Holden Sheppard

I'm an award-winning author based in Perth, Western Australia. My debut Young Adult novel INVISIBLE BOYS (Fremantle Press, 2019) is a gay coming-of-age novel which won multiple awards and accolades, including the 2019 WA Premier's Prize for an Emerging Writer and the 2018 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. It is currently in development as a ten-episode TV series. My second novel is titled THE BRINK (Text Publishing, 2022).

In mid-2021, while in-between writing my second and third books, I identified a need to write for fun again. I wanted to write a project that could not be traditionally published; something not to be taken so seriously in a critical sense, nor distributed commercially, nor edited over and over, but written quickly and published as a relatively rough draft - purely for the joy of it. When I was a teenager, I used to love writing Pokémon fanfiction. So, purely for the love of writing, I decided to write a fun, first-draft-only, eight-part Pokémon fanfiction novella - THE SKELETON THIEF - to be posted for free on Wattpad. Writing this novella, especially the final two chapters, helped me recapture some of the hectic joy of the flow state of writing. 

As Pokémon belongs to Nintendo and Game Freak, this work of fanfiction is made freely-available and is not for sale - it is non-commercial and no income is received for it. It is posted in line with the principles of fair dealing (in Australia) and fair use (in the USA) and it is posted in the spirit of Game Freak and Nintendo's long-standing tacit tolerance of Pokémon fan works. THE SKELETON THIEF is a transformative work with respect to the original work and comprises its own original storyline and characters; it is both loving homage and gently satirical at times, but filled with respect for the source material; it is non-commercial; and it does not directly detract from the potential market of the other Pokémon products (games, anime, etc.).