Writing Life

BOOK CONTRACT - JULY 2006

What a thrill it is to announce that contracts have been signed with Picador UK and Random House Australia, and what a journey it has been to arrive at this moment. It goes something like this.

You write the book. You hone and polish the manuscript and, with fingers crossed, slide the bulky parcel across the post office counter. You resolve to catch up with other projects, ignoring the awful space it has left in your life, as if a child had left home to trek into the unknown.

You have made a tentative start on the next novel, when a first offer arrives. Others follow, a heated auction is held and before you know it there are agonising decisions to be made. This publisher or that. How wonderful to be deciding between major publishing houses all of whom are passionate about the book. Oh, it has been such an exciting time!

And now, with the ink barely dry on the contracts for the publication of Nights In The Asylum, I am looking forward to the process of seeing my manuscript become a book. And when the finished volume finally arrives in the post it will feel, I imagine, a bit like welcoming home that long lost child, a child grown up and exotically transformed by its journey.

And as if to prove that blessings, like troubles, arrive in pairs, the University of Adelaide has offered a scholarship for three years of full time writing. I do feel doubly blessed.

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