The cover for All That is Lost Between Us has just been revealed exclusively on Write Note Reviews. Simon & Schuster Australia have done a brilliant job and I’m in love with this cover – I hope you like it as much as I do.
col-md-2
And here’s a teaser as to what it’s all about:
The lies we tell for love are the most dangerous of all.
Seventeen-year-old Georgia has a secret – one that is isolating her from everyone she loves. She is desperate to tell her best friend, but Sophia is ignoring her, and she doesn’t know why. Before she can find out, Sophia is left fighting for her life after a hit and run, with Georgia a traumatised witness.
As a school psychologist, Georgia’s mother Anya should be used to dealing with scared adolescents. However, it’s very different when the girl who needs help is your own child. Meanwhile, Georgia’s father is wracked with a guilt he can’t share; and when Zac, Georgia’s younger brother, stumbles on an unlikely truth, the family relationships really begin to unravel.
Georgia’s secret is about to go viral. And yet, it will be the stranger heading for the family home who will leave her running through the countryside into terrible danger. Can the Turner family rise above the lies they have told to betray or protect one another, in order to fight for what matters most of all?
Set against the stark, rugged beauty of England’s Lake District, All that is Lost Between Us is a timeless thriller with a modern twist.
col-md-2
Jenn J McLeod is releasing a new book just in time for Mother’s Day – and thanks to the lovely people at Simon & Schuster I have one copy to give away. Here’s the enticing blurb for Season of Shadow and Light:
When it seems everything Paige trusts is beginning to betray her, she leaves her husband at home and sets off on a road trip with six year old Matilda, and Nana Alice in tow. But stranded amid rising floodwaters, on a detour to the tiny town of Coolabah Tree Gully, Paige discovers the greatest betrayal of all happened there twenty years earlier. Someone knows that truth can wash away the darkest shadows, but… Are some secrets best kept for the sake of others?
To win a copy of Jenn’s latest release, just leave a comment telling us which book you would recommend to us at the moment. The competition will close at midday WA time on Tuesday 5 May. Good luck!col-md-2
The chance to hear Hilary Mantel and Elizabeth Gilbert speak at Perth Concert Hall were two of the hottest tickets at the Perth Writers Festival this year. I was entertained, enthralled and inspired by both, and their words will remain with me for some time. Here are a few of my favourite soundbites from each of them.
HILARY MANTEL
On Margaret Thatcher: ‘I admire her as one must admire any woman pioneer, but I don’t think she solved the problem of how to be a woman in a man’s world.’
On writing: ‘I’m always looking in my fiction for the moment of transformation – the moment a life or society changes. These are the questions that drive my fiction.’
Hilary’s advice to the BBC director of Wolf Hall: ‘Remember that these people [characters] don’t know they are in history.’
On fiction writing: ‘A novelist has no business with neutrality.’
On her audience: ‘All the time I am asking my reader where their prejudices come from; where their information comes from.’
On research: ‘I put a great deal of effort into research but there is inevitably that marshy ground of interpretation – and I’m in that marshy ground.’
On Thomas More: ‘The news is Thomas More was not a 1960s liberal… he was a man of his time, and heresy hunting was a fact of life. More was a wonderful man, but he just happened to have this foible: he liked burning people…. The idea that he was a martyr of freedom would have him spinning in his grave.’
ELIZABETH GILBERT
‘There is no creativity without courage.’
‘Fear is boring. It’s a song with only one word – and that word is stop. What it stops most of all is creativity.’
‘In order to begin to have that conversation with fear you have to have a fierce sense of personal entitlement – it’s not possible to do creative work without it.’
‘It’s about being aware that you as a citizen of this universe have the right to participate in the creation of culture.’
‘The arrogance of belonging is the only voice that can stand up to the darkest voice of fear.’
‘If it’s good enough, it’s good enough. If you can finish you’re already so far ahead.’
‘Having a creative mind is like having a border collie – if you don’t give it a job to do it will find a job to do, and you might not like it.’
