This is the longish tale of the life path of a story I’ve been working on for over 2 years, from the germ of an idea to a 100k word manuscript…
In mid-2021, when the world was in the grip of the virus, I lived about four hundred metres south of a state border. That line separated the state I’d lived in all my life and the state where my business is located. We moved south fearing that if they closed the border again, we might end up sleeping on cots in the office at work. If we hadn’t moved, this or something like it, is what we would have ended up doing. Pretty much everyone I knew and cared about was on the other side of that imaginary line, or thousands of kilometres to the south, locked-down and locked-out.
I still can’t believe it, even though we all lived through it. There were no cases near us so fortunately we weren’t fearful for our lives. I had nothing to distract me, nothing better to do, so I thought I’d better sit down and write.
Before the borders closed again, I had been lucky enough to attend Australia’s biggest writing retreat. Held on the Gold Coast each year, the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat publishes an anthology, and I had co-written a story with another author. One of my principal drives is Connection, so when the border closed, I figured co-writing a story would be a fun way to stay in contact with the writing community. I loved it so much that I set myself a goal to find writing competitions and enter four each month.
Furious Fiction (through the Australian Writers Centre in Sydney) had been a regular on my writing schedule. I’d had no success. I wasn’t wasn’t focused on winning, just writing. I wanted to fill my days with something other than complaining about the border and worrying about my tourism-based business.
I posted about my plan to enter competitions and encouraged my writing buddies to join in. They were busy with work and life as they weren’t in lock-down, even though most of them lived within twenty kilometres of my home. A few of us decided to enter the annual Sisters in Crime short story competition, the Scarlet Stiletto Awards, and I had been tossing around an idea for a cosy or domestic noir story set in a fictional rural town. Only the Goddess knows why I chose a setting in Victoria, rather than the rural/coastal area directly to the south of my new home!
A character took up residence in my brain and I pushed around some ideas. I settled on Domestic Noir. I grew up watching Alfred Hitchcock presents from the shadows of the lounge room door, long after I was supposed to be in bed.
Death of a Show Princess is around three thousand words and set across two timelines, one written in third person, past tense and the other in first person, simple present. My dad and sister both read it and gave me some great feedback. There was a pretty good twist and I liked the character I had created. She was a strong woman who had survived a terrible situation and gone on to do amazing things.
I sent the story and started writing something new.
Weeks later, I received a call to say my story had been shortlisted in the competition. I was blown away. I thought it was a good story and was grateful that someone else thought enough of it to include it in the shortlist. In the end the story received a Highly Commended, and I was happy with that.
In non-pandemic times, there would have been a soiree in Melbourne where everyone dressed to the nines, but sadly, the 2021 winners had to suffice with a Zoom call. (I wish they had thought to include the 2021 winners in the 2022 event. I think that would have been a nice thing to do, but in the scheme of things, many people missed out on a hell of a lot more over those years.
In the following weeks, I wrote more stories and sent them off to competitions. I have heard that a lot of authors keep a spreadsheet of entries, but I just wrote, sent, repeat. I wish I could be ‘spreadsheet’ organised.
One day, and I have no idea why, it occurred to me that I should write a novel based on that shortlisted story. I had already written two novels, both in the genre of Magical Realism and set in France. There are old houses and time portals and beautiful dresses and deep loss and regret. I love both books and think they’re actually pretty good, but neither has garnered much interest.
Despite the lack of success with these books, I had decided at the beginning of 2021 that I would query my next book. My first two books are Indie published and while I don’t regret taking that path, I didn’t want to die wondering if I could achieve a more success, aka, the validation of securing a traditional publishing deal.
I was excited about this book. I had received a nod from the establishment and once I had recovered from the disappointment of finding that my story wouldn’t be included in the anthology, I published Death of a Show Princess on my website. People loved it and gave me excellent feedback (aka Praise). I had tangible proof people were interested in the story.
The working title was Homecoming. It was contemporary fiction with an element of crime. A young woman would return home from living and working in London and confront the ghosts of her past while the second protagonist, a disgraced ex-Olympian, tried to put her life back together after an accident and a messy divorce.
While the borders were still closed, the lockdowns had ended in my area and it was business as usual, apart from the fact that I couldn’t cross the border or visit any family or friends.
I plunged into NaNoWriMo that November and smashed out the first fifty thousand words of Homecoming. I liked where the story was going. There was an unlikely friendship between two women who lived in a tiny hamlet, a love interest for my Olympian, and a b-story about her desire to connect with her family of origin.
Then life settled into a pace that was regular busy or just plain frantic. The quieter life we had been forced into disappeared seemingly forever. Everyone was determined to do all the things they had been missing out on during the pandemic and of course we all got covid-19 in rolling shifts.
By mid-April, I had finished the first draft of Homecoming and started on the second. As sections took form, I began the process of finding readers to give me their unvarnished opinions and making changes to the manuscript. My dad and sister-in-law both read it and gave me a few suggestions, but what I really needed, in hindsight, was an expert. I should have sought and paid for a manuscript appraisal. What I did instead was keep writing, creating a third and fourth draft. After all, a manuscript appraisal is just one person’s opinion, even if they are an ‘expert.’
In early December I received an email to say I had won the November 2021 monthly short story competition run by the Queensland Writers’ Centre. With the story in the Rainforest Writing Retreat anthology, a shortlist and now a win, my newbie writer bio was a little healthier than it had been a few months prior.
At the end of March, I was sufficiently happy with Homecoming to submit it via the online Friday Pitch portal to Big 5 Australian owned publisher Allen and Unwin. Delusional, I know.
To be continued…
If you’re enjoying this blog, you might also be interested in the new non-fiction book I am working on with Jane O’Connell. Real Friends Stab you in the Front is about the role of criticism and feedback for writers and other creatives. The title and synopsis has already garnered some attention, winning the SelfPubCon and Alliance of Independent Authors Art of the Title competition late in 2023. They gave us a huge pile of prizes and this nifty logo to put on our websites.
The strangest thing happened this week. I was watching the tennis and my phone lit up with notifications. My first thought was ‘oh no, something bad must be happening,’ but no, it was just Jetpack telling me loads of people were reading a blog from 2018 called Why is Raonic Tapping? It’s a weird blog – I don’t tend to write normal things… But people all over the place must have been wondering the same thing!
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