is in the bookshops he realises 'W' authors tend to be shelved in the darkest corners, close to the ground.
West can ease his angst with the knowledge that his book is likely to appear in a number of sections in the shops and attract plenty of online genre tags - China, travel, autobiography, gay literature. And the ambitious Australian creates the sense that if Dymocks fails to recognise his polymathic potential, he may just go into each shop and stack Beijing Blur in the appropriate sections himself.
West is 27 and promoting a memoir conceived at 23 when, while working as a journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he started a one-year secondment to China Radio International (CRI), the mainland's overseas broadcaster.
He is now a producer for Hack, a national current affairs programme broadcast daily on Australia's government-owned youth radio station Triple J. Since leaving China West has completed a master's degree in journalism at New York University, kept a blog and worked on documentaries.
Writing hard copy seems a little slow and old-school for a driven Generation Y scribe. Men West's age are not supposed to be interested in books. He should be floating among the clouds in Web 2.0 looking down on complete sentences as the corny artefact of the days when living overseas was a big deal.
But West insists Gen Y is alive to the novel. Most of his reading is literary fiction, he says, because he sees too much non-fiction during a working day in journalism. And while he likes his digital toys, he sees them as new ways of carrying stories. 'I think the key to it all is storytelling,' he says over coffee amid the gentrifying hipness of Sydney's Newtown. 'I do think storytelling will continue to exist but in many different forms.
'I am young and I wanted to experiment with a lot of different voices and forms and media. There are various styles in the book as well. So I wanted to experiment with this old-school form and f*** it up a little. I wanted to play with it, write it a bit like a blog, a diary, some reportage.'