In the wake of Adelaide Writers’ Week’s cancellation, Steve Davis revisits two beloved archive episodes, celebrating the craft and commerce of storytelling through the voices of South Australian authors, publishers, and romance writers, closing with an original song written for this particular moment in our cultural life.
The white marquees are not going up in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden this year. Adelaide Writers’ Week, a festival that has graced this city since 1960, was cancelled following a sequence of events set in motion by a disinvitation that drew international condemnation, triggered the resignation of director Louise Adler and nearly the entire board, and ultimately prompted an unreserved apology from a newly constituted board. Community alternatives, including Constellations at the Adelaide Town Hall, have stepped forward to keep the spirit of the festival alive. The Adelaide Show is doing the same, in its own way.
There is no SA Drink of the Week in this episode.
The Musical Pilgrimage closes the episode with an original composition, “Uncomfortable Ideas,” written by Steve Davis and performed by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos. More than a few people have suggested it deserves to be the unofficial anthem of this year’s festival.
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Running Sheet: Adelaide Writers’ Week in Absentia
00:00:00 Intro
Introduction
00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week
There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.
00:06:25 Adelaide Writers’ Week In Absentia
Steve Davis opens by acknowledging the cancellation of Adelaide Writers’ Week and the circumstances behind it, without dwelling on controversy for its own sake. The spirit of the festival, he argues, cannot be legislated out of existence, and The Adelaide Show is here to prove it.
Before the archive episodes begin, Steve offers a handful of literary touchstones. Patrick White observed that writing a novel is like an illness from which one is trying to recover, and that the artist’s role is to make sense of a world becoming increasingly nonsensical. Clive James described great books as voices that speak across the centuries, telling you that you are not alone. Vonnegut reminded us that we must be careful about what we pretend to be, and that reading leads to a life more grand, more empathetic, more civilised. And Douglas Adams, who loved deadlines for the whooshing noise they make as they go by, gives us a fitting frame for a festival that simply did not happen.
Two archive episodes follow, chosen for what they reveal about the real work of writing and the underappreciated world of genre fiction.
Segment One: Writing, Publishing, and Resetting Expectations, Episode 308 (6:25)
The pandemic was supposed to be the great gift to aspiring novelists. Time, solitude, and the vague sense that history was being made. What actually happened, for most people, was considerably less cinematic.
In this 2020 recording, four people who know the industry from the inside cut through the life-coach optimism that surrounded the period. Authors Jane Ainslie and Michelle Prak bring the writing perspective. Publishers Michael Bollen of Wakefield Press and Rommie Corso of Hardshell Publishing bring the business view. Together they create an unusually candid picture of what it actually takes to turn a manuscript into a book that someone buys.
The moment that sets the tone comes early. Jane Ainslie addresses the idea that everyone has a book inside them with the sort of directness that suggests she has been asked this at a lot of dinner parties: not every story the world has inside it is a story the world is waiting to read. Michelle Prak, who has put herself through five, six, sometimes seven drafts before a manuscript goes anywhere near an editor, adds that writing is a deeply enjoyable, deeply expensive hobby that tends to crowd out a great deal of everything else.
Michael Bollen introduces a concept that most aspiring authors have not quite faced: a book’s shelf life, for literary fiction, sits somewhere between milk and yoga. He describes the editorial process as a dance, with the editor standing in for the general reader, keeping an ego-free eye on whether the character who died on page seven has somehow reappeared at the party on page 86. Rommie Corso explains that self-published authors often resist the very commercial adjustments that would help their books find readers, wanting independence and viability at the same time. These do not always coexist.
There is a fine moment around the ethics of drawing real people into fiction. Michelle Prak describes her novel Goodbye Newsroom, set against the backdrop of shrinking newsrooms, as inspired by rather than transcribed from real events. Jane Ainslie explains that fictionalising her nursing experiences allowed her to treat them with more dignity than a straight memoir would permit. Steve raises the precedent of a Wakefield Press novel about South Australian politics whose characters bore a striking resemblance to identifiable figures (that was a reference to The novel you’re thinking of is Never A True Word by Michael McGuire, a former journalist and long‑time political writer for The Australian and The Advertiser – his interview was in episode 198). Michael Bollen confirms, diplomatically, that some adjustments were made.
Segment Two: The Art and Heart of Romance, Episode 111 (1:03:54)
The candles are on the table. There is a fire going. The Scenic Hotel has given this conversation a room of its own, and three romance authors have settled in to make a serious case for a genre that represents the largest slice of fiction sales on the planet, and which continues to be treated by the literary world as something slightly embarrassing.
Trish Morey, Victoria Purman, and Bronwyn Stuart are completely clear-eyed about what they do and why it matters. Romance, Trish explains, is not a “whodunit” but a “howdunit.” You know who ends up together. The pleasure is in the journey, and in not being able to work out how on earth these two people are going to find their way through all the obstacles between them. Victoria adds that romance readers were among the earliest adopters of digital books, and that the genre has long sustained a community of writers who support one another in ways other literary communities have not managed to replicate.
The conversation turns, as it always does in the best episodes, on a moment of genuine revelation. Victoria puts it plainly: the deepest appeal of romance fiction is that the heroine is truly seen by the hero. Trish confirms it. Steve, in what he describes as his second light bulb moment of the evening, sits with this for a beat before acknowledging that this is not a small thing.
Steve is also pressed into service reading from one of the novels in the voice of a cowboy hero. He brings considerable commitment to the performance. The authors’ response is warm, specific, and entirely at his expense.
The episode closes with the “Is It News?” quiz, hosted by Nigel Dobson, which draws on historical romance headlines from 1923 South Australia and, against all odds, confirms that the real thing was considerably more scandalous than anything currently on the romance shelf.
02:15:32 Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage, we feature Uncomfortable Ideas (The Adelaide Writers’ Week Song) by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos.
Writers’ festivals exist, at their best, to put uncomfortable ideas into a room and let people sit with them. Adelaide Writers’ Week found itself this year at the centre of a very public argument about whether that is still something institutions are willing to do.
The festival has been here before. Germaine Greer being Germaine Greer. The exposure of fabricated Holocaust revisionism behind the Helen Demidenko affair. Patrick White in 1986 urging writers to ignore critics if they wanted to avoid producing work that was safe and uninspiring and pleasing to nobody. Writers’ festivals are unsettling because they surface ideas people would often prefer to leave alone. They are necessary because a society that cannot examine uncomfortable thinking out loud gradually loses the capacity to protect itself from thinking that goes unexamined.
“Uncomfortable Ideas” was written by Steve Davis to speak directly to that tension. It addresses the short-sightedness of those who believe audiences need to be shielded from difficult thoughts, and it takes seriously Patrick White’s case for artistic courage that does not stop to ask permission. Listen for the bridge, which captures the specific feeling of an invitation to speak in the open air being overshadowed by voices that underestimated what a well-read audience is capable of holding.
Here’s this week’s preview video
There is no video this week.
SFX: Throughout the podcast we use free SFX from freesfx.co.uk for the harp, the visa stamp, the silent movie music, the stylus, the radio signal SFX, the wine pouring and cork pulling SFX, and the swooshes around Siri.
An AI generated transcript – there will be errors. Check quotes against the actual audio (if you would like to volunteer as an editor, let Steve know)
428-The Adelaide Show
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Steve Davis: [00:00:00] Hello, I’m Steve Davis and welcome to episode 428 of the Adelaide Show Podcast. Well, this is a special edition that we have today because the white marquees, they’re not going up in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden this year. That’s because Adelaide Writers Week are festival that’s called the City Home.
Since 1960 has been canceled in circumstances, I’m sure we’re all aware, that drew international attention and ultimately a formal apology from the newly constituted board. So what began with a dis invitation, one that was widely condemned as an act of institutional timidity in the face of political pressure, set off a sequence of events that nobody could have predicted.
There was about 180 authors who withdrew from the festival director Louise Adler, and nearly the entire board resigned citing the [00:01:00] silencing of writers under government pressure. Then of course, the new board was eventually appointed and issued an unreserved apology acknowledged the organization had failed to uphold artistic freedom.
Meanwhile, uh, community led alternatives, including constellations of the Adelaide Town Hall have stepped forward to keep the spirit of the festival alive. Well, here at the Adelaide Show. We felt the same Pool Writer’s week has always been described as a place for civilized discussion, for humane and empathetic exchange of ideas.
And that spirit doesn’t need a marquee to survive. So what I’m doing today is running a gorilla version of the festival. We are revisiting two classic episodes from the archive that sit right at the heart of what a writer’s festival is for, which is the craft, the industry, and the, the sheer human pleasure of [00:02:00] storytelling.
But before we get there, perhaps a few words from writers who understood the job better than most. Patrick White, who was involved with various writer’s weeks, never one. Also for a, a comfortable reassurance. He once observed that writing a novel is like an illness from which one is trying to recover. He also believed the artist’s role is to try and make sense of a world becoming increasingly nonsensical.
How timely is that statement today? His contemporary at the time, Clive James, he put it another way. He said, A book is a voice that speaks to you. And a great book is a voice that speaks across the centuries telling you, you are not alone. Just been continuing my reading of Dostoevsky and now ov, uh, I agree 100%.
Those voices maintain their relevance across [00:03:00] hundreds of years. Kurt Vonnegut, um, he’d seen enough of history to have earned his criticism. He said this, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. And from him, also, a gentle instruction to the rest of us read to lead a life more grand, more empathetic, and more civilized.
And we can’t talk about writers without some of the, the quirkier members of the fraternity. Douglas Adams, he memorably noted how he loved deadlines and especially the whooshing noise they make as they go by. Well, this week, it’s the whoosh of that canceled festival that brings us together to make sure that authors remain loud, clear, and unreserved.
So here’s what I’ve got for you today. We’re gonna start by traveling back to 2020 and episode 308, which was recorded during [00:04:00] COVID-19. Isolation authors were Jane Ainsley and Michelle Pra alongside publishers. Michael Boland from Wakefield Press and Romy Corso from Hard Shell Publishing. They tackled the myth of the isolation masterpiece and the gritty reality of getting a book from draft to shelf.
And then we’re going to go back further to 2015. In episode 111, it was our romance writers round table. It was recorded around a candle lit table at the Scenic Hotel with Trish Maury, Victoria Perman, and Bronwyn Stewart. And it remains one of my most fond episodes. And we’ll close a course with the musical pilgrimage, and this time it’s a song I’ve written and then produced through Steve Davis and the virtuosos that someone kindly suggested should be the unofficial anthem [00:05:00] of the Adelaide Writers Week.
Anyway, more on that when we get there. Let us open the book and start at the first page,
Theme: refugees. Lady.
Lady. Lady, lady
Caitlin Davis: in the spirit of reconciliation. The Adelaide Show Podcast acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout South Australia and their connections to land, see, and community. We pay our respects to their elders past and [00:06:00] present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Theme: That lady
Steve Davis: for the first of our two main segments. Today, I wanna take you back to 2020. Everyone it seemed had been handed the gift of time and told this was the moment to write the great Australian novel. What actually happened, of course, for a lot of people, was staring at blank walls. So with episode 308, I sat four people down who knew the difference between the romantic idea of writing and the real work that goes into it.
