Low Head Lighthouse, Tasmania
Give us your elevator pitch for your latest book, then analyze it and tell us why you think it might tempt an agent, editor, or movie producer.
This could be blog post that gets me kicked off the blog. I love being part of this Blogging Collective and I don't want to leave. But my dilemma is, do I write the truth about what I'm writing, or do I keep up the facade of being a committed crime fiction author?
I think people prefer the truth.
Anyone who knows me, knows I have been horrified and distressed as we watch a genocide occur in Palestine, while our media sits nervously on its hands or gleefully cheers it on, and Western political leaders provide support for it. Horribly, it's now culminating in awful scenes with hundreds of people bombed to death in Lebanon this week.
Last year, I was two weeks away from putting the finishing touch on my ski lodge thriller. I stared at the screen for days on end, and felt nothing. I felt disinterested in the work. I took a break over the Australian summer. This year, I started something new about a doctor, who writes crime fiction, who watches helplessly as medics, hospitals, journalists and aid workers are targeted in Gaza. There's a dual time line, with another storyline set in the 1830s.
Both story lines are set in George Town, Tasmania, a tiny seaside town on the Tamar river mouth. This was a town settled in 1804, and is Australia's oldest town. It was abandoned by the British colonists as there was no freshwater. Consequently, it remains almost exactly as it would have looked in the 1830s. There's some housing subdivisions, and cafes on the main street, but it retains the original grid layout with the Regent Square in the middle, and faded Georgian homesteads and inns scattered around the harbour and farmlands. Also remaining is the Pilot Station from where expert seamen in small pilot boats still lead big ships up the dangerous river; the convict gaol; the lighthouse; and a beautiful mansion called Marion Villa where a rich pastoralist and his daughters spent their summers. On a nearby hilltop you can climb up to the Semaphore Station, which was how the settlers communicated with flags to other colonial outposts along the river. George Town is a beautiful place, but like most of Tasmania, it's a crime scene where massacres and genocide of First Nation people occurred.
I'm curious about how ordinary people live their lives while catastrophic inhumanity occurs in plain sight. How do we reckon with our humanity? I don't know the answer to this question. I'm not trying to answer it. My work-in-progress is also a love letter to Tasmania. My ancestors turned up there in the 1850s, looking for farming opportunities. We didn't learn much about the Palawa people at school. It was only when I went to university that the education curriculum changed. Now, in Lutrawita/Tasmania, school children learn about the past, about the Palawa people who are the traditional custodians of the land, and who survived the brutality of colonisation and dispossession. I believe Australia is making steady baby steps toward reconciliation.
Do I think agents/editors/readers will be interested in this novel about such horror? Maybe not, to be honest. But sometimes, writing from the heart with no concern for a commercial outcome, can create the best writing.
Currently, as a crime writer I've gone off-road without a map. But I know I can't write anything else right now. I'll be back once this draft is done, if I'm not lost forever in the wilderness of my sadness. I can't write crime as real war crimes play out on my screen every day. But the seed of passion for my ski lodge thriller remains. I've worked on it with my agent for over a decade. One day, I will share it with everyone, and that will be a happy milestone.
To answer the question of the Blog: How would I convince an editor to love this novel? I'd tell them that the reason I'm so passionate about it is that it's set in a fictional tiny ski resort that resembles one where I spent a lot of time growing up, and that it's a coming-of-age mystery, for both a teen daughter and her mother, as they both realise that the world they live in, is different to the world they thought they live in. Coming-of-age is an interesting theme as it can happen to people at different points in their lives, when they have a moral reckoning with the truth. My agent loves it, she's loved it for a long time. (My oh-so-patient agent!) I hope that an editor will fall in love with it enough to publish it, one day.
Elevator pitch for my ski lodge thriller:
A young man mysteriously dies in an old ski hut in a Tasmanian ski
resort. It’s 1994 when homosexuality was illegal, and poppy farmer Enid, and
her seventeen-year-old daughter, believe this is one in a series of unresolved gay-hate
murders. Troublingly, it seems that someone close to them in their ski lodge is responsible.
Blurb*:
A ski club is a strangely
intimate place. Every winter weekend fifty people sleep side by side in
dormitory bunks, eat breakfast in their pyjamas, ski together, and have lively
après ski drinks by the fire. They’re all familiar, yet they don’t really know
each other.
(*I was going to include my full blurb here, but I'm paranoid someone might enter it into AI and produce a similar novel before I get it out there!)
The surest way to convince an editor to acquire my novel is to cross my fingers and toes!
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