Writing

Dangerous Devotions is my first published novel. There are several more, written late at night after too much else to do in the day, now sitting on my cyber-shelves, or slipping onto the screen to be edited - and hopefully published. Here’s a couple of tasters:

The second Harbour City Mystery will star my favourite character from Dangerous Devotions. That’s not Tom, although I admit I rather fancy him myself (am can I say that or is a bit weird?). Tom’s still there, and all the cast of Dangerous Devotions: they’re pretty much a gang now, addicted to shared adventure. This new book is framed up and has a lot of red clothing in it.

Scarred Skin is near being edited and sent off. It’s set in arid-tropics of far north-west Queensland, an area familiar to me through my father’s stories – he was a great story-teller – and through my own more recent visits. We have ancestry up in the Gulf. It’s bleak and beautiful country and I aim to capture the intense connection its few inhabitants seem to feel to it, as well as intrigue the reader with a crime that does not seem to belong in the setting.

And then there’s the Ridgetown trifecta – three novellas with two classic, damaged detectives locked in a strange dance of personality, past and ambition, in a icy town on the edge of magnificent cliffs. I’ve nearly finished novella two, and have an outline of novella three …

I’ve been writing all my life (I have the handwritten, typewritten, dot matrix, inkjet print outs, floppy (yep, there were floppy discs), hard drive and cloud content to prove it. (You can see I am definitely not a Marie Kondo fan). So I am the bearer of a history of many rejected/ some prize winning/ lots never-submitted/ a few published short stories. Plus some professional magazine editing and journalism, a bit of fiction editing, reviews of non-fiction and fiction, articles, too many theses and all sorts of bits and pieces. If you’re interested in any more info, just fill in the contact form.