So you’re about to hear from Jane Ainsley and [00:07:00] Michelle Pra. They bring the author’s perspective. Michael Bolden of Wakefield Press and Romy Corso of Hard Shell Publishing. They brought the industry view and together they stripped back the life coach language that had attached itself to the pandemic period.
And they just talked honestly about what it takes to move a project forward when the world’s just rearranged itself. You hear Michael Boland walked through the high stakes decisions a publisher makes before committing to a project. Uh, ROI Corso explains the particular work of guiding self-published authors through a process that’s more demanding than it first appears.
Michelle prac reflects on her shift from journalism to the fictional world, uh, particularly in the, the focus of the, the novel Goodbye Newsroom. And Jane Ainsley shares how her nursing background shapes the characters that she creates. Uh, the group also takes on the, the brutal editorial discipline of murdering your [00:08:00] darlings.
While some of the most successful genres commercially successful romance and erotica among them, um, my speakers say they continue to be underestimated by the literary establishment. So that’s. Episode 308, and we’re going to listen. I mean, you can go back and listen to the full episode if you wish, but here are some wonderful moments from that.
I’m going to start with that old saying about having a book inside us because the full quote, at least in the version used by Christopher Hitchens goes, everyone has a book in them, but in most cases, that’s where it should stay. So I wanna start with our authors. Firstly, do you think we all have novels inside us and should we liberate them or suppress them?
Um, who would like to go first? Um, Michelle,
Michelle Prak: I think, uh, well, everyone has a story inside them. We’re all living our own [00:09:00] very interesting and diverse stories and saying that everyone has perhaps a novel inside them is almost, you know, demanding that everyone hands in an English essay. Like not everyone wants to turn their story into a novel.
They’re quite happy experiencing, um, life as it flows on sharing anecdotes and, you know, yarns and stories with friends and on social media and in whatever form that they like. Um, it’s just that, yeah, some people want to go through that torturous process. Of perhaps putting some of that onto the page.
And so I’ve been torturing myself like that for a couple of years now,
Steve Davis: and I want to come back to that later. ’cause I’ve read some of your, um, confessions of the torture in the forward to your books. Uh, but, uh, Jane, your impression of that quote,
Jane Ainslie: um, without sounding really rude, I think it’s a little bit like when, um, people show you their baby and say, this is the best baby in the [00:10:00] universe and the most beautiful baby, and my children are the most talented.
And you look at them and you go, oh, okay. Should you say so? So I think, you know, I think everyone has stories, but, um, you know, it’s just whether everybody wants to hear your story.
Steve Davis: Okay. Succinct, uh, ROI as a publisher and you, you, you facilitate a lot of self-publishing for authors. What are your thoughts.
Should. Yes,
Rommie Corso: absolutely. Um, so like Michelle said, everyone does have a story in them, and I find with my clients many times it’s, they’re actually on a healing journey. So it doesn’t matter if they wish to then publish their story to the outer world, they can decide that when they’ll finish their manuscript.
Um, but that’s the, the biggest benefit I see is that it has a real impact on their life and, um, they’re able to heal past traumas and, and so many things. And sometimes it’s just to do something for themselves, um, because we’re always giving to other people our time, our energy. And, [00:11:00] um, just to write something that’s, that you’ve been able to complete yourself is a huge achievement.
Steve Davis: And Michael, in your case, of course, you have to stake some cash in the game to take someone’s book to publication. What are your thoughts should some of them?
Michael Bollen: Well, just to what Romy was saying is very interesting, I think because we do get a lot of manuscripts and a lot of authors approaching us with a fully written manuscript that has been, um, an arisen perhaps out of a trauma or have been, has been, um, uh, the therapist, the doctor has advised the patient or the sufferer to, to write down their story and um, you know, as therapy, as catharsis, as much as anything probably.
And, you know, and it is a healing journey as Rommy. So it plainly says, we are then sometimes put on the spot with a manuscript, which may be, um, [00:12:00] extremely valuable for the individual and perhaps for some others have suffered the same situation. But, uh, it’s not going to be read, it’s not gonna be, it’s not gonna be bought, uh, where you’re tie in what Jane was saying, um, that, um, is not commercially viable, if you like, because partly because, I mean, I think this, um, writing or writing an episode out of your life if you like, or healing or, or, or coming to terms with whatever, I, I’m not a therapist, um, is a, is a very popular way of doing things.
And um, it just does really put us on the spot because someone said you might have a, a terrible story, you know, abuse as a child or, or, but, but there are a million books in that area. Um, and because your seven friends said how wonderful this book is after having a quick scheme and after you’ve asked them [00:13:00] fortnightly, have you read it yet?
Um, and then they finally answer, um, it doesn’t necessarily mean we would have the capacity or any real publishers would’ve the capacity to make that book self-sufficient.
Steve Davis: So
Michael Bollen: numbers. Cover costs.
Steve Davis: Um, I wanna come back to some more nuance on that element, but just before we get there, just taking a sidestep from, uh, fiction to nonfiction for a moment.
Uh, Wakefield Press in particular, we’ve had interviews with a lot of your authors over the years, uh, Denise George, Michael McGuire, uh, and in fact, the one that I remember the most, uh, Bruce Monday wrote a book called Those Wild Rabbits, all about the history of rabbits in Australia. Which to be honest, I’m not sure I would’ve just picked up randomly off the shelf.
But because it was presented to me and the interview uncovered so much in information about Australia that in a way I hadn’t thought before. Um, what is the, the likelihood of success [00:14:00] for a nonfiction novel, a nonfiction book in this current climate?
Michael Bollen: Oh, I think, look, um, nonfiction if, as with, say, Bruce Monday’s book, and he also wrote a book about the stone walls, dry stone walls of a nonfictional book that is unique or different, it’s always gonna sell, um, over, over decades.
Whereas as someone said, um, you know, for a lot of literary novels, you hear a lot about, in Australia, their shelf life is somewhere between milk and yoga. You know, that, um, they’re here today and going tomorrow. Bit like the pro gold. Circuit or the protest. There’s people up there telling, you know, JK Rowling, whatever, selling billions and billions of copies.
Steve Davis: Mm.
Michael Bollen: But, um, there’s a lot of ghost books
Steve Davis: on that note though, Michelle, I’m really curious to know with your novel. Uh, the first one, I think Good goodbye newsroom. [00:15:00] The adventures of a journalist who’s been laid off. She rebuilt her career with her sister. You’ve got a past life as a journalist. Was there any thinking process you went through prevaricating between a story of fiction or something that was nonfiction, talking about a life in a newsroom or media in the modern age?
Michelle Prak: I always thought it would be a fiction piece, but like a good fiction piece, like many good fiction pieces. It was rooted in a lot of reality and a lot of my own personal interests. Um, so, you know, I’m a public relations practitioner and so what happens in the media is of interest to me because for a lot of my clients, media is where they want to appear.
So I’ve always been on the periphery of media, I guess looking, um, in particular over the last five years at how newsrooms have been struggling, shrinking, um, a lot of people, you know, I went to uni with when I studied journalism, you know, major [00:16:00] redundant and so on. So that was a theme swirling in my mind for quite some time.
And I didn’t ever really consider putting it into a non-fiction piece. I always wanted to. Develop a kind of humorous look at it. Um, so yeah, it did come out to be, um, a chicklet, uh, story. Uh, but yeah, with a lot of, um, connections to what, um, we’ve observed in real Australian life and in fact, you know, around the globe with the news media
Steve Davis: and even observing more and more, unfortunately with the journalists being laid off NewsCorp just recently, uh, it was, uh, quite pretentious.
Your novel.
Michelle Prak: Yeah. It, it, it, it, it continues. So every 3, 4, 5 months you’ll see more headlines, um, with, um, journalists being made redundant. So yeah, the themes, you know, I wrote started writing it in 2017, but yeah, it’s, it’s still all happening right now.
Steve Davis: You might suggest to a news corp to use your novel as an induction, uh, process for [00:17:00] onboarding new journalists so they can see what their future has in store.
Uh, but Jane, I like that. Now you draw your stories from the, the world of nursing. You were in the world of nursing. What about you? Had you pondered a, a, a nonfiction expose or, or rendering of what life is in hospitals or was it always going to be fiction?
Jane Ainslie: It was the nursing. Um, the book is based very much on my, obviously on my experience as a nurse.
Um, and I’ve found the people, when you tell people you were a nurse, they always wanna know those stories. You know, those stories, um, which are often quite humorous, but. Um, they’re humorous, but they’re also very sad because obviously it’s to do with a person who’s in a really nasty situation in a hospital.
But I, so they, therefore, I didn’t want to do a nonfiction book because it kind of felt really disrespectful. Um, by fiction, using the stories, I was able to make them kinder [00:18:00] and, um, it just softened the whole, um, reality of what nursing is actually like. So, you know, and I was able to bring in a romance, so it was really like a checklist, nursing story.
Um, and I, I felt a lot more comfortable with that. I don’t think I would ever want to write a nonfiction nursing book. I think it would just be too sad. And like, um, the journalists, um, you know, nurses are being laid off all the time and being made to be redundant and, and it’s, it’s a, it’s a really nasty culture.
So I don’t really wanna think about, you know, I don’t wanna involve myself in that energy.
Steve Davis: Although in the opening scenes in looking for Wonderland, our nurse Alice is in charge of a, a patient in emergency who seems as high as a kite naked as the day he was born. Uh, and quite gifted in, in a certain aspect of, uh, his anatomy.
And, uh, again, could almost serve as an induction novel for nurses.
Jane Ainslie: Well, that was a Saturday morning in the ED when I was working, and I just felt that was a [00:19:00] very worthy, um, story to repeat. So yes, you know, there is a lot of nakedness in nursing and, um. But often not very, not often, not very fine examples of the human anatomy.
So when you get a really good one. Yep.
Steve Davis: You
Jane Ainslie: remember
Steve Davis: now writers from, you know, Oscar Wilde to Stephen King have talked about the need for us to murder our darlings. Uh, in the writing process, we might have a character or a scenario that’s close to our heart, but for the sake, the greater sake of our project, it just needs to be cued.
Um, so here’s the thing, if an author has finished a manuscript and is coming to Michael or Romy, how open are we to criticism to pair back some aspects of the book? And have you been involved in those conversations? Maybe a story or two? Uh, who would, Michael, should I start with you?
Michael Bollen: The thing is always quite complicated.
Whose book [00:20:00] is it is, um, and the editorial process, what the editor, who the editor is really is the person standing in for the general public, standing in for the reader. So working two ways really. And it’s a, a good, a good editor in, besides the copy editing, besides the dot totting, the t dotting the T’s and crossing the i it’s the other way round is, um, is, um, involved in that sort of dance is a word that, uh, the.
