novel

A Friend and a Cousin

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During the last few months while I’ve been dealing with my dying father, a friend and one of my cousins have been having great success and publishing novels.

Elsie King

Elsie King (aka Lynne Wong), has had her second historical romance novel published this year: A Suitable Bride. Her first novel, A Suitable Heir, was published in July last year. Both are great reads and capture the Regency period brilliantly. They are both extremely well written, and even though I’m not a great fan of romance novels, they both held my attention throughout, and I loved the characters and settings. A third book is well on the way too and will be published in 2025.

Alison Edwards

My cousin Alison (who is much younger than me because her father — my uncle — is only 18 months older than me) has lived in the UK and the Netherlands for quite a few years now, and returned to Australia last month for a book tour for her novel: Two Daughters. She is now back in Amsterdam, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Alison knows both the south coast of NSW and Cambridge very well, having grown up in one and been educated in the other. I read the novel quickly, but with so much going on in my life at the time, I couldn’t give it the attention it deserved, so I’m now reading it again. I’ll give it a proper review later, but for now let’s just say I enjoyed it, and thought it was a very clever and well-written novel.

Progress report

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The critique group Create-Write that I’m a founder member of is going well. We have a number of members who are writing novels or short story collections and are either published, submitting for publication, or getting close to that point. Our numbers are capped to allow us to give detailed and worthwhile critiques.

I printed five copies of my draft mystery novel some time ago via Lulu.com, and distributed them to Create-Write members. I found it easier for everyone (and slightly cheaper) to print and distribute the book as a paperback proof copy than to give everyone half a ream of printed A4 sheets. It was also good for me to see it as a book, albeit a draft still in need of plenty of work. Since then I’ve received editing comments, reviews and suggestions from everyone, and have incorporated those into the novel to produce another draft. The next step is to go through this draft (the umpteenth), see if it’s as good as I can get it, and then start submitting to an agent or a publisher, or perhaps self-publish.

I also went to the crime writers group in the city last weekend, to meet up with other writers. It was a small group, but it was good to meet them, and I will go again. Most are self-published, and I will consider going that way too, because even with an agent or publisher, authors still need to do all the marketing and get far less in royalties. At the moment, I’m still hoping for traditional publication, but we’ll see. The first and most important step is to continue polishing to make the book as good as I can get it. I’m itching to get on with the next Ben Lovely mystery novel, and also to return to the black comedy screenplay I’ve finished, which is waiting for me to get back to it.

On a personal note, I’ve been dealing with my 96-year-old father, who has been living independently until now, but who is nearing the end of that independence. He’s done well to live alone for so long and so successfully but he’s ready and even eager to go into a nursing home, and we’re currently going through the endless loops required to get him there. Everything seems so difficult, and it leaves little energy for the other things. But, that’s life.