On a quiet country road in the dead of night a teenage school girl is murdered.
No one hears.
No one sees.
The police begin their investigation, and everything draws a blank.
But for Detective Jane Lockwood the youth and innocence of the victim makes this more than just another case.
She’s determined to solve the crime and bring the killer to justice. But in a conservative country Australian town in 1993, that doesn’t want its first female detective, she ends up battling more than just the odds to see that justice is done.
In an emotionally charged turn of events Jane is pushed to the limit, and has nothing to go on except the victim’s tragic drawings and the beguiling words shows so fair.
Writing Female Planet was such an enjoyable experience I was keen to back it up with another novel fairly quickly.
The article in Style Magazine was so complimentary I thought that could be a useful piece of publicity, so I grabbed a bunch of them (ahem….) and tore the article out and posted it and a cover letter to a list of literary agents.
I posted 10 in total and I thought, I’ll be realistic – maybe I might get one or two that show some kind of interest, and the rest will be thanks but no thanks. Well how naïve was I! I only got two replies and didn’t hear boo out of the other eight.
Of the two that responded one was a thanks but no thanks (which was a shame because they were in Brisbane – which would have made it handy – the rest were in Sydney and Melbourne) – but at least the polite one was from a Queenslander!
The other reply came fairly promptly in the form of an email. I’ll keep this person’s name anonymous, but the first email was essentially thanks, but I’m not quite sure what you want. I replied (representation) and an interesting discussion ensued. She explained the market for science fiction is really hard because there is so much free science fiction on the net – there is however always a huge demand for crime fiction, especially for female readers. Leave it with me, I said, and I started thinking about it.
Over the next week or two I tossed around some ideas – I didn’t want to write something to order, but I wanted to be a bit pragmatic and the idea of doing some crime fiction interested me – partly because I’d never written anything like that before, or even thought about it, but also because I knew it was always an interesting way to explore a society and culture and time – by what the crime and the investigation opens up.
So I started thinking about the idea of a murdered school girl, who’s body is found one morning. The first thing I realised is that everything in a crime novel is so tightly linked in a causal way – you have to be very careful about how you lay clues and what leads to what, and what effects what – I hadn’t written any narratives like that before. It was kind of mechanical but an interesting (and new) component for me.
I settled on Toowoomba in the early 90’s as I knew that time and location quite well – and it was a very interesting period in Queensland history – you had the wash up from the Fitzgerald Enquiry, and the public debate and law and order etc was still a very hotly contested space – you had the hangover from the Queensland that used to be, and the very beginnings of the Queensland that came to be now. There was still a lot of friction and it made for an interesting back drop I thought.
So with all of that it just unlocked and I developed the idea over a few weeks. I then set about writing it – and I tried to write it in a “normal style” with short sentences and full stops etc and I found just couldn’t do it – that ground to a halt maybe 10 pages in or so – I found the way I write effects my ability to access the story and ideas, and putting full stops in as much as people normally do just blocks the ideas, or the flow of it – so I struggled with that and then gave up – I had to write it just how I write everything else. So I went back and tried to take the full stops out of what I had already written – and now it’s a bit of a mish mash with a few still in there, that wouldn’t have been had I been writing it in my way from the beginning. I’m not trying to be pretentious or anything (as someone once hinted to me) – but I’m just writing it how it flows and I think my novels should be read more like you read a poem than a novel.
Another thing that became apparent really early on for me is the early 90’s (particularly the time I spent in Toowoomba) was a very hard and not enjoyable part of my life, for a lot of reasons – and it brought all of that back, which is pretty awkward at first but in setting the book then it gave me the opportunity to say the things I wanted to say about the culture then, so it was good.
After I’d written about 10% I sent a sample to the agent who’d shown an interest and waited for a reply – eventually one came from her assistant – thanks but no thanks. I politely asked for a bit more info and was told ‘I don’t like the way you use pronouns’ – and that was that. No discussion about if you changed certain things, just ‘the industry is too hard now so I can’t put the time in…’
I was a bit disappointed and confused, wondering what was wrong with my pronouns – and how wedded to them was I anyway? Maybe it was just the industry and they couldn’t afford the time to work with me ~ but it was frustrating because it said nothing of the characters or story or themes. So I decided it wasn’t worthwhile putting any more time into this kind of thing – and I liked my pronouns anyway – so I’d just go it alone as I had with my other books. This is not to say I don’t want feedback – because I do, but only if it’s constructive.