Veteran who taught me about publishing and about editing a hundred years ago, trying to, trying to get the work. Whether it’s shifting text around, whether it’s saying, look, you’ve said the same thing 40 times. The obvious sort of things is that Steve’s dead on page seven, but very much the life of the party on page 86.
How does that happen? And that sort of work gets, it can be complicated. And the editor, I think, in a publishing house or working for a publisher needs to be, [00:21:00] you know, the drummer in the band. The one keeping, it needs to be egoless really.
Steve Davis: But, uh, Romy, in your situation, you are likely to see not just authors who are finished, but who might be at the beginning of a process.
What, where are we more open to, uh, to that sort of guidance? At what point?
Rommie Corso: I have a lot of flexibility with what I do with helping independent publishers and authors, which is great. So I usually try and match them with an editor that’s, uh, familiar with that, their style of work, their genre. Um, and I think it’s really important to get a good personality match.
And so thankfully I have the flexibility to do that. Um, with the independent authors, you can get a lot of pushback. They don’t often like. The commercial changes that you’re trying to make, and they want to be independent because they want to do it their way. So sometimes there’s only so far we can take the [00:22:00] work.
If they do want it to be commercially viable, then they obviously need to, uh, listen a bit more deeply to the feedback that the editors giving them. But, um, but overall they get flexibility with, with the independent publishing pathway,
Steve Davis: I suppose. But I would, I would imagine that’d be less open to hearing it if all my blood, sweat and tears had gone into the nth degree, whereas earlier on, I might have a chance to shift, uh, direction.
It’s just, yeah.
Rommie Corso: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I guess clients can get structural, um, feedback as well, just even at the beginning of their project, they, there’s two different pathways that I find some people like to just write, write, write, and they need to do that, otherwise they’re never gonna finish. Uh, whereas others need some structural guidance and working out their, their ideas for, for chapter names and, and book themes and, and putting that together first so it people work differently.
So again, there’s um, I allow for that [00:23:00] flexibility and what’s gonna suit their personality.
Steve Davis: Um, Jane, I’m curious, did you have to murder any darlings in any of your books when at great pain and, and cost?
Jane Ainslie: Absolutely. Um, I find my first. My first, um, draft is usually incredibly self-indulgent. And, um, not, not all that interesting because I have written mostly it’s, it’s like exercising those demons out onto the page, but getting the skeleton there of, of the book, the story you want to tell.
And then I find by the end of that, I’ve got a clearer idea of where I’m going and I go back and I kill off all the darlings and I just write the book
Steve Davis: Pra um, what, what was your process like? Uh,
Michelle Prak: I write about five, six, maybe even seven drafts, and then I engage in editor to work on it with me. Um, with my second novel, the train guy, I killed a lot of things there.
I I chopped off [00:24:00] limbs and put limbs back together and, but that was my own volition, my own understanding of, of the story. I actually wrote a couple of drafts of the train guy and then I realized that the train guy was actually two different stories and so I had to tear one out, so I left one aside and just focused on that one story.
Uh, and that worked for me so that, that was a, a lot of murder and, and mayhem there. Uh, but that all took place before I sent it to the editor for,
Steve Davis: see, this is where I think I should lower my expectations, that I’m ever going to get a novel done ’cause four or five or six drafts before them getting that, that is a, a very patient.
Process and I, I now understand, uh, in goodbye newsroom and the forward. You say, well, here we are, folks, 80,000 words. It’s been hard work getting them. I don’t think there’s any more to come, but of course there have been. What changed?
Michelle Prak: I think I was just being flippant and silly as I [00:25:00] often am. So I probably, you know, turned out that forward quite quickly.
Uh, I always knew I’d, yeah, I, I wanted to, to keep writing. I really enjoy that and you’ve gotta enjoy it if you’re going to be an indie author ’cause there’s no money in it. So, uh, it’s just something now that I’ve got a, a passion for, I devote a lot of my spare time to it. Okay. Often equipped to family and friends.
It’s a very, very expensive hobby, but it’s a hobby that I, I really, really enjoy and I’ve been able to carve out time for it because, you know, I do work for myself, so I’m lucky to be able to structure my hours around writing. Um, but also maybe, um, sadly I have withdrawn from a lot of the volunteering community and committee roles that I used to be involved with because yeah, you do reach a certain age where you think, you know, what do I really want to do?
What have I always wanted to do? And I was seven. What did I tell myself I wanted to do?
Theme: Mm-hmm.
Michelle Prak: I reminded myself I wanted to write novels. And so yeah, I’ve carved out that time [00:26:00] and, and publishing them myself. And I think I, I can’t envisage. Stopping.
Steve Davis: There must be an art after all the work is done to that title so that it grabs our attention.
I mean, I talked about those wild rabbits before and I did say, I might not have picked it up, but I was obviously hooked by that, uh, goodbye newsroom, uh, looking for Wonderland, et cetera. Uh, in my life. There is one book, uh, the title of which I could actually reflect on for hours. It’s called The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
And I, to me, that title is a book unto itself. It is so rich with meaning. So can we, I just love to explore what is the art or science of crafting a book title. Um, Michael, I mentioned those wild rabbits. I’ll start with you.
Michael Bollen: It’s very interesting because, um, especially I think there’s difference between a novel and a nonfiction.
[00:27:00] And this is quite strong because the, um, so much now of the purchasing of cus of people buying books is data driven. It’s, um, searching through Amazon or websites or wherever. So it gets more and more important that the title, at least in a nonfiction work actually, or at least a subtitle, actually tells you what, what this book is as important as something that might be, uh, alluring or look alluring of itself.
Whereas with the novel, it can be quite different. Um, in the, as you say, the poetic, the poetry of the title, unbearable lightness of being the things that are so very, very memorable. Obviously a memorable title still comes in and like back cover blurbs, you know, within a publishing house, and I’m sure within friends or within, um, reading groups or club reading clubs or whatever it might be, is that batting back and forth of a title and a [00:28:00] back cover blurb can, you know, take, you know, how many, how many editors or how many smart people does it take to paint a light bulb?
Well, how many, how many does it take to get the blurb right And so that everyone’s happy. And then added to that is, you know, now where, where data feeds, you know, the words, what is it called? Metadata. The metadata that, you know, we’ve always asked author, well tell us 10 words that really matter that get put in.
So they get driven out into the ether in whatever way it is to all the different, many feeds that are gonna help drive someone given so much of the buying is over the, over the net now, as well as the, you know, the browsing public where it’s history, science, but here, people, people, people looking. So the very first real bestseller I published and was a fluke, really was a book, um, that came in from a nurse and just spent, uh, two, three years working in Saudi Arabia.
Um. So behind the veil was pretty obvious. This was [00:29:00] before even the, so what’s that Sally Fields movie? Uh, not without my daughter, and we sort of lucked out in that. Um, the book came out by Fluke, just at the same time as the first Gulf War, which meant that at the time, all this media that existed, you know, as Michelle was pointing out, none of them really exist anymore.
Straight, uh, post Magazine, Steve Ard, who used to have a vibrating chair where two author sat on in order to jolly them up. Um, so that Behind the Veil, which was, you know, it doesn’t sound like a, a particular title, but at that time when the whole thing was going on, the first, the first Gulf War, and then the next, and I was just thinking during this particular recession, we haven’t lucked out so well.
But by luck, the last recession, the GFC recession, 2008 Global financial crash would, um, a, a book called, um, one Magic Square. The subtitle really worked better How to Grow Your Own Food on One Square Meter.
Theme: Yeah.
Michael Bollen: And Lolo Ho Bun and the book [00:30:00] just went ballistic at the time. We sold All over, all over the World.
Now,
Steve Davis: I would’ve loved to have seen that book published in, in the Size that is one meter square. I, I think, well, there would’ve been, um, um, Michelle and Jane, I just wanna know, you’ve got beautiful paired down titles for your books. Um, just goodbye Newsroom and Train. Go. Just start there, Michelle. Was there much wrestling or did you have that title as you were writing?
Michelle Prak: Goodbye Newsroom was super difficult to come up with because I just went through so many different iterations of what made sense for the story and for a long time the title included the name of, um, the main character Anna, and it was pointed out to me that Holly was a really one of the main characters too.
So, um, I moved away from using names. Uh, I knew I wanted a media theme though because this is, um, the first series. So I needed, uh, to have something to hang potentially three or four books [00:31:00] together. And I’m still not convinced that Goodbye Newsroom is right, because one of the things with fiction is your title needs to appeal to readers and fans of that genre.
It needs to be the kind of title that they expect and gravitate towards. Uh, but that’s what I settled on as being, um, what captured the story quite well. And I do tend to like, um, two word titles and the train guy was easy to me. You can already tell straight away it’s, um, light, fluffy, um, bit of a, a rom calm.
And it captures the story at the same time. And I just thought it was, I could imagine it on the cover, you know, and you have to think of these things in indie publishing. I just thought I could see the short, sharp title, colorful cover. And, um, yeah, I hope that would attract readers.
Steve Davis: Is there the option of re-releasing Goodbye Newsroom with a different title?
Michelle Prak: Yeah, it certainly is. And you know, when, when publishers, um, take indies on now and again, that’s one of the things that they, um, [00:32:00] talk about. You know, if you re-release down the track, will we have a new title? But, you know, I brainstormed for a long time and, and had others help and, um, got nothing so far.
Steve Davis: Jane, um, looking for Wonderland, your lead character is Alice. When did looking for Wonderland drop into place?
Jane Ainslie: You know, I actually can’t remember. I think when I was writing it and she was, you know, it was like she goes down ’cause she’s a middle-aged character and there’s not a lot of middle-aged characters around.
Well, when I wrote that, I don’t think there are. Um, and, and she was going down a bit of a rabbit hole, so it just seemed like a natural fit. But, um, I thought I’d talk about, the very first book I ever got published was called The Legend of Cedar, and it was about a western, uh, one Australian, Caucasian, um, woman, young woman who ends up going to India and has a, you know, like a spiritual experience.
And, but um, so, so I actually ended up having that published in India because no one was interested in it here. And, [00:33:00] um, it got published by a really big publishing company in India. And they said to me, you’re gonna have to change the title because it’s like calling, you know, it would be like the legend of Jesus here.
As they said, it’s too religious. For release in India. So then I had a week to come up with a new title and a book that I’d been working on for three years. So that was just horrendous. And, and I still don’t really like the title that we ended up with. Um, it was, I ended up re retitling it as Chai for Beginners.
So, um, yeah, that was, that was, that was really hard. That was like, that’s like renaming a child.
Steve Davis: Yes, exactly. And I, I can just sense, ’cause Michelle and I both have a history in social media, chai for begin, you just thinking it’s tick, tick, tick, it’s going to be picked up by more algorithms, et cetera. Uh, and I’m coming to you Romy, but I just, one quick thing.
