Hello! It’s been a while since I visited. And why haven’t I? What a dweeb! Oh wait! I’m a full-time teacher and husband and father and oh yeah! Let’s forgive ourselves!

Anyway, I thought I’d update you fine folk regarding the latest news about To Become a Whale, and future projects!

1. Longlisted for an award!

This is very rad. I’ve been longlisted for the Indie Book Awards Debut Fiction category. This came out of nowhere. I drove to work and looked at my notifications and saw I’d been tagged in an award tweet. I always thought there’d be some kind of trumpets, or something…

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This is hugely gratifying. There are some real heavyweights on that list – books I’ve read, books I’ve read about – and to be included in such company feels like a big thumbs-up from the Australian independent booksellers. So good. Indie booksellers are a huge boon to authors – word of mouth spreads far more consistently and is far more reliable than other forms of mass marketing. I’ve loved partnering with indie bookstores – the people are uniformly wonderful. Man. I am just utterly chuffed.

2. Being published in France!

You read that right. We’ve sold To Become a Whale in France!

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One of those things you’d never bother dreaming about but is super super cool when it happens. I am super-excited by this. The translator (an Australian living in France) is currently working on the translation. Imagine my book being in the hands of super-nice French people! They usually invite debut novelists over to foreign countries to do a bit of a book tour, right? Right?!

3. New book!

I’ve finished work on a new book I am very excited by! I’ve worked on this while simultaneously working on the edits and changes to To Become a Whale, and after my fourth or fifth draft, I’ve sent this on to my publishers. There’s no guarantee they’ll like the book, they’ll see a market for it, that I managed to write something good twice in a row, but you know what? I really like it. So if it goes ahead or not, I’m still proud of it.

But let’s hope it goes ahead!

It’s very different. Multiple, shifting perspectives, crime, violence, humour, historic, not-historic, future, small-town, morality. It’s all good! I’d buy it and read it and like it. I think.

4. New new book!

I’ve also started work on a new new book. This one is scary and far too big for me to understand yet. So I’ve started plodding away at generating words. We’ll see where it goes. It is a very vulnerable book and writing it is hard, but again, you gotta go to those places if you want to produce something worthwhile.

Thanks! Leave a comment and converse with me!