Andrew Best

Independent writer and creator

Andy is an author, writer and musician whose style and vision comes from years in independent and DIY arts scenes, and a love of SFF, table top games, punk and local culture.He graduated from Winchester University U.K. with a B.A. in Drama: Theatre and Television.

Andy Best with guitar in rock dive
Parkour Girl and Hit Man stand in an old Shanghai neighborhood, a magazine review, a concept sketch

Books

Andy's debut in long form fiction was the Indie novel Parkour Girl and Yellow Fish Car. Born out of the groupthink writing sessions of H.A.L. publishing , the novel takes the good, bad and the ugly of noughties Shanghai ex-pat life and spins it into a gonzo hero tale.

Andy has completed Punk Rock vs Haibao: weblogs from the China underground, the book of his well-known Kungfuology music blog, and Aertelis a contemporary sword & sorcery novel that showcases his years of experience with SFF and gaming. Both books are currently seeking representation.

For Parkour Girl cover, concept and promo art I worked with Wuduo (Deviant Art) and Ivan Belcic.

Music

Andy has played in bands, composed original music and performed live since 14 years old, many of those years dedicated to the Shanghai underground scene. Most prominently, he was the sole male member in the Riot Grrrl/China Post-Punk band Ugly Girls, a fixture of the city's stages for five years. The band recorded two albums, and their popular tracks YU Mad and Fuck Boss were used in Angie Bird's short film The Day Grunge Died (2018). They played at prominent events such as Shanghai Ladyfest, and opened for touring acts, including Canada's Metz.

Andy focuses on city scenes and independent music communities, preferring to host music on Bandcamp rather than streaming giants. He has a love of lo-fi and DIY music, collaborating with China artist Little Punk (Huang Pei) on the album Hey Guy, You Are Big Time Alright.

Album covers, a dog in space and little punk in an old window frame

Screenplays

Andy trained screenwriting and film making at Winchester University with the former director Peter Sykes, who worked in documentary and with Hammer Films. He uses the industry standard Final Draft and specializes in spec scripts and story development.

He has a full portfolio of sample and original work:Castle Amidala - a Star Wars film and retelling of Episode One
Neuromancer - an adaptation of the William Gibson novelHe does not own the rights to those two properties and they are intended for proof of skill/sample work.Piper Creek - an unpublished original slasher film in a punk style, dealing with the rise of anti-Feminism and victim blaming in the media.
Endgame - an existential thriller set at the onset of environment collapse, in development with Andrew J. Ord.

A screenshot of Final Draft and a still from a Little Punk music video where she looks for people to help on the street
A Stranger Things style promo for the podcast by Elaine Chow

Podcast and Games

Andy has played table RPG games since he was ten years old, starting with Dungeons & Dragons, and usually playing the games master/creating the adventures.

Between 2015 and 2017 Andy wrote, produced and hosted a professional actual play D&D podcast for Kungfu Komedy. We made 80 episodes with a cast of locally based comedians and performers playing the game live - the Polymorph Self Podcast.

In 2018, Kungfu Komedy was bought out by Live Nation for their booking service, then the website and podcasts were shut down, orphaning them on most services. However, all episodes have been recently archived on Youtube at the link below, starting with a classic episode Those are snake faces

Picture of live bands in Shanghai and a portrait of Andy by Wee Ling So

Blogging

From 2008 to 2014, Andy founded and wrote the Kungfuology blog, covering the Shanghai and China independent band scene. The blog and articles were featured across sites and magazines, local and international, and the work gave Andy his first wider recognition.

At its height, the blog published three times a week, with breaks covered by Jake Newby in a parallel site, combining for hundreds of posts. The posts covered live shows, band introductions and scene news, spanning a sea change in the environment as a sub-culture driven indie scene collided with smart phones, modern cool-hunting agencies and politics.

Andy has adapted the blog into a book Punk Rock vs Haibao: weblogs from the China underground which is currently looking for representation.

Contact

Andrew Best is currently unrepresented in the traditional industry.Please shoot me an email if you:- wish to represent any of my books or screenplays
- wish to hire me for creative work
- wish to talk about an independent project
- wish to say hello or ask a general questionandy (dot) best72 (at) outlook (dot) comandybest (dot) bsky (dot) social

cover of Aertelis with a chaos star and a sword containing the cosmos

“Everything decays, but the glass’steel decayed at a rate so slow as to be invisible on the scale of a single lifetime. In the sword she saw visions of her home. Her home so far away, deep down in the reflection of her elven eyes, sunk deep in her memory, transferred to the blade, as far away as a million years is long.”


Zana Hala’Kaalni is a warrior princess in exile, untethered from her home, and from her sense of self. Allowing chaos to lead her, she enters a nation on the verge of civil war, a quest for a failed utopia, and the ruins of a long dead era, the lost history of her world.Aertelis combines the action of classic Sword & Sorcery, literary themes of the Scifi-Fantasy New Wave, and character driven storytelling of the modern era.Aertelis is a standalone story in the Kalni Chronicles anthology.


UBL hyperlink here