I’ve, I’ve, I have to mention this, it’s my acclaim to fame, uh, use, use Western at the beginning. And I thought you were going down country and western. There’s a gentleman in the Adelaide Hills who writes mules and boon [00:34:00] novels. Uh, for the West. I’ve got a strand of Western, uh, bass ones. I was a character, uh, in one of them.
So Steve was the cowboy hero and my then partner was the heroine in that story. It was my only claim to fame. It’s a real, no, it’s not a page turner. Uh, it’s great for the compost actually. Uh, but I’m glad I was in something. Romy I’m imagining part of the value you can bring to an equation is to help that your author client get that title right.
What, what’s been your journey on that front?
Rommie Corso: Yeah, well actually, um. I started my career in visual communication and design, and one of the best things I learned, and that was a, a course at, at the University of South Australia was idea generation and, um, how to actually come up with ideas. And there is a formula for it.
Uh, and one of the biggest things I learned for any, um, budding authors and aspiring authors out there is just to not get too [00:35:00] stuck on that first catchy title that you think of. Um, write a whole bunch down, come back to it later, rethink it. Uh, I think, like Michelle said as well, you really need to think about your target audience, your market, and thankfully because of.
Social media these days. If, uh, there’s some private groups out there, there’s one that, that I actually run called Chi Pen Publishing. And it’s a private, safe environment so people can test out their ideas with, with their market and say, well, this is what the book’s about. Um, you know, for, for those that interested in this type of book, does this title make sense?
One of the biggest mistakes I see, uh, with the independent authors is they come up with a title and people don’t get it. They need education. And you don’t want that. You don’t want to have to educate people so they get what you’re trying to say. So even though it seems easy to come up with, you know, just a catchy title, it does take a lot of work to get to that point.
Samela Harris: Hello everybody, this is Samala Harris [00:36:00] having an extraordinary experience of being on GU Rather Superior Radio with Steve Davis and Nigel Dobson Keefe. And Steve Davis is a little bit above the, uh, the average interviewer. And I have to tell you, he’s a bit on the articulate and well informed side. I don’t know why he’s not on the mainstream, but here you are a bit of class here and I’m rather glad to be part of it.
Steve Davis: Let’s focus on what I promised listeners, and that is some Tin tech thought ideas, uh, to help. Find a way forward to bring some writing project to fruition. And I wanna start with you, Jane, because I think it was in a conversation we were having, it might have been someone else, but I think it was you. I made reference to an incident when I was a young man in Budapest of forging some documents so that I could get a longer stay permit as the early nineties, uh, without having to go in and outta the border all the [00:37:00] time.
And I, whoever I was talking to said, ah, that’s the beginning of your novel. So here’s the question, is that where we start is, is a, a promising writing project born of just having the opening scenario?
Jane Ainslie: Ooh, that’s a toughie. Um, I think a writing project is born when you have that idea and you just, it’s like, it’s like a flame and it just, you go, oh, that’s it.
It’s, it’s really, that’s the only way I can describe it. So, um, and I think, but I think also, I think that you were talking to me about that, um, particular situation and you know, sometimes someone will say a line to you and you go, that’s just, that just grabs you and it’s so intriguing and I would want to hear more about that.
Um, so yeah, I think you’ve got to, you’ve got to have that. It’s almost fire.
Theme: Yeah.
Jane Ainslie: Within you. Um, when you get the idea that will propel you into writing the [00:38:00] book, which is Michelle attest, it can be extremely long, tedious, hard, heart wrenching, sometimes a very boring for all the editing, um, process. It can take a year or years.
So you’ve really got to love what you’re writing.
Steve Davis: Right. Well, I might do that if I can geocache hungry out of the distribution model so that I don’t have any jail terms awaiting me. Uh, Michelle, do you start with just the idea of an opening scenario or are you like John Grisham who needs to know what the ending’s going to be and then just work your way towards that?
Michelle Prak: Um, a little bit of both because I learned that one reason I was failing to finish writing manuscripts at all was that I was starting to write them without knowing what the end would be. Okay. Now for some authors, that’s how they do. Right. Um, but for me, um, uh, that kept failing. So even though I had the, the germ of an idea, which is often, um, a fantastic, [00:39:00] um, opening point or you know, some sort of captivating first chapter, uh, it always fell down because I didn’t know what the end might be.
So what I’ve been doing for the past few years, um, is plotting, uh, it all out. So a lot of, um, the listeners and yourselves would know that writers often fall into two camps. Um. Plotters or pants. So the pants who fly by the seat of their pants. So being a pants didn’t work for me. I was going nowhere. So I have become very much a plotter.
So now, yeah, I do get a, an idea that I’ve played with for some time and it’s influenced by what’s happening around me, and it’s influenced by what happened to me decades ago. Um, but then I do write out, um, what’s gonna happen in each chapter, and I know how the story is going to end before I work on the first draft.
Steve Davis: Okay. So if JK Rowlings had known where her book was going, her story was going to end, instead of just writing, we would’ve had a novella instead of a series of about eight books, [00:40:00] perhaps in, in embarking on a project, what should come first? Another aspect of coming first is the characters or the genre.
Uh, because I note that if you wanna make money, romance, and erotica is the number one, uh, genre according to figures I saw Crime and mystery is second and religious and inspirational is third, which could be chai for beginners. Um, what do we think is, is it’s, did you embark knowing what your genre, I mean, chick lit, you talked about a lot, Michelle.
Was that how you were focused?
Michelle Prak: Yeah, I thought, for me, again, I was thinking about writing for, you know, until, until I drop off. And for me, I thought that was a good entry point. I, um, obviously read the genre a lot, enjoyed it. Um, thought I might know how to weave a story that way. So at the same time as I came up with the idea for a story, I knew the, um, characters who would be in there, and I knew what genre fit, and so I [00:41:00] just worked with that in mind.
Uh, but mind you, um, I’m turning to the next popular segment, uh, thrillers at the moment. So I finished a thriller manuscript late last year, and I’ve blobbed it into a few competitions. Um, and at the same time, um, when I came up with that idea, I knew straight away that that was the genre. Mm-hmm. Um, and I, and then I then, you know, you know, how it needs to unfold, what readers expect of, of that genre, the style, the point of view, all of that sort of falls in place.
Um, but I guess, and that’s to say as well, it’s really important to, um, read widely ’cause it does, um, help you as an author.
Steve Davis: One last twist on that before I come to Jane and then go to our publishers is, I was actually surprised for a moment when I read in, uh, the beginning of your book, Michelle, that the, the, the categories it was in, uh, were romance fiction, contemporary, women’s fiction, sisters fiction, et cetera.
And I just had this weird moment of [00:42:00] thinking, are they relevant in 2020 when we are meant to be not so broken up on gender lines? Is there, is there still a persistent difference in what attracts. Uh, male or female readers, I just wondered if it, is there a point coming where that’s going to be anachronistic or are there just fundamentals, uh, whose, um, whose, uh, you know, elements you tap when you have one particular focus?
Michelle Prak: I think just because, uh, it’s called chick lit or women’s contemporary doesn’t mean it’s only for women or chicks. Mm-hmm. Um, it’s just a signpost, a traditional, like longstanding category that people of all sorts of genders might just enjoy and they know how to search for. So that’s how I see it.
Steve Davis: Okay.
And does that mean you just have a bit more pause for reflecting on the emotional journey along the way? Is that what separates women’s literature from other? [00:43:00]
Michelle Prak: I’m not sure. I, you know, I’ve read plenty of, um, thrillers by male authors with male protagonists who have a lot of anxiety and self-reflection and, and emotion and hand wringing and, and chasing the love of their lives.
Steve Davis: Okay.
Michelle Prak: Um, so yeah, I, I’m not really, I’ve not really examined categories like that. Only from the perspective of having, you know, to, to publish myself and knowing as a reader and frequenter of libraries where I can head, um, depending on what my mood is and what sort of, um, what a reading I’m looking for now.
Steve Davis: Right. And, and Jane, your thoughts on this question of the importance of choosing a genre or do you just find the genres that fit afterwards?
Jane Ainslie: Well, it’s actually been a bit of a. The last looking for Wonderland was a bit of a strange one because it wasn’t exactly Chiclet and people wanted to say it was, but it had a, a spiritual element to it as well.
So I am, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed about, you know, spiritual stuff. Um, but I have led a very, um, you know, a life where I’ve explored a [00:44:00] lot of, um, spirituality in different parts. You know, I, as I like to say to people, I was totally prepared for 2020 because I was in a doomsday cult, um, an Indian doomsday cult in my twenties.
So I knew how to stop for a pandemic. Um, you know, I spent four years wearing a sari, um, and tring around, you know, trying to save the world. So I’ve been there and done that. And I think, yeah, I think for me, with the genres, a lot of it is about your actual authentic voice and, um, you know, how much do you wanna own what you’re doing, or do you wanna write to conform to what people might want?
Um, you know, there’s always that balance of your story versus how you’re gonna market it.
Mm-hmm.
Jane Ainslie: Um, so I, I think I tend to just write the story and then hope like hell that it will fit into some genre and somebody will get it and like it, and, and that’ll be that,
Steve Davis: uh, roi. You must wrestle with this, with your, with your clients.
What’s your thinking on the importance of genre? [00:45:00]
Rommie Corso: Yes, Steve. It all comes down to the book marketing. So if people, especially the independent authors are trying to be too different, it just might fall off the wagon. Um, and it’s, it’s really important, I feel, still to be looking at, at what genres things fit into, because otherwise it’s just an education process for your buyers and readers, and you don’t want too much of that because it, it’s, it won’t sell.
Um, so I, I do think it’s important. I might be sounding traditional here, but if you don’t know where your book would sit in a bookshop, then there’s a marketing problem. Um, it needs to connect with, with the readers. They need to understand it without having to be educated. Um, the other point was, as a society, obviously we’re becoming more culturally, um, aware and diversity in publishing is on, on the rise, of course.
Mm-hmm. Um, and there needs to be a consideration for, there are emerging trends, so I am [00:46:00] always looking at that too. So there just needs to be a balance between, um, catering for the new markets, um, but not straying too far that people don’t get what you’re trying to, um, deliver.
Steve Davis: I’ll just keep waiting till podcast fiction becomes a category.
Then, uh, Michael, might I ask you, do you to see the world through a, a framework of genre?
Michael Bollen: I don’t say anything wiser than what Romy’s just said, which I thought was a brilliant. Um, encapsulation really of, of how even looks from this chair is, um, is that you certainly don’t want to be hide bound. I mean, I can, um, you know, I remember an author, the publisher saying, you know what, what’s, what is, what is the book gonna tell?
It’s a book that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. And I think it’s, it’s, it’s, um, you know how sometimes you read something, suddenly you realize somebody else understands just what you’ve been [00:47:00] thinking, um, or you, or you see a word and you’ve learned a word and then suddenly it appears everywhere and, you know, you feel pretty proud of yourself.