‘Creativity can be done with lightness and it can be let go, so you can move on to the next thing, and the next thing…’
col-md-2
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
I hope 2015 has started well for you all. I’m feeling refreshed after a couple of restful weeks with my husband and daughters. It was as relaxing as life with a 5 year old and 1 year old gets!
The second half of 2014 was hectic. I finished my novel, signed a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster, and applied for and was awarded a PhD scholarship. In my personal life we had a really bad winter for illness, and my one year old went from one thing to another for about four months. Luckily she was better by the time our family came to visit, and we had a wonderful few weeks exploring Hong Kong and Australia with our loved ones.
So, what does 2015 hold for me? Lots of writing, I hope – and lots of reading, if I’m lucky! To that end, I will sign up once again for the Australian Women Writers Challenge in 2015, and I will aim for the Franklin level, which means reading 10 books by Australian women writers. This challenge is open to anyone, so click on the link to join in!
And now it’s confession time. I also signed up for the Franklin level last year, and when I tallied up I have only read eight. Aargh! What’s more, I read most of them in the first few months of the year, before life intervened. The good news is I enjoyed every single one of them. Here they are:
Charlie Whisky Foxtrot and The Ark by Annabel Smith.
In 2014 I read two completely different books by the same author – which immediately underlines just how talented Annabel is.
Charlie Whisky Foxtrot is the story of two brothers who have lost one another, until Whisky has an accident that leaves him in a coma, and Charlie is forced to re-examine how and why their relationship has become so complex. Annabel’s use of the phonetic alphabet to thematically underpin each chapter is inspired, her writing is brilliant, and this novel won her a MUBA nomination.
Inventing The Ark allowed Annabel to play with narrative form even further – it’s a dystopian, epistolary novel with interactive components! A team of scientists and their families have retreated to a bunker known as The Ark – caretakers of five billion plant seeds that hold the key to the future of life on Earth. As oil supplies dwindle and anarchy creeps into the world, their leader locks the doors – a decision that sparks tension and distrust, and soon everyone fears they are held captive alongside their enemy. The claustrophobic world Annabel creates is compelling, and the character studies are fascinating.
The Mistake by Wendy James
I love Wendy’s writing. I was completely engrossed in this family story, and I admired how Wendy was able to maintain sympathy for a character whose child has disappeared, possibly through her own wrongdoing. What I loved most was that you don’t know what has happened until the very last page – the ending left a shiver down my spine. Fabulous!
Into My Arms by Kylie Ladd
Kylie is brilliant at character studies and family stories, and this book has at its heart a terrible predicament that is sensitively handled to make this an engrossing read.
Back Again by Susan May
I loved Susan’s short story ‘The War Veteran’, which was part of the From the Indie Side anthology that included my own short story ‘Cipher’. With Back Again, Susan has cleverly developed another short story into a full-length novel. Back Again is the story of a mother who is forced to relive the day she loses her child again and again, until she can figure out how to change fate. It’s a unique time-twisting thriller, and packs an emotional punch.
Wave Length by A J Betts
The story of a young boy determined to ace his exams and get into uni. This wonderful novel explores the nature of family, ambition, perceptions of aging, finding meaning and purpose in life, and a whole lot more. I absolutely loved it.
Have You Seen Ally Queen? by Deb Fitzpatrick
A great companion read to Wave Length! Ally Queen is uprooted from city life and taken to live in the country with her parents and younger brother. It means a new high school, a new house, and new friends – and she is not happy about any of it! While she is defiantly struggling with the changes this has wrought upon her life, her mother suffers from a nervous breakdown – but amongst the turmoil, a new friend offers her the chance to see life a little differently. A great coming-of-age book about identity, fitting in, and the realities of family life.
