Blog for 1 April 2022

I’ve got to the middle of my first draft of ‘Fight’ and am now researching juvenile detention centres in Australia. It’s hard to do. Max is holed up there for a month, some Australian kids are there for years. In Queensland, where this part of ‘Fight’ takes place, there are more than 10,000 10-17 year olds imprisoned in youth detention. 50% of these are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander children, despite indigenous children making up only 6% of the 10-17 year old

‘The Sunset Clause’ is now at what I’ve come to call a ‘red pen draft’. This is where I print it out and literally go through it with a red pen. Amazing what changes you can see to make on paper as opposed to a screen. Thanks to some sage advice from Anna Mackenzie who assessed an earlier draft, it has been trimmed and tucked and tweaked to a better version of itself. I hope! The plan is still to have a final draft ready for an editor before the end of the year.

One of my favourite quotes of all time:

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures, attributed to Jessamyn West.

Good stories can be a window or a mirror, and a fictional character can, and should, give us a deeper understanding of our world and ourselves.