But I think there’s that moment, which is just where things are about to be articulated. Um, just about to come into the, the way of speaking, way of thinking, whatever it might be. And I dunno how you, how you actually tweak that moment. As I was talking about with that couple of books, which we were just had really come out by fluke at the absolute right time, you know, confluence of events and, and content, which, um, that’s the thing double, you know, from thinking you can second guess the market or as, or as Romy saying, um, um, trying to, trying to think you’re gonna move the whole market by having something different, you know, and that everyone’s gonna run for it.
Well, it doesn’t work like that. There’s a billion books in the. In the world. But there is that point of difference. And I think it’s somehow to do with just clicking the [00:48:00] moment. And you can’t really do it by, you can’t in traditional publishing and even have itself publishing and say, you know, when people come to say, oh, this book has this hot, this book has coronavirus, and well wacko, you know, no one’s gonna care.
Possibly about, well probably they will, but, but that would’ve moved on or, or whatever. So to try and hit the hot, is that the word? Hot button moments like you can with a newspaper the next day or a podcast possibly, um, isn’t gonna work. So you’ve gotta always be thinking of a book. I believe, although there’s billions of them in the world, of course, is, you know, that a book is something precious and rare, and the book is something that’s there forever, you know, that’s there forever.
It’s gonna be read in a million years. And can the reader in Finland enjoy it? You know, a making it clear,
Michelle Prak: you know, I mentioned, um, a, a thriller novel manuscript that I’ve written, so I started writing it more than a year ago, and my working title is Isolation
Steve Davis: Confluence Again,
Michelle Prak: and has, it’s all about Outback South Australia, a [00:49:00] thriller set in an isolated setting.
And I’m like, I thought it was perfect and now I’ve got that.
Jane Ainslie: Oh, can I, can I just say something as well? Um, you were talking about, you know, that we just hit the moment in history and, um, when, I remember when Bridget Jones. Diary came out and that, you know, it was just a chick clip or whatever. I can remember rolling around on the bed just laughing so hard if I was gonna vomit because I was a 33-year-old single woman, and no one had ever written about that particular age group being okay until then, you were a freak.
And that was, you know, 20 years ago. So things have changed, but, and then Sex in the City came out in the same year, and I was the same age as Carrie, the character. And I say to younger women, now you’ve got no idea what it was like. But they, they, they changed the whole social norms around being a single woman in your thirties without children.
Wow. And that was amazing. And, and it changed the whole landscape of sort of being a female.
Steve Davis: See, [00:50:00] despite the, the money that would’ve come in for the authors, how satisfying must that be to have produced from your head characters and stories that get etched into the, the, the zeitgeist guy. There’s amazing stuff.
But on that though, characters in our stories. I know someone who’s lived quite a double life and there are many stories of, of incidents that would just be hilarious in a book. However, can you be. Um, sued. If the character you’ve come up with, someone recognizes themselves in those stories or plot lines and is Carly Simon’s line, you know, you are so vain, I bet you think this book is about you.
Is that a defense to get you out of trouble? So how do we draw characters out of people we know safely? Roi. Can I start with you on that? ’cause you might have to give counsel from time to time on this front.
Rommie Corso: Uh, I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t give legal advice. Um, however, from my [00:51:00] understanding, if, if there’s a defamation case that it’s on, the onus is on, um, the per that person to prove that they’ve been somehow defamed.
So if you have a character and they say, oh, look, you’ve used me, um, has, or what’s the outcome of that? Has it, um, been detrimental to that real life person’s reputation? Um, but as I said, I, it’s not legal advice from me. So I’m, I’m gonna, that’s all I’m gonna say on that matter.
Steve Davis: Um, PRA did you model directly on people, you know,
Michelle Prak: inspired by, is the term inspired by many people over a long time?
But I’m thinking with your, um, query, um, now you might need to become a ghost writer for a little while. Maybe you can collaborate with this very fascinating person.
Steve Davis: Ah, okay. Well, and so good thinking this is becoming career advice as well. Uh, Jane, what about you? Uh. Are there real doctors and nurses in your story?[00:52:00]
That’s all you’re saying, I must say. We interviewed, I I, by the way, I’m putting links to all your books. Anything you want. The interviews we’ve done with Past Wakefield Press people, this is gonna be the best show notes ever. ’cause Michael McGuire, who wrote Never a True Word, we pummeled him for an hour to find out who in South Australian Parliament was linked to each character.
And he remained tight-lipped. And we knew who it was with Mike Rand and Kevin Foley, and he refused to say anything. Michael, had you told him, do not let your guard down?
Michael Bollen: There was some discussion, I think, I think, um, I think there was, uh, given that his biography said who he worked for in, um, his notes in, I can’t remember.
It did actually in the book in state parliament and there was a conative sort of fellow. But, uh, we did change. I remember some aspects of the, uh, one of the character’s [00:53:00] main ahuh appearances and fight and weight and so on in that book. Just, just in case, I’m sorry.
Steve Davis: I, I would just say, I’ll take that as vindication that we were onto something.
Um,
Michael Bollen: you might have been on the moment.
Steve Davis: Yes. Uh, actually, I, I wanna bring us home with two questions from listeners. Uh, one has come from Joe Wood about making time to write. She said, I found. Having the family at home, very distracting. They disturbed my necessary peace. I have written more since I’ve been back at work and school than I did during isolation.
Now I’m trying to stick to a one and a half hour block of time where I’m not allowed any social media. I am allowed to look out the window or Right. The idea being that eventually looking out the window will become boring. So I’ll have to write, must say I’m getting really good at identifying the 19 species of birds that visit the tree outside my window as evidenced by my photographs of them.
Maybe I need to ban the camera too [00:54:00] so I can hear there’s a sense of understanding Joe’s plight. Who would like to go first?
Michelle Prak: I’m just wondering if you ghost wrote that question, Steve.
Michael Bollen: Pretty good one.
Michelle Prak: Really poetic long question. Um, there’s so much you could, we could have a whole session just to devote to different ways that authors try to carve out time.
I think one of the things that always will have to factor or come into play is yeah, your environment, where you live, who lives with you, your family, and so on. So for me, um, another element of being able to find time at the moment is that my son’s are 18 and 20 years old. So if I was trying to do this when they were six and eight, I think it’d be a really different proposition.
But I follow a lot of, um, female authors who have young children. And I really admire the tactics that they take. One of the things that they do quite often or, and encourage others to do is just snatch 10, 20 minutes. If, if you can. Not always to [00:55:00] have to think you need to spend 90 minutes or a couple of hours writing.
That might not always be possible, but 20 minutes is useful and it’s all progress.
Steve Davis: In fact, that’s also a way of dealing with procrastination. I remember reading somewhere, just say, I’ll start this. ’cause typically you’ll then get into some sort of flow. So I’m banking that idea. Thank you. Michelle. Jane, what’s your writing process?
Jane Ainslie: Well, look, I tend to agree that, um, just keep it short, just give yourself like, you know, 15 minutes, I’m gonna sit down for 15 minutes because the blank page is really scary. And, um, you know, I’ve had sometimes months where I haven’t been been in between jobs and you go, great, I’ll write my novel and, you know, get to the end of it.
And the house is really clean and you’ve learned some new macrame skill and still got a blank page. So, um, I think you’ve gotta trick yourself, you know, just by starting off really small and, um, just have a bit of fun with it. You know, if it’s not fun, you’re not gonna do it.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm. And, and good point. Uh, roi.[00:56:00]
I know that you are the author whisperer from time to time because in the self-publishing model, people need that help. Any advice you give people?
Rommie Corso: Yeah. Um, so what the ladies are saying is, is correct. And, and there’s, there’s different strategies that work for different people. Um, I like to help people with, with a bit of the mindset work.
And, and that’s why started just writing down why, why is this important to you? Um, why are you doing this? And is it important enough for you to carve out a little bit of time, either every week or every fortnight? So, and having that written and stuck on your wall, why you’re actually doing it, your purpose, um, really helps you keep the juice in the tank, keep your, your motivation up.
Um, and the other thing that I would would suggest is there’s groups out there that you can, that you can join. We all need support with any changes that we are making to our routines in life. So even if I’m wanting to get healthier, get fitter. Sometimes you need a training buddy. [00:57:00] Um, so there’s, I know the, the chook pen publishing, the social enterprise that I’m, I’m involved in at the moment.
Every month we have a Saturday where we do a little meditation to get people in the right head space to write, and then they have some writing time and many times then they can’t stop. So while, yes, it is important to try and find the time and, and make your space comfortable, just keep that mindset work in mind.
Why are you doing it? Is it important enough for you to what, what is it important in your life that you can possibly set aside so you can allow room for your writing project if it’s important enough for you to want to continue with it.
Steve Davis: I like the idea of the meditation class because I can never focus in meditation and that would get me onto the writing to get out of.
Meditation. So that’s good. Um, I’ll, I’ll come to Michael with the last comment, uh, before we take our final comments from this chat. And it came from Joe Evans, who is a winemaker at Buddy Crop Wines and a great listener to [00:58:00] the show. And he’s asking about what’s on the horizon. He says, with the technology of the day, moving from the written word to eBooks to audio books, will there be video books which may bypass any written scribe at all?
The return back to the basics of storytelling live and real, not rubbed out and rewritten? Uh, Michael, is that in your future?
Michael Bollen: Probably not mine, but, uh, well, possibly. It sounds expensive actually, but, um, well, maybe not with the z and on, but what is, what is, uh, I don’t know what a video book, isn’t that a film?
I think it’s a good question, but what is the future audio book? Certainly on the rise, even though you read, and it’s almost like the old ad edge repeated is remember that no one ever went broke by not publishing a book. Um, and so, um, the, the, you know, audio books, there is a lot of expense to do them properly to make them, and nobody’s really make quite making the money they [00:59:00] expect or want or need to, um, you know, the returns, even though you can do the cheaper version pretty easily.
Um, but what’s on the horizon? I don’t know. You know, the death of the book has been predicted forever. Um, and it’s just not true as people read, um, constantly. It hasn’t been the dominant form, you know, cinema, TV or radio in between. And now, um, in the internet, whatever entertainments, but, um, books, books are there and are always gonna want to be there.
I said in a recent article, it’s a huge protein beast, the book industry, and it snaps back in in different ways. I mean, there’s print on demand now, which was a response in a way to the fear that eBooks, which never quite took off. We, we make eBooks, but they, they don’t sell as well as you think, except in some genres.
But the, um, but printing on demand, quick printing, small printing in small numbers, um, is [01:00:00] working forever. So we can print a book in America just as easily as in Australia and England.
Steve Davis: So if I take that, uh, to the rest of the panel, now I, part of what I think Joe was getting at was almost like the oral tradition, uh, of indigenous peoples, of sharing stories, uh, live and repeated over and over again.
So I just wonder, do you see anything in the future? And did you take offense at Joe’s thing about this being better than words or different from words that are written, rubbed out and written again? ’cause we’ve talked about the importance of editing. Um, Michelle, how about this as a sprawling topic to, uh, entwine yourself within.