True Spirit by Jessica Watson
I seem to have read quite a bit about teenagers this year – perhaps subconsciously preparing for some Young Adult fiction writing! I picked up this one because I wanted an insight into what could make a sixteen-year-old girl decide to sail solo around the world. I was captivated by the insights into sailing and the ups and downs of her journey. I’m awed by Jessica’s strength and self-reliance. In the book she talks at length about the support of her parents. I only hope I can offer something similar to my girls to help them pursue their dreams – especially if they are slightly terrifying ones!
So there’s my eight. I’m off to a good start this year towards achieving Franklin as I’m absorbed in Dawn Barker’s Let Her Go. There’s a definite bias towards Western Australian authors in my 2014 round-up, and I hope to continue that focus this year. Buying local is a great idea, and not just for groceries. Many authors have trouble earning a decent living, just as many readers have trouble affording lots of books! If you alternate between the library and the bookshops, please consider supporting your talented local authors by seeking them out, buying their books and helping to build their profile. And if you can’t afford that, then the authors you love will all be grateful if you take time to post a glowing review on Amazon, GoodReads, Booktopia, Fishpond, and anywhere else you can think of!
I’ll have more for you soon on the release date of The Spirit Road. Meanwhile, I’m about to get busy writing the next one.
Wishing you all a peaceful, prosperous and healthy 2015.
Sara xcol-md-2
I’m delighted to welcome Nicole Alexander to my blog this month. Nicole and I published our first novels at a similar time with the same publisher, Random House, in 2010, and since then Nicole has been a prolific writer – The Great Plains is her fifth novel! Nicole covers an astonishing breadth of topics in her books and skilfully absorbs all her painstaking historical research into her stories. It was a pleasure to chat to her and find out more about her new novel. Before we begin, here’s a taster of what you can expect from The Great Plains:
It is Dallas 1886, and the Wade Family is going from strength to strength: from a thriving newspaper and retail business in Texas to a sprawling sheep station half a world away in Queensland.
Yet money and power cannot compensate for the tragedy that struck twenty-three years ago, when Joseph Wade was slaughtered and his seven-year-old daughter Philomena abducted by Apache Indians.
Only her uncle, Aloysius, remains convinced that one day Philomena will return. So when news reaches him that the legendary Geronimo has been captured, and a beautiful white woman discovered with him, he believes his prayers have been answered.
Little does he know that the seeds of disaster have just been sown.
Over the coming years three generations of Wade men will succumb to an obsession with three generations of mixed-blood Wade women: the courageous Philomena, her hot-headed granddaughter Serena, and her gutsy great-granddaughter Abelena – a young woman destined for freedom in a distant red land. But at what price . . . ?
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Nicole. THE GREAT PLAINS is your latest work of fiction. Can you tell us about it, and what inspired you to write it?
My aim was to write an epic narrative that told the story of two lands, two frontier worlds, Australia and America, and the people both settlers and indigenous who inhabited those countries. With that background in mind in plotting the novel I asked myself this initial question: what would it feel like to be displaced in the world? What would it be like to be lost to the world you were born into, only to find that on being reunited with loved-ones that you truly didn’t belong? During the American Civil War, a confederate soldier, Joseph Wade, gets caught in a skirmish and is killed, his young daughter, Philomena, abducted by the legendary Geronimo of the Apache Indians. This is Philomena’s story, and that of her descendants, strong-willed women, whose destinies are altered by fate and whose lives are hampered by the prejudices of society and the mixed-blood that runs in their veins. It’s also the story of the powerful Wade family across two continents and the men who became obsessed with these women and the families, both in Australia and America, struggling against adversity during periods of enormous change.
Your novels have covered The Great Depression, World War One, and now the American Wild West. Can you offer us an insight into your research process – how you tackle it, and keep it under control?
To date I’ve had a previous interest in every topic I’ve written about, so that’s made it easier to pinpoint timeframes and include specific historical events. It is easy to get carried away with the research side of things and I have to be quite disciplined in what and how much material I read. I find the best thing is to read widely on the subject area first and then begin writing. Getting the story down is fundamental. I then research along the way as specific points come up and again when the manuscript’s completed. This is part of double-checking facts to ensure accuracy.