So anyway I kept writing and by February 2019 I had finished it – I’d gone through my usual process of writing it on WordPerfect 6 for DOS and then editing and formatting it on MS Word. I was using twitter a little bit at the time and had found a reader in England who offered to proof read it for me and give me some feedback, which was helpful. And so I self published the eBook in February and then paperback in May.
The Remember Toowoomba When facebook group did a giveaway and the High Country Herald also ran an article, and I had the book stocked in the Book Tree in Toowoomba.
As expected being a crime fiction it did seem to have a reasonable amount of interest and in the first few years between sales and me lending the book it would have been read about twenty times, with only one person ever picking whodunnit! And of course those figures are paltry compared to a real sale but I was happy with that. The general consensus was the story and characters were really good, but a lot of people struggled with the punctuation and some of the writing elements. And then I found out there were some typos and one scene had the wrong character’s name in it. Blergh!
Something else I had tried to do with this book was keep the descriptions of the characters to a minimum – that way the reader could invest a bit and picture/imagine them themselves. Some people loved that and some people hated that – and I thought about that a lot – I really loved writing visual descriptions, but had purposely left that out here. So I decided I really should change that – otherwise why write a book at all – people could just make it all up and be invested however they like!
Also like my other novels this one also had no chapters – and I discussed that with a number of people, and they didn’t like it because it didn’t give them a point to ‘get out’ or have a break – or the point to read up to. I’d put no chapters in there because I wanted it to be like a film – a coherent whole, not segmented pieces. But again, in talking to people I found out the practise was different – and it was so obvious I don’t know why I never realised it! You can finish a movie in one session, but not a book it just takes too long – so you need it in sections.
So some of these changes I could automate and some I couldn’t – and I won’t go into any of the laborious and mind numbing detail, but I made it all look pretty conventional – and in the end I couldn’t stand it! The full stop thing just does my head in as well as a whole lot of other things – so I changed it back. Again some could be automated and some had to be done manually. The worst part was ellipsis – apparently according to the law they can only ever be three dots long, like this…however I have a variable length to match the mood of the speaker or the prose – but I’d done a destructive edit – all of my multi-length ones had all been changed to just three dots regardless of how long they originally were. So long story short I had to find a way to combine the original ellipsis length from the old text with the new passages I’d written and other punctuation changes. Took a while but I could. And some of the punctuation changes were pretty good – “ changed to ‘ – and who wants to read something like ?’, or !’, so the commas were dropped from them and various sensible things like that – but other bits of punctuation that inferred more about the rhythm or feeling of the dialogue or prose were kept – and most of the full stops gone from the end of each paragraph – in fact most paragraphs are one sentence – occasionally there’ll be two or more though.
So all of that kind of rankled a bit with me and so in late 2023 I decided I’d do a second edition. I’d divide it into chapters and I’d put in visual descriptions of some of the characters – all of that was easy, and not too much of a stretch in practise or principle. But then I decided I’d also make the punctuation more “normal” – just to make the book more accessible. Especially after discussing this issue with two of my children who are very literary and have read far more novels than I’m ever going to.
So February 2025 the new eBook and paperback of the second edition came out – and rereading it many times as I had to when I was correcting things, made me realise I really like this book. I’d been tossing ideas around for a sequel and had written a little bit in late 23 through to early 25 but I decided to hold that for a while – I wasn’t quite up to the level of detail required at the time, with so many other things on in my life, and so I started writing something that didn’t need that kind of planning – but I do plan to return to the next book in the series soon.
I see the whole series taking place over 5 books – and it’s about plotting the growth in one character as well as capturing the social change going on at the time – to be honest there was a lot about that period which was pretty horrible and I really capture that well – it was the last gasp of intolerance being a social norm. Perhaps we’ve gone too far the other way now and the pendulum needs to sit in the middle – but I really want to capture how things were and what it was like to be outside of that society and those values at the time, and one character to be dealing with that as well as her personal and professional issues.
So more in this space to come!