ARAL BEREUX'S INTERVIEWS

Find out the importance of book trailers and what makes Aral Bereux tick.
 An interview with Jennifer Perry.
I remember the first time I picked up a Stephen King novel. From the first pages of Salem's Lot,  the horror genre grasped me in her claws, refusing to let me go. Little did I know the comfort it would bring over years of teenage angst and sometimes the uncertainties of the adult world.

From an early age, I proclaimed I was to become an author. I remember adamantly stating it in front of my English class several times. Why I never followed the initial dream, I'll never be certain, other than to attribute it to mediocrity and the whole "life just gets in the way" excuse.

​But it was an excuse. I never stopped writing; page after page, night after night. I never stopped dreaming up characters, situations, and tangled plots. The J Rae Chronicles are the product of those intense nights of hiding in my head, wondering about real life and the challenges we face. As a child growing into a teenager, I acutely understood the intricacies of human nature - and more so today.

​Coupled with my love for the horror genre, and never having a word to describe the genre I wrote in (until I stumbled across Orwell), my words began to form into a dystopian world that sometimes terrified me. No matter how hard I try, even today, I always return to a dysfunctional society, a family or a single human teetering on the brink of disaster, struggling to claw back at life. It's not apocalyptic - it's dystopian - the before and after picture of the big meltdown that is always avoidable.

​From the genre writing - the fiction - I naturally progressed towards the essay, then the article, and slowly to journalism - the career I announced in the meet and greet of the first week in high school.

It's funny how life goes full circle. The time between wanting to be a journalist to now, is 29 years. I worked in typically dystopian environments that reflected the fragility of freedom - I became a prison officer mostly, serving as the youngest female in the state with only 53 kg of me to support it. It was in a maximum security men's prison - the worst of the worst, for 12 years. Following this, I jumped into emergency service work where car accidents and personal disasters unfolded before me. Never did I think this was fate preparing me for my writing career.

​To be a dystopian writer, you need to understand what you write about. If you care at all for the message you are conveying - which is usually a heartfelt warning or pleading - you have to understand the intricacies of humanity. You need to know what makes us tick. And you need to be honest.

​Journalism was a natural progression. Everything in my life has happened for a reason. The life links we all experience are rarely a coincidence. So, why do I write?...

Writing is a part of me. I never had a choice. No true writer, young or old, ever has a choice.

​The lyrics of Which Way Home by Fanning are all too true...
Aral Bereux is a freelance journalist, author and editor. She has written on many topics including AI, climate change, geopolitics, history, finance, religion and philosophy.

Bereux’s writing has appeared in various online publications including Zero Hedge, AnonHQ, and Captain Planet, and she was the only Australian author shortlisted by Lulu for her short story contribution to the Anthology.
 
Her first chronicle of the J Rae series documents a different Isis with an ideology; RFID chips; attack drones, and a totalitarian world created by capitalism.
Written in 2012 but conceived in the early 90s before ISIS and the war on terror existed, the J Rae Books document a dystopian society that is truly avoidable but well on the way to reality.

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