Sometimes novels evolve as they are written. Now that THE GREAT PLAINS is finished, how does it compare to the book you envisioned when you began working on it?
I never plan an entire novel. I don’t like the restrictions that places on the work. Novels grow organically, characters change, situations can be improved on, or the chapter order may need to be altered. I start with an idea and usually plan the first quarter of the work and then I begin writing. Once I have a feel for the work I wait for the characters to start talking to me, for my imagined world to come alive. The Great Plains was a major undertaking, the story changed, as did the characters, but the kernel of the novel, that initial idea, remained constant.
THE GREAT PLAINS is your fifth novel. If you could revisit yourself when you were working on your first novel, THE BARK CUTTERS, what advice would you have to offer about writing and publishing?
Writing is about redrafting, refining and re-polishing, making a seed into a pearl. Make life your muse and writing your passion and with luck and timing you’ll create something worthwhile. I’ve been telling myself the same thing for over twenty-five years now.
As well as writing, you are also a busy with rural property and numerous farming projects. How do you combine these two occupations?
With great difficulty. There’s no writing or editing while I’m on-farm, the place is pretty busy. I tend to turn off my writing brain and concentrate on the work at hand. A typical property work day for me starts at 7.30 am and could involve anything from mustering sheep and cattle, working in the stockyards, doing bookwork in the station office or checking cultivations with our agronomist. I’m a 7-day-a-week person, which includes 3 full days for writing as well as nights, although work-related injury has slowed me down this year on both fronts.
When you hit a roadblock in y
our writing, how do you get going again?
I usually re-read what I’ve previously written, or read about the subject I’m writing about. If all else fails I go and do something else and hope the muse returns. It may take half an hour or a week, but eventually I’ll get back on track.
What else are you feeling passionate about at the moment?
Red wine and chocolate, but then I always feel passionate about red wine and chocolate. I’d like to emulate Oscar Wilde who only seemed to work half a day and partied the rest of the time, but luckily or unluckily my work commitments don’t allow it!
I love book recommendations. Tell me about one book you’ve loved in the last year?
On the literature side I really enjoyed Richard Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. My guilty pleasure? Phillipa Gregory’s The White Queen and The King’s Curse by the same author which I’m currently reading.
And now THE GREAT PLAINS has been published, what are you working on next?
My current work-in-progress is set in Australia on the northern NSW frontier in the 1830s when settlers went beyond the designated counties to the outer limits.
Finally, where can people go to find out more about you and your books?
They can head to my website www.nicolealexander.com.au
col-md-2
I’m delighted to welcome Annabel Smith onto my blog this month. Annabel is the author of the digital, interactive novel/app The Ark, and the novels Whisky Charlie Foxtrot and A New Map of the Universe (shortlisted for the WA Premier’s Book Awards). Her short fiction and non-fiction has been published in Southerly,Westerly, Wheeler Dailies and Junkee.
I admire Annabel for all sorts of reasons: not only is she an extremely talented writer, she has a great work ethic, and she reads zillions of books I’ve never heard of and introduces me to them via her fantastically detailed blog! On top of all this she holds a PhD in Writing, is an Australia Council Creative Australia Fellow, and is a member of the editorial board of Margaret River Press. In summary, she’s one busy lady! Therefore, I’m very grateful she found time to visit and tell us about her new book THE ARK.
THE ARK is your latest work of fiction. Can you tell us about it, and what inspired you to write it?
The Ark is a digital interactive novel and app in which a group of scientists and their families retreat into a bunker inside Mount Kosciusko during a post-peak oil crisis, alongside a seed bank which holds the key to the future of life on earth.
I began making notes for the novel after reading Adrian Atkinson’s foreboding essay ‘Cities After Oil’, about the likely collapse of society as we know it, in a period of chaos following post-peak oil. Then, in the ‘environmental lifestyle’magazine G, I saw a snippet about the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, also known as the Doomsday vault. These two ideas came together in my mind and The Ark was born.