Michelle Prak: And my response will be sprawling also, uh, I think it sounds a bit like the spoken word movement, which has been really popular recently. Uh, you know, and slam poetry tournaments and all the rest. I think that there is a place now for, um, oral stories still. [01:01:00] Um, I haven’t seen it, um, take off in any great numbers and I’m, I’m not sure why.
So there, there’s, there’s already an appetite for it and that there are already artists that would like to participate, um, in that.
Steve Davis: Jane,
Jane Ainslie: well, I wonder, I I was speaking with, um, some people I’m in a group with recently and we were talking about this year and I said, you know, you’ve almost gotta draw a line in the sand that this is, this is, um, going forward.
This is a different world we’re in than the world we’ve been in. So if you stuff that’s been written 2019 back, it’s gonna have stuff in it now that’s got no relevance to what we’re all going through this year because I think it’s not over yet. And I think there’s still a lot of stuff to happen that may really shock us and may still really change the world.
So we’re, we are on really shifting sand and I think I’m not, I, I was actually thinking this morning when I was out for a walk, I’m not so interested in telling stories that I really crafted and edited and all this at the moment. I think there is a need [01:02:00] for. Us as people to tell each other stories because this time is so scary and we are isolated and it is frightening and people wanna relate.
And often that is through storytelling. Um, and we will be telling stories about, this is history in the making. We’ll be telling stories about this time, not necessarily in big novels, but we will be telling, you know, how we’ve dealt with it, what we went through, how we felt. Um, and I think that’s gonna be really important.
Steve Davis: That’s an interesting observation about, uh, pre COVID, uh, stories because I’ve already noticed in, uh, the little bit of Netflix, I get to watch that when two characters meet each other and shake hands, my suspension of disbelief is, is broken temporarily. Oh, that’s right. That’s right. We’ve gotta go back.
Roi. Have you got a new market of going back and revising past work so that we take away those little things that will break the suspension of disbelief or have you got some other things to add to this, uh, conversation?
Rommie Corso: Yeah, it’s, [01:03:00] it’s, um, there’s a great unknown at the moment and I’m actually excited for what the.
The youth are, are going to be creating and coming up with during this time they’re gonna be creating what’s coming next and, um, and hopefully we, we catch onto it and, and can help support them, um, as well. But it, it is, um, uh, shifting sands like Jane said. So, um, who knows what’s gonna come next? I know everyone’s got used to being online a whole lot more.
Um, I look around at the kids. I mean, I never had a computer till I was 24. Uh, that was my first computer. So, um, the kids are growing up with, with digital, um, media and I don’t know what they’re gonna create, but it’s exciting.
Charles Firth: Hello, I’m Charles Fir and the Chaser. You are listening to the Adelaide Show and I’ve been told that I’ve gotta give some useful advice to you.
So my advice is stop listening to this show.
Steve Davis: The second segment today is from [01:04:00] episode 111. And if you haven’t had a chance to do that yet, this might be the time where you pause and you pull up a chair, acknowledge that there’s a fireplace, uh, just crackling to the side of us. As we recorded this, there were candles on the table.
I must say. The staff at the Scenic Hotel was so generous in setting aside this intimate place for us to record the episode. These authors that we have in this episode represent a genre that outsells almost every category of fiction on the planet, and they’re completely clear-eyed about why that is. So it it was called The Romance Writers Roundtable.
Our authors were Trish Moray, uh, Victoria Perman and Bronwyn Stewart. It’s a warm discussion. It’s funny, it makes a serious case for a genre that the literary world’s been dismissing for decades. You’ll hear about [01:05:00] the craft of writing stories that are sexy, funny, and emotionally resonant, uh, including Victoria Herman’s, sun Drenched Australian Men, and Bronwyn Stewart’s preference for the grittier end of historical fiction.
It also here me, uh, pressed into service as a cowboy hero reading aloud from a romance novel. Um, the author’s response, um, I think to that is worth the price of admission on its own. Yeah, I had no shame. Uh, beneath the fund, there’s a genuine argument that’s going on here in this episode. Uh, they make a considered case for why being truly seen by another person is one of the most powerful emotional experiences a reader can have.
And it’s why that experience packaged in a, a romance novel deserves to be taken seriously. And this is wonderful. A bit of nostalgia for me where I’m going to include the is it news segment, which our wonderful Nigel Dobson [01:06:00] ran. Uh, ’cause it confirmed what these authors already knew. Real historical romance was frequently stranger and considerably more scandalous than anything they put to the page.
So here we go. Let’s enjoy from episode 111. A very good time, a very intimate time, uh, in the candle lit fireplace
Speaker 13: lit room at the Scenic Hotel.
Steve Davis: What I’d like to ask, first of all, is if the three of you have a working definition of what for you sets apart romantic fiction from other forms of fiction?
’cause I have developed a pet theory, but I’d love to know what you think first. Uh, or should I tell you what I think first and then you, you go first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could I go first?
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Davis: Um, alright. I actually think it’s just like writing any other story. But the main difference I note, [01:07:00] is that there are periodic pauses to reflect.
On the physical or emotional status of the person a character’s interacting with. So it might be a normal story, but we meet someone and we almost pause temporarily to reflect on the past we had together, or how they haven’t really aged much, or how they’re trying to read something into the other character.
That, to me, seems to be something that your genre seems to do a lot of that I haven’t noticed in other readings. And I can tell from Trisha’s furrowed brows that I’m way off beam.
Trish Morey: Well, it’s interesting you say that, but the actual definition of a romance, um, is, is um, a story that has two key elements, and one of them, the first is that it’s a story, uh, between a man and a woman and their relationship.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
Trish Morey: And it must have a, a, a satisfying ending.
Steve Davis: [01:08:00] Right.
Trish Morey: Okay.
Steve Davis: Unlike romance in the real world.
Trish Morey: Well, don’t say that. People say that. Yes. You know, I mean, people say it’s unrealistic, but then look at the people who’ve married for 50 years, 60 years. I’ve been married for 27. We’ve been together more than 30.
Um, you know, it happens, you know, I believe in love and I believe in romance, and I, if I didn’t believe in, I couldn’t write. Basically, but what you talk about the emotional aspect of it, it is, uh, it is fiction that’s written by women, mostly for women, or mostly by women, for women. Um, and, and yes, we tend to be more emotional beasts and we tend to, um, we tend to, to analyze things Yes.
On an emotional level more than a guy would,
Steve Davis: oh, uh, sorry. People can’t see this, but I’ve just clutched my forehead because it’s like light bulb moment.
Victoria Purman: That is a
Bronwyn Stuart: light bulb
Steve Davis: moment. It really is.
Bronwyn Stuart: That’s what we call it in the biz.
Steve Davis: Wow. All right. Victoria.
Victoria Purman: I, I take Trisha’s point. I think that’s absolutely right, that they’re emotional, they’re emotional stories, [01:09:00] and men write emotional stories too.
They’re just treated it differently because blokes write them. I think we’ve all Nicholas Sparks. Well, you
Trish Morey: mean emotion Yeah. Emotional stories that, yeah.
Victoria Purman: Yes. When, when a, when a man writes an emotional story involving a man and a woman, I mean, there is a growing, um, gay, uh, romance
Nigel Dobson: mm-hmm.
Victoria Purman: Sub genre as well, because
Nigel Dobson: I
Victoria Purman: was
Nigel Dobson: gonna, I was gonna say there, yeah.
What about the situation of man romantically with men and women with women?
Trish Morey: Yes.
Victoria Purman: Yeah, yeah. There is, there’s all that. I mean, it’s a very broad church in that respect.
Nigel Dobson: Yeah.
Victoria Purman: Um, but their emotional stories about the journey two people, um, make towards each other. I is the way I would say it too. Mm. Mm-hmm.
And, and we often talk about the happy ever after ending. Sometimes it’s happy for now.
Theme: Mm-hmm.
Victoria Purman: I mean, not every book we’ve umbel, you know, we’ve written, um, involves a wedding at the end, or the, the traditional idea about marriage children. Sometimes it’s just two people deciding they’re gonna explore a future together.
Sure. And that we leave them on that, at that cusp, if you like.
Trish Morey: So it’s a happy ever a [01:10:00] happy Yeah. It’s happy for happy new beginning.
Victoria Purman: Yes.
Steve Davis: That’s right. Okay. Uh, Bronwyn your thoughts, ’cause you, you also have more of a bent towards the historical, really historical, uh, versions of, of romance too. Uh, was I off beam?
How are we going?
Bronwyn Stuart: I think, I think you were okay. But I think, um, Trisha and Victoria have already said it, but it’s, it’s about the, it’s about that satisfying ending and it’s about the relationship that, that comes between the two. Uh, what sets us apart in romance too, is that we never kill off the hero or the heroine before the end of the book.
They, they both have to be alive at the end. Um, they don’t necessarily have to, I suppose, be with together at the end. You could have two heroes and a, and a heroine. As long as that story, it’s, it’s all in the story. It, and it has to, it has to be satisfying and it’s a, it’s a form of escapism for women as well.
So we, we don’t wanna read a book about a, a woman who, I don’t know, catches the clap from her partner while she’s having an affair from her husband. It, it’s, we want it to be romantic, [01:11:00] but we want it to be a believable story as well. Right.
Steve Davis: So that one wouldn’t get published.
Bronwyn Stuart: No. It might. It might. It might.
Maybe as an ebook. I don’t, I don’t know different
Trish Morey: stories. Romance are, are ultimately stories where a woman wins. You know, they’re actually books that empower women. Um, they’re strong heroines. They overcome loads of difficulties and they win the guy, even if they don’t want him in the start, but they win his love and his respect and all the good stuff that comes from a really healthy, honest relationship.
Steve Davis: And so this is where my light bulb moment comes back to me because I, I’m still processing that. Is this a way? Should men read romance?
Victoria Purman: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Well, we have, we have readers, we have male readers. I’ve got friends of mine, blokes read my books and say, I never read a romance before, but that was really good.
Not trying to blow my own horn, but I think there’s an assumption about what a romance is that people, people think it’s a really old fashioned kind of barber heartland style. And I’m not knocking those. Mm-hmm. They’ve just moved on a lot since then. [01:12:00]
Steve Davis: Uh, well, it’s funny you say that. I’m glad your friend said it first.
’cause when I started, who, I think I started Bronwyn’s book first. What’s this? Plug the title again.
Bronwyn Stuart: That’s called The Road to Ruin.
Steve Davis: Yes. I actually was in about two or three pages and I said to my wife. This is like a real story now. I and I,
Bronwyn Stuart: wow.
Steve Davis: I know, I know. And I know that, yay
Bronwyn Stuart: me.
Steve Davis: I know that sounds horrible and I do apologize for it, but I want this to be as candid as possible because blokes have such preconceived ideas about this genre
Victoria Purman: and some women do too.
Trish Morey: Oh, lots. Lots of women do def, lots of women do.
