Taking their anti-social edge one step further, seventeen-year-old Gem and her friends Mira and Lo have decided to go 'underground'. Their activities will be 'extreme', 'anti-establishment', 'avant-garde' and 'debauched'.

While Gem makes an underground film and Mira sets about pursuing 'boys-without-barcodes', no one knows what it is that Lo - the most subversive of the three - has planned. But in the back of her mind, Gem's worried. She feels the balance of the trio's friendship is always weighted against her. And as the weeks draw closer to Christmas, appearances start to deceive and relationships flounder. For all the promise of the group, underground seems a dark place to be.

It will take great films, bad poetry and a pantheon of inspirational guides - from Andy Warhol to Germaine Greer - to help Gem work out the true meaning of friendship, where family fits in, and that the best parts of life aren't always underground.

Simmone Howell is an award-winning short story writer, screenwriter and small press publisher. Her short film Pity24 was awarded the 2004 AWGIE for Short Film Screenplay by the Australian Writers' Guild. Simmone is a graduate of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology writing course. Her own fiction has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and e-zines both in Australia and overseas. Simmone is in the final year of her literature degree at Deakin University in Melbourne. Notes From the Teenage Underground is Simmone's debut novel.