THE ARK plays with narrative, as the story is told through emails, news articles, blog posts, text messages and conversation transcripts. Why did you choose this structure, and were there benefits or drawbacks to it during the writing process?
Initially I thought these documents would form a supplementary thread to the main narrative, offering a different, less subjective viewpoint. But I was having so much fun writing them that they took over and eventually I decided to tell the whole story through documents. I like to give myself a new challenge with each book I write, and I’m interested in structural experiments – I wanted to see if it was possible to tell the entire story this way. There were some difficulties – how do you show a character’s inner life, for example, or an action sequence, without descriptive prose or a narrative voice. I was stimulated by overcoming these challenges.
Your published works are noticeably diverse in content and structure, much more so than those of many other writers. Do you feel that there are themes or other elements that bind your novels, or is each project unique?
I think all my novels are connected by a preoccupation with the effect of secrets or what is left unsaid. In A New Map of the Universe and Whisky Charlie Foxtrot this theme is explored through the impact of secrets on family relationships; in The Ark, it is explored more broadly in relation to access to information and how that relates to questions of power and manipulation.
Sometimes novels evolve as they are written. Now that THE ARK is finished, how does it compare to the book you envisioned when you began working on it?
I didn’t have a plan with The Ark – I wrote it organically, letting it unfold as I went along so I really had no idea where it would end up. The most surprising aspect of the process was the revelation that I was not writing a book ‘about’a seed bank, which is what I thought for the first couple of years. The seed bank was just the setting, the book was actually about the way humans behave in extreme circumstances. It took me a long time to see that.
Annabel Smith
Can you tell us one of the things you love about being a writer?
One of the things I love most is making up small and silly details, like names for businesses or products. Unlike the greater story arcs or character arcs, writing these tiny details brings instant satisfaction and allow for a little playfulness. For example, when writing The Ark, I created a fitness schedule for the bunker inhabitants and I amused myself making up names and descriptions for fitness classes which might take place twenty five years from now:
Yogatronics: Achieve perfect posture AND enlightenment via intelligent pressure pads which assist with self-correction of those tricky asanas!
TaeKwonBop: Defend your vitality! Contemporary robo-dance meets the ancient Korean martial art TaeKwonDo: be prepared to bop til you drop.
When you hit a roadblock in your writing, how do you get going again?
I go back to the last place I felt confident things were working and see where I might have made a wrong turn. Failing that, I show it to a trusted writer friend who might be able to see it with clear eyes.
What else are you feeling passionate about at the moment?
I’m horrified by the way the Australian government is treating asylum seekers and plan to volunteer to ease their suffering and make them welcome and comfortable, wherever possible, or even just convey that not all Australians are heartless. On a much lighter note, I am very excited to be planning a trip to the states with my husband and son next year, to meet the US publisher of my novel Whiskey and Charlie and travel through Yosemite in a camper van, with dear friends of ours who live in Seattle.
I love book recommendations. Tell me about one book you’ve loved in the last year.
My favourite book in recent memory is Patrick Somerville’s This Bright River. It is beautifully written, funny, poignant and extraordinarily suspenseful – basically everything I look for in a book.
And now the ARK is complete, what are you working on next?
My current work-in-progress is the first in a trilogy called Monkey See; an epic quest with a speculative-fiction twist, in which a trio of unlikely heroes must unite to overthrow a sadistic cult before their city is destroyed by the mother of all tsunamis. It is wild! I am having an absolute blast writing it.
Finally, where can people go to find out more about you and your books?
I love to connect with readers on my blog, as well as on Facebook and Twitter. I also have a website for The Ark.
Thanks for visiting, Annabel!
