Hotel Echoed Romeo – Stephanie Hagstrom Panitzki
Hotel Echoed Romeo
It was more like a beast than a hotel. Or some sort of substrate machine. The owner calls himself the Bachelor. Guy builds a total empire there. Adds a strip club, medical facility, love school, casino, church, graveyard, and gallery. One stop shop. But are these to just distract from the real story? The birth of something new. A dream editing implant where fantasy and reality collide. Where does reality end and dreaming begin? For the stream of a character's own imagination lived out as it plays out is never as linear as life has had us believe. Especially not now with the implant from rival tech groups vying for the interior real estate of the mind. Editing the world around them, tweaking life to suit, and getting lost in such confused stage sets of their own design leaves one searching for their own tail in the midst of chaos. Hotel Echoed Romeo describes a world seen through the eyes of a schizophrenic. It’s a song with a rhythm, riding at a tempo. An ode and a celebration of the beauty of language. Words flowing like a river of sound, filling our minds and confounding the idle hands of time.
About the author
Stephanie Hagstrom Panitzki was born in Launceston, Tasmania, and graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism in 2012. Journalism wasn’t right for her, so she explored different forms of writing: public relations, exploratory forms of poetry and creative fiction. Drawn to the fringes of a life she has worked hard to learn about, she completed her first novel, Hotel Echoed Romeo, in hospital while recovering from schizophrenia in 2023. This journey has influenced how she sees the world and also informs her growing body of work. Stephanie takes her writing beyond the typical form of the linear narrative. Her writing holds near and dear to its heart science fiction, dreaming, Finnegans Wake, the Bible and language. She likes yoga, cats and running. She hopes to write more on how technology and language, mental illness and creativity, and discussions on the nature of our reality and how it influences our senses, informs our subconscious and shapes our lives. It is her hope that she translates life onto the pages she writes authentically and with a respect for words. She also hopes her work is refreshing and a relief from the rigid storytelling format we have come to know from traditional literature.