Answering the big question: Where have you been?

It’s been a while, but last week I announced I’ve got another novel coming. Novel number four with a different publisher this time. A similar type of story – a parable, a story carrying truth within a story dressed in speculative and mystical elements.

I say it’s been a while because my third novel was published in the long shadows of both Covid and Black Lives Matter – two concepts that used to hang over almost every conversation like a spectre, and now seem to have been confined to listings in a history book, even though they are both still very much part of our everyday.

So I thought in resuming normal transmission, I’d answer some questions I’ve had since that announcement.

Here’s the biggest one: where have you been?

It’s a reasonable question. I published three novels in 15 months, and then radio silence.

But there was something happening during that radio silence that wasn’t me sitting back raking in millions in royalties. If you’ve ever written a book, you know that that is never going to happen unless you somehow create a cheeky wizard who goes to magic school. (And it doesn’t help that my surname is close to hers in spelling.)

There’s a simple one-word answer to that question: life.

Since I last published in 2020, life has been at times something to endure, and or something to survive. I’m not going to provide a laundry list of grievances, because life is hard for all of us, and please don’t take that as a siren call for pity. It’s not. Life isn’t easy. Everybody has it hard, and there are plenty of people who’ve done life tougher than me. But these were definitely the big ticket items that kept me away from storytelling.

I’ve been protecting my business from COVID (I work for myself) while managing a number of mental health crises amongst my family and battling three different types of cancer.

A friend of mine, Sarah Nuss, used a word to describe any writer’s time away because life just needs to be dealt with. That word is sabbatical. I really like that word because you come back from a sabbatical changed, not necessarily refreshed, but certainly different, and probably wiser with lessons learned. And I can tell you with this next novel that those lessons definitely made their way into that.

When you’re dealing with things of a significant nature, it’s not that you take your eye off the ball. It’s more that your eye is needed elsewhere. That’s not to say all of those things have gone, but through the grace of God, I’ve written another book, and it’s coming out with Enclave Publishing in July 2027. I can’t reveal too much. Only basically the pitch, and the question that I always start my novels with.

The pitch of this new novel is a modern retelling of the Parable of the Unclean Spirit, with a dash of the board gate Clue (or Cluedo if you’re in Australia).

I always start my novels with a question that drives how I explore a particular life issue or topic. For The Baggage Handler, it was ‘what would you do if you realized that you’d been carrying baggage all this time?’ With The Camera Never Lies the question was ‘what would happen if your secrets were revealed and you were forced to face them?’  For Where the Road Bends, it was ‘who are you … really?’

The question for Novel #4 is ‘can you run from your past, or will it find you?’

So that’s me back on the radar. For those of you reading, I appreciate your support, and I’ve appreciated your messages through social media as well.