Would you like to win an e-copy of The Ark? Leave us a comment telling us your favourite dystopian work of fiction, and make sure you’re signed up to my newsletter to enter the draw. Competition will close 11.59 pm on 14 November 2014, and the winner will be notified the following day. Please note this competition is to win an e-book edition of The Ark, which is downloadable for Kindle, Kobo, iPad or iPad mini.
col-md-2
Today it’s my pleasure to help celebrate the release of Annabel Smith’s The Ark by joining in this group post on writing in the digital age. Annabel’s book is PERFECT for the digital age – a new invention of the epistolary form using emails and transcripts to tell the story of a group of people trapped in an underground bunker with vaults of priceless seeds in the year 2041. What’s more, The Ark is truly interactive – you can explore the bunker, listen to the characters speaking, and add your own fan fiction at thearkbook.com. So first of all, congratulations, Annabel, on your genre-defying dystopia and its groundbreaking format.
I have transitioned to writing in the digital age alongside the publishing industry. When I first began proofreading I had to learn all the little symbols that are the proofreader’s shorthand, and bulky tree-toppling typescripts would be couriered to me. However, my editing jobs slowly moved towards using tracked changes online over the last decade, and now I edit my own work the same way.
I find writing in the digital age to be a mixed bag – the internet pummels me with distraction and trivia as soon as I venture online, but there are many gems to be found too – and the joys of instant research rather than endless treks to the library are amazing. I’m certainly grateful for programs like Word and Scrivener – I think back to viewing Jane Austen’s manuscripts in the British library (incredible, to think her hand and mine had both been so close to the same sheet of paper) and I wonder about the personal qualities needed to complete an entire manuscript by hand.
When I become one of the billions of consumers of internet content, I can have a dozen moments of connection and disconnection in a single minute. If I’m writing intensely I find this exhausting, and I try to avoid it. I need to keep my story under the spotlight, and going online is too much of a firework display. The internet is a fantastic tool for publishing and promotion, but it’s also an endless noise-maker, making even the most meaningful things seem scarily devoid of meaning if I linger in this virtual world for too long. However, I cannot be anything but thankful for all the connections and relationships it has brokered for me since it came into existence.
Whether I like it or not, I belong to this digital age. How else could I be talking to you now? I’m ensnared in the worldwide web, by turns exhilarated and exhausted – doing my best to tame the techno-beast before it gobbles me up. In case that happens, as Annabel releases her new work into worlds virtual and real, I urge you to click here without delay and discover The Ark for yourself.
Find out what my fellow writers have to say about writing in the digital age by visiting their blogs. You’ll notice we have a new member, Yvette Walker, author of Letters to the End of Love. Welcome to our group, Yvette!
Amanda Curtin: ”The first time I tried Trove, I was almost speechless.’
Yvette Walker: ‘to me it’s a twenty-first century toll road I have to drive along every day.’
Emma Chapman: ‘the digital age offers great opportunity to connect with readers’
col-md-2
Yep, book 4 is in full draft form, with my agent, and we’re working on getting it into the wider world. Watch this space! If you want to know what it’s all about, here’s a preview:
Georgia Turner has a secret – one that has isolated her from all those she loves. She is desperate to tell her best friend, but Sophia is ignoring her, and she doesn’t understand why. Before she can find out, Sophia is left fighting for her life after a hit and run, with Georgia a traumatised witness.
As a school psychologist, Georgia’s mother Anya should be used to dealing with scared adolescents. However, it’s very different when the girl who needs help is your own child. Meanwhile, Georgia’s father is racked with a guilt he can’t share; and when Zac, Georgia’s younger brother, stumbles on an unlikely truth, the Turner family’s relationships really begin to unravel. But it will be the stranger heading for their house who will finally cause their walls of secrets to crumble, and leave one of them running through the countryside into terrible danger.
Set against the stark, rugged beauty of England’s Lake District, The Spirit Road is a timeless tale with a modern twist. It is about what happens to a family when the lies used to betray and protect one another are pushed into an unyielding and unforgiving light. col-md-2
