Continued from A Story of a Story Pt.2
In August 2022, I received a special mention in the Queensland Writer’s Centre Write Left Write competition. This was my second nod from the QWC. They usually just awarded first place, but the judges must have decided mine was worth breaking the rules for. I was chuffed. (You can read Fancy Meeting You Here… here.) Fancy Meeting You Here… is a contemporary romance story inspired by my favourite movie, Notting Hill.
A few weeks later, I was in Tasmania for the first time. When How I got this Tattoo won the Tasmanian Writers’ Prize, I was invited to the Tamar Valley Writers’ Festival to attend the launch of the anthology and appear on my first author panel. It was hugely exciting. I’d been invited to a festival and on top of that, I’d never been to Tassie before! Visiting the local indie bookshop Petrarch’s with my book-mad great-niece and nephew, I spotted the anthology featuring my story right there on the front counter. It felt good, not gonna lie, but in typical me-fashion, I got my niece to take a photo of me and I pulled a weird face and never posted the pic.
The festival was held all over Launceston and the Tamar Valley. This is one of the most beautiful areas in Australia and the lush green landscape reminds me of the UK. The launch of the 2022 anthology was held at a stunning vineyard with an old stone barn cellar and a magnificent Georgian manor house, my favourite kind! The weather was exquisite after days of rain. I was excited but nervous. The tickets for the event were $65, and I was amazed to see such a huge crown milling about in the late winter sunshine, however an announcement came over the loudspeaker directing those of us there for the anthology launch to head over to the tent and those there for the free walking tour were directed to wait in front of the cellar door. Needless to say, the only people there for the oddly expensive anthology launch were the authors and their companions. It was a little mortifying, but the launch went well; the panel was fun. But then it was all over, and I headed back to real life.
The crash I always feel when I must go back to ‘normal’ was brutal. The life-altering events of the previous months felt as though they had amounted to pretty much nothing and two days after arriving home, I badly injured my right shoulder doing Pilates, of all things. To my horror and frustration, I couldn’t lift my arm, let alone write, for nearly a month. I tried dictation and voice to text but apparently my diction is pretty rubbish and I struggled to understand what I was trying to write when I read it back. Half the women I know have had this same issue with their shoulders, so much so that the doctor referred to it as “fifty-year-old shoulder.” I had physio and a massive great needle in my shoulder and did all the exercises and for the first time in my life, I listened when the doctor said to rest. I wrote nothing for weeks.
Michael and I went to Bali again at the end of November, and my shoulder was pretty good. It was a relief to go back to my usual yoga place and found a healer at Seminyak. After a few sessions with them, my shoulder is better than it was pre-injury. It was lovely to be able to sit at my computer beside the pool and write for a while each day. I was rewriting Death of a Show Princess again.
‘Why don’t you write something upbeat,’ Michael said after reading the chase scene. ‘Can you write a romance story for me?’
I figured I could afford a break from DoaSP. It wasn’t as though I had a deadline or anyone who actually wanted to read it.
Now you’d think at this point that it would have occurred to me to write a novel based on How I got this Tattoo but that took me about another six months to come up with. Instead, I knew I wanted to set a story in Bali. Most of the books set in Bali are either about drugs or the terrorist attacks. I don’t know much about either, so I started writing about a young woman who lives an idyllic life in a small Australian coastal tourist town who loves her life and has absolutely zero intention of going anywhere. Her father was never seen again after leaving the country, and Beatrice had carved out a very pleasant life for herself, including a great job, a wonderful flat mate and a gorgeous love interest.
Why would she go anywhere else?
Of course, the story being set in Bali is something of a spoiler because obviously, this being fiction, things don’t really work out the way Beatrice wants and she ends up in Bali, something she never dreamed she would do.
I worked on this story and Death of a Show Princess over the next six months and attended the Rainforest Writing Retreat again in the following June. The theme for 2023 was Romance, and I was excited to learn more about the genre. For the anthology I wrote a story with the ‘secret baby’ trope because one of the organisers said she couldn’t quite get her head around that concept. ‘How can someone have a secret baby?’ she asked, which cracked me up.
I enjoyed writing the romance short story and had taken some pages of Beatrice’s story to the retreat for feedback. The readers gave me useful and positive feedback, saying they really wanted to know more about Beatrice and her antics. I also kept working on DoaSP and submitted it for the Publishers Book for the Fiona McIntosh National Conference in August. I had spent an enormous amount of time on the manuscript, and I loved the story. I just had to find a home for it.
In June I contacted a well-known crime author whom I had met and asked, giving them an easy option to decline, if they would read some of DoaSP and tell me what they thought. I told them I needed brutal honesty when they generously agreed. I was so grateful and the feedback was useful and positive.
I headed off to Adelaide in August 2023 to attend NatCon23. In the stunning conference centre at the Adelaide Zoo, along with 130 other dedicated writers we enjoyed 3 days of amazing speakers on everything we could want to know about the publishing industry and television production here in Australia. The food was delicious, the town of Adelaide but on some great weather and the networking with other writers, publishers and booksellers.
The famous Publishers Book to which most of us had submitted was still a mythical beast; no one had laid eyes on it yet except those for whom it was intended. The publishers were all lovely and I managed to get around to chat to most of them. I pitched Death of A Show Princess to them and most seemed politely interested, especially when I mentioned the short-listing in the Scarlets and winning the Tassie Writer’s Prize the previous year. I even mentioned the non-fiction title I’ve been working on for a couple of years and one in particular seemed interested in that. None requested a manuscript and one, when I suggested I could send it to her, said she would look at my submission in The Book first to see if I “could write.”
In the weeks after NatCon I hoped I would hear from one of the publishers but it was not to be.
There are just so many ducks that need to be herded into a row before the stars align between an author and a publisher. Terrible metaphor I know but it’s better than being convinced that no matter how hard I try, no matter how good my work is, I will always be rejected because I don’t have “it”.
A few weeks later I started a critique group in conjunction with the Gold Coast Writers’ Association and asked my writing buddies to read my first chapter and give me some unvarnished critique. One friend, to whom I am eternally grateful, told me the piece was overworked and lacked all trace that it was my work.
This was like a bell sounding in my soul.
I had worked and reworked the first chapters to death! I had submitted a piece to dozens of Australian publishers that was overcooked! Now that’s mortifying. And you know what else? I didn’t want to be a crime writer. So after that long and winding journey with Death of a Show Princess, from idea to short story, to full length novel, I decided to rewind back to the start and revisit the original story. Back to the drawing board, as they say! When I am finished with my book on criticism, I will pull out that two year old manuscript and start all over again. It will need a new name and a lot of love but what else would I do?
I’m not going to lie, it’s frustrating to spend a massive amount of time on something that seems to be going nowhere. This story is close to my heart because like me, the main character, former Olympian Lizzie Wolff is an adoptee and I want to explore her struggle to find her place in the world and in her family. Watch this space…
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