Steve Davis: And that’s what formed my initial definition. Mm-hmm. That it’s like a proper story in inverted commas, but a lot of pausing and analyzing,
Victoria Purman: I think re reflection and um, and analyzing characters is a factor. But, but any book will do that really. I’ve just finished a book that it wouldn’t necessarily be called romantic, [01:13:00] but there’s a lot of analysis of character.
Of, um, of motivation.
Steve Davis: Yeah. I’ve almost finished my little fetish with Jack Reacher novels and there is observation there, but it’s normally about shit looks good in that white t-shirt.
Theme: Mm mm
Steve Davis: Uh, that’s about the extent of it, uh, with a little bit of motivation. Um, and you are sort of nodding knowingly, Trish, it’s like, it doesn’t seem to have the same depth as when in your story, Trish, that I was reading Stone.
Castles.
Trish Morey: That’s right.
Steve Davis: When our heroin bumps into the hero, she takes a good long pause and a look and notices how time has treated him well. And there’s not even a sign yet of a beer. Gut gets mentioned.
Trish Morey: Oh, yeah. In, well, wouldn’t you think that’s normal? That if you, you meet an old flame, you, you want them to have a beer gut, you’re gonna notice if they don’t or wrinkles.
Yeah. You’re gonna notice if they look hot and you’d be really pissed off about it. Yeah. So of course she’s gonna take, [01:14:00]
Bronwyn Stuart: I think this inner reflection too helps for us. It gets the reader into the head of our characters. And if you can’t, a, a friend of mine read one of my books once and she said, and she’s not a reader, and she said to me, wow.
I felt like I was standing in the room watching it all play out. And I was, that’s exactly what you want as an author. You want the reader to be in that story. You don’t want them to be thinking about doing the washing or the kids or work or anything else. You only want them focusing on that central love story between your characters in your book.
Yeah.
Steve Davis: Do women really think that deeply? All the time.
Victoria Purman: Pretty much. It’s, I went to writer’s week a few years ago, I’m gonna invoke a literary reference here. And I’m not really a literary person, but I heard Elizabeth Jolly speak, and this is, uh, before she obviously died, but this is when I was really thinking one day, I’m gonna be a writer.
So I was taking in every bit of advice, and she said, when your character walks into a room, describe the room. I’ve never forgotten that piece of advice because it, you don’t have to give architecturally described descriptions of the [01:15:00] room. You know, it was built in like curtains care, open windows. That’s right.
But you want to give the reader a feel for where the characters are, what places them, what, and you can do that. The character will notice certain things depending on the character. I mean, if your character’s an interior designer, for example, they’re gonna notice the curtains and the carpets. If your character is a bartender, they’re gonna walk into the bar and, and notice what bottles of wine are behind the bar.
So all those are things that you can help to create the world. We might say about where, where do the characters live? How do they inhabit the world? How do they see the world? And you can use description to do that. And I think the description of emotion and, and the way characters look at each other and analyze each other is a way of creating a, a realistic character.
Because we always size people up. I think maybe it’s just right as we do, we go, oh, who are they? What are they thinking?
Bronwyn Stuart: I think it’s a woman thing. I don’t think it’s just writers, but we do, we have to ground, you have to ground the reader so that they, they do feel like they’re in the room.
Trish Morey: And men [01:16:00] and women are different.
I mean, you’ve heard of the book, you know, men are from Mars, women from Venus. We do think in different ways.
Steve Davis: One thing, and this is I’m, this might not even make the podcast yet. Probably will. ’cause I’ll forget.
Victoria Purman: We can swear now Is Zoe, you
Steve Davis: mean My wife has a pile of romance novels by her bed. She loves them.
Loves them. She is a I
Trish Morey: love your wife.
Steve Davis: She is. And oh, this is gonna sound horrible. A very intelligent, smart, powerful woman.
Trish Morey: Sure.
Steve Davis: And I’ve always wondered in my stereotypical way, why aren’t you reading in Inver comma is brain food. Why aren’t you, uh, I’m expecting you made Allus earlier to dos, oh no, you did Tri to Dostoevsky, et cetera.
So what is going on there? Is it escapism? Is that the sort of thing? Is it the down, is it like me reading my Jack Richer? Is it her equivalent of that downtime?
Trish Morey: Yes and no. I mean, it’s entertainment. It’s entertainment fiction.
Steve Davis: Right.
Trish Morey: You know, it’s, it’s better than watching the telly. It’s, it’s, it’s better than watching the news.
You’re guaranteed a happy ending. Um, you know, the world is controlled. Um, it’s, it’s like, [01:17:00] you know how a crime fiction is, is a, um, a who done it? Mm-hmm. Well, romance fiction is sort of like how done it, I’ve heard a, a writer friend of mine describe it that way in that, you know, these two, when you pick it up, you know the hero, you know, the heroin, you know, it’s gonna be a happy ending and they’re gonna end up together.
But you can’t for the life of you work out how that’s,
Steve Davis: it’s
Trish Morey: the journey. And that’s, that’s, yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s overcoming obstacles to be together.
Steve Davis: Um, just before we finish on this with Stone Castles, my wife wants to know, is there a follow up novel coming with the flatmate from New York, coming to this
Trish Morey: and the cop?
Steve Davis: Yeah.
Trish Morey: Um, maybe a small. Um, novella or something. Um, okay. But no.
Steve Davis: And tell me about this ’cause this novella concept, Victoria, you made some comment to a novella coming out sometime soon. Novellas are like short novels, aren’t they? Yeah. Is there a market for those?
Victoria Purman: Yeah, there is. And, and Trish writes them too.
We both write for the same, uh, US publisher to early publishing. And the digital revolution, if you like, in publishing, has made those [01:18:00] things more possible because book books on a shelf have to be a certain length to, to fit the space. You need so much space on the spine to, oh, because the title oh to the
Trish Morey: boxes
Steve Davis: still show.
It comes, it comes to books. Width is important. That’s what I’ve always thought.
Victoria Purman: Dirty, dirty Mom we’re the ones who write the sex scenes. I can’t believe it, Steve. Um, but novellas are, uh, they can be downloaded. Um, everyone has a reading device, a phone, and there’s a big market in those big market in digital, in the romance world.
In fact, in romance, romance readers were the earliest adopters of, um, ebook.
Trish Morey: So it’s really good for spinoffs. But you know, you, you’re saying your wife reads a lot of romance. She probably reads a lot of other stuff as well. Apparently Romance, romance readers read very widely, all sorts of fiction
Steve Davis: and fast.
She finished both your books on the weekend. I got halfway through both of them at best, and I thought I was,
Trish Morey: they’re voracious. It’s a voracious market. Romance. It’s the biggest, um, fiction market in the world.
Bronwyn Stuart: Did you only get halfway through because you lost interest because you were otherwise occupied?[01:19:00]
How, why did you only get halfway through?
Steve Davis: Um, well, they were so steamy. I got no, what happened? What happened was, I, I’m just not as fast as her in the reading department. Not disinterested at all. So I’m interested. Good.
Bronwyn Stuart: That’s
Steve Davis: good. I want to finish the story. I love the stories and, uh, yours in particular, Bronwyn, when the heroin puts herself up for, I won’t say much more.
’cause I won’t give her what story. No, that’s
Bronwyn Stuart: okay.
Steve Davis: No. Puts herself up for auction after she just bought 12 virgins or something at auction.
Bronwyn Stuart: Yep.
Steve Davis: Uh, and
Bronwyn Stuart: then yeah, she’s, she’s, she’s standing on a stage and she’s about to sell her virginity to the highest bidder.
Steve Davis: Yep. Yes. And she, uh, can I mention what happened just next?
Or is that
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah. No, no, that’s okay. Go
Nigel Dobson: spoil alert here.
Steve Davis: Uh, no, I dunno. Story. No, no,
Bronwyn Stuart: no, no. It’s not a spoiler. No, it’s in the first chapter. Yeah, the
Steve Davis: first chapter. Yeah. Uh, and then the, he, the who I imagine is the hero, um, he, and she thinks he’s just the doorman, or let’s buy terminology. What would you say?
Coach Coachman. [01:20:00] Coachman coach have doors. So yes, they do. Again, we are getting women from Venus, men from Mars, aren’t we, to me? Detail.
Victoria Purman: You see, you need to watch pride and prejudice to know about the, the doorman, because they stand, or the Coachman footman, it’s the foot. They stand on the back of the carriage when the rich
Steve Davis: that’s
Victoria Purman: inside the carriage.
Steve Davis: So he’s the foot long, uh, foot. Sorry, sorry. Fraud is the footman. No, he’s
Bronwyn Stuart: and Footlong. Uh, no, he, he is the, he is her co he’s disguised as her coach driver, her Coachman.
Steve Davis: He bids mm-hmm. He does, um, to, to win her virginity. And she’s like, poo-pooing this as to how dare. And then he reveals himself as
Bronwyn Stuart: No, no, no, no.
He, in the first edit, he did reveal himself, but after that he, he reveals his identity. Oh, sorry. We don’t reveal ourselves. There’s a difference. Uh, is that a romantic? That actually is, my editor did put in there that, that she liked reveal himself. But that sounds like a flasher. So we decided to [01:21:00] it would be reveal his identity.
Yes.
Steve Davis: I’m glad I got that other version that, thank you. That was fantastic. You thank you. Because all the men fainted. Uh, no. Uh, so anyway, that’s where I got it. But I was entranced. By that because there was something in it in his character for me that there were layers going on. He had his footman, doorman horseman, who was the man waiting outside.
Bronwyn Stuart: Uh, that was his vale. Yeah, his, his his, yeah. Vale. Uh, his man of business. I guess. Every, every, because the hero of that story is an ex-military man. Um, you always have a second in charge and that’s basically his second in charge. His his go-to guy who knows everything and, and is trusted.
Steve Davis: Yeah, because there was dialogue between our hero and him.
I was intrigued and I thought, this man, there’s more in this man than meets the eye. So I was almost feminine then, wasn’t I? I was actually, no,
Bronwyn Stuart: no, no. You just were a good observer while you were reading.
Victoria Purman: No, you just sucked into a great story.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
Victoria Purman: [01:22:00] Thank you. But I think probably what, what people might not realize too is that the books we write have the male point of view and the female point of view.
So they’re not told only from the, the heroin’s point of view. So you actually get inside the male character’s head as well, which is just exactly what you’re talking about. So there there are two, there are two people in the, in the story, and you get to know, you get to know and understand both of them.
And that’s, you know, we certainly right. Male point of view. So, um, because we try to, we spend our lives trying to understand blokes
Nigel Dobson: well,
Victoria Purman: so that’s probably what, you know, you were talking about. What interested you were in intrigued about that character because you were in his head in the story.
Nigel Dobson: So what got each of you into writing of all things?
Have you always done it or it came along in life?
Bronwyn Stuart: Not me. I never wanted to be a writer. Um, I, I actually didn’t even know it was, I’ve never thought of it as an option. When I was at high school, I used to read everything and anything, but I’d never thought about the people behind those things.
Nigel Dobson: So you were a reader though?
Bronwyn Stuart: I was [01:23:00] a, yes, a big reader. I was stealing romance from my mom at a very young age. Um, she, my, my mother used to read, you know, two or three meals and burn a day, and when she heard my dad’s car in the driveway, she would tuck it underneath the couch, wherever she was sitting. She would tuck it in and she might have three or four going at once.
So I would sneak in and take her book while she wasn’t watching. But then there was a point where I finished a book, um, one night and I had a terrible ending. Uh, nobody died, but it was just very anticlimactic. And you know, that there’s a lot of people who start out the same way. They, you throw the book down and think, I can do this so much better.
And then you swim, find out that you really can’t, you can’t do it any better than that person did straight away anyway. But that, that’s how my journey started. I, um, I just wanted to do better. And then I found that I had all these characters in my head just bouncing out and wanting their own stories to be told.
Victoria Purman: Okay.
Nigel Dobson: And there other two ladies.
Victoria Purman: Um, well, I started off my life as a journalist. Um, I wanted to be a writer when I was 15, but I didn’t really know how, a bit like you, like [01:24:00] really next I wanna win an Academy Award. You know, it seemed like just something like a big complete fantasy. So I went off and went to, um, studied and became a journalist.
And, and I, so I sort of wrote, I’ve written all my life in various jobs, but I’ve always wanted to write books. And I finally decided that I probably should just sit down and try to write one. And I went to a workshop with the Trish Morey sitting next to me. So it’s a bit of a fan girl moment every time I sit on anything like this with her.
But I did a, um, workshop at the SA Writer’s Center. And it was about how to write a romance. And, uh, the reason I picked romance was because life’s tough. You know, I don’t wanna read about murder. I mean, I, I do like mysteries and I do like detective thrillers, but I don’t wanna read about real life stories of murder, abuse, um, horror war.
I have had serious jobs in my life too. And so I deal, deal with serious things at work. So,
Nigel Dobson: so it’s, it’s more a case of sort of a, a fantasy escape from reality.
Victoria Purman: It’s a relief and as, as Trish said, it’s [01:25:00] entertainment. And we, I firmly understand that we’re in the entertainment business.
Nigel Dobson: Yep.
Victoria Purman: Um, and there’s nothing wrong with that, actually.
Yeah. My favorite movies are romcoms. That’s entertainment too. So that’s the sort of thing I wanted to write. I wanted to entertain people, and I wanted them to close the book and go, oh, that was lovely. And that’s all I’m in it for. I don’t apologize for that. No, it’s a, it’s a brilliant way to spend time when you create those stories behind the keyboard.
Nigel Dobson: And Trish,
Trish Morey: uh, well, I like Victoria. I always thought I could write, um, but I was sort of directed into a real job. Okay. Right. So I became a chartered accountant.
Nigel Dobson: Oh. So, so writing wasn’t seen as a quote, real job. Well, you
Trish Morey: just wanna make a living and you know, who, who do you know who’s an author, who makes money?
You know, and, and then I knew nobody. Um, um, and so, um, I be, I became a chartered accountant. It was when I was on maternity leave with my second child, they actually saw an article saying, mills and Boom, were actively seeking authors. And I thought. Hell, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. You know, I’m the next [01:26:00] author, I’m gonna send them a submission and they’ll say, where’s this person been for the last however long?
Um, so I sent ’em a submission and they rejected me. Um, but 11 years later they finally accepted one. So, um, yeah, it’s, um, it’s, and it’s a great, it’s a brilliant job. I mean, it’s, I’ve got four kids, um, a perfect stay at home job for a mom. Um, although school holidays is hell and you wanna write a murder mystery, um, it wouldn’t be any mystery, um, or
Victoria Purman: a sex scene.
Trish Morey: You, well, you can’t write. Yeah. Um, but yeah, it’s a great, it’s a really good, it’s a great job and it’s entertaining and there’s no office politics and I can work in my pajamas and my ugly boots. I can work in bed. Well,
Steve Davis: hello.
Trish Morey: Back to research
Steve Davis: and there’s the quote for the program.
Nigel Dobson: And so in the last say 20 years, how about the change of sort of the digital revolution?
Has that changed how you do your writing style and things? The fact that you can sort get published a lot easier if need to, and online readers and things,
Trish Morey: it’s probably never been an easier time to get published one way or another. And not, maybe not necessarily with all the print publishers, but [01:27:00] most of the print publishers now have their ebook arms as well.
So they’ll have digital, um, publishing, um, and really, and, and then self-publishing if all else fails or you wanna go that route because you think you’ve got more control.
AJ Davis: Yeah.
Trish Morey: All of them have their advantages and disadvantages. Uh, but in terms of getting published, there’s never actually been a better time
Bronwyn Stuart: for me.
Um, the digital revolution, I suppose, is what launched my career because my first two books came out as, uh, as what was called, um, digital First through Corina Press. Um, and they have now been translated into Italian and released in print. But without that, I might not have ever had the experience of working with an editor, which is then what got me a print contract ultimately, uh, in historical romance.
So, um, digital Revolution definitely helped me.
Nigel Dobson: So having printed Romance works in Italian wasn’t on your horizon of things you do achieve in life.
Bronwyn Stuart: You know, um, when I, when I sold the Road to Rule and it was only for Australia and New Zealand R so there was never [01:28:00] anything that was going to happen with that book yet overseas.
Um, and I, and I went to the post office one day and there was this nice little box from Harlequin and you always think, oh, this is great. But I thought, I haven’t bought any books ’cause my husband doesn’t like them when I buy lots of books. And I opened up, I opened it up and, um. And I was, I couldn’t read the cover because it’s an Italian.
And so I sent my editor an email and said, Hey, we didn’t, I didn’t sign rights for Italian in, in print of this. And she wrote me back one and said, no, you didn’t. It. That’s not it. And so I did the smart thing once, you know, all the, all the excitement died down and checked the copyright page. And it was one of my first books.
Um, and they hadn’t actually told me that it was happening either, so, which they don’t have to because I signed away all the rights. Oh, okay. Um, but it was a nice little surprise. And then when I checked, when, when I checked the page, they told me to check online to. To see where my foreign editions were coming out.
There was two there. So, um, that, it’s really, really cool.
Steve Davis: And so does Italian make your books seem even more romantic?
Bronwyn Stuart: I don’t know because I can’t read it. [01:29:00] I have given away a couple though now, so I’m, I’m hoping to hear back from at least one of those people to tell me whether it translated smoothly anyway.
But
Steve Davis: Do you have like test couples who are Italian?
Bronwyn Stuart: No, no, no, no, no. Um, actually my husband’s, uh, work mate’s called Fabio. Oh, cool. Yeah, I know he slept on my couch one night. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Um, so Fabio’s mother is Italian and so, um, I signed a book for her ’cause I did get a couple of copies and I’m not gonna do anything with them.
Um, so yeah, I gave one to her, but I also gave some away at the Romance Writers of Australia conference, um, this year in Melbourne too. So hopefully I’ll hear some feedback from someone about whether or not they translate it smoothly. I think ev anything at Italian has to be romantic, doesn’t it?
Steve Davis: I think so.
Especially if it involves Parmesan cheese.
Bronwyn Stuart: No, no, no cheese. No cheese. Historical. Remember
Steve Davis: in the novels I’ve read thus far and admittedly I’ve only read two romantic novels in my life and the authors are both sitting around this table as I [01:30:00] speak. The body image is fantastic. Right. Perfect. And I’m a bit jealous as I’m reading of the heroes, and that just gives me a wake up call, but that’s all right.
Victoria made the comment earlier that when you finish one of these books, you go, oh, that was lovely. That was fantastic. Do you think any readers will ever think, oh gee, I wish I’m just a bit. Podgy. Now I’m a bit, would you ever feel a bit versed?
Bronwyn Stuart: Do you know? I always feel like that after I watched Lara Croft, um, the movie I always feel,
Victoria Purman: or any Hollywood action film, young feeling featuring young women.
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah. Um, we don’t do it on purpose. We definitely, I, I mean, for me, um, the Regency era, there was a, there is a certain stereotype for the, the woman and the man, but because my hero was a military man, he’s going to be pretty buff anyway because he had to be to survive. Um, and the women, you know, you can take a fair bit of free license with that, but, but I certainly don’t just make them really, really hot on purpose.
But this is about [01:31:00] escapism too. We don’t want a hero who’s kind of podgy. We don’t want a hero who’s got an an extra nipple or a one toe missing
Trish Morey: unless it’s pivotal to the story. Yes.
Victoria Purman: The surgeon who removes the third nipple, you know? Yes. Yeah. Woman. I mean, you forward to my os woman
Trish Morey: of novels, woman. Oh, the reader is in the shoes of the heroine.
So, you know, she’s rooting for us. She wants us to work out. She’s, she’s not gonna feel inadequate at the end of it. She’s gonna feel empowered because she’s take, you know, she knows when she’s finished this novel that you can sort anything out. But love, love really conquers all. Um, and, and that’s the message that you can take from our books, whether they’re about, you know, the themes are homecoming or fish out of water, or Cinderella stories or whatever.
It’s that love, love conquers all, and it’s a really important message.
Victoria Purman: And, oh, I, I think that, of course we describe a kind of fantasy version of men. And, um, I think that though, the thing that readers love the most, and it’s certainly what I love the most, is the dialogue between the two characters. That’s, to me, what makes characters [01:32:00] attractive is the banter, the, the teasing, the, the flirtatiousness.
And that’s, that happens with words. Yes, people are attracted to each other because they look a certain way, but, but it’s that interaction, which you can, which we use to reveal the two characters falling in love. They’re not gonna fall in love at first sight because someone’s got great abs. I’m sure it might attract their attention, but if he’s a total, you know, ass wipe, then you know, forget about it.
He’s not gonna be the hero because we just don’t, you don’t want. Think, I think what don’t wanna read about someone who’s a total swi.
Steve Davis: Yes. Farbio with abs, you know, a y
Victoria Purman: but it’s a, it’s a building relationship really. And that doesn’t have anything to do with the way they look.
Trish Morey: Yeah. That’s, I mean, he doesn’t love a lot.
A guy who makes you laugh, you know, a guy with a sense of humor. Yes. That’s a really sexy, uh, characteristic.
Bronwyn Stuart: Do you know there are a lot of heroes too, though, that do have flaws. We, there are books where the hero has been maimed in, in an accident, or he’s lost an arm at war or, or a leg or blind. Yeah. Uh, Michael Stokes, he’s a photographer of, um, [01:33:00] of military men, uh, for book covers who have lost limbs.
Um. In, in conflict. So, and it also comes down to perception. I can, I try not to over explain my hero or heroine’s characteristics because I want you as the reader to imagine them. I want you to see them in your mind. I, I don’t do storyboards of, um, characters and what they look like. Um, although for the road to ruin, I did have a picture of Harry Keel, Harry K the soccer player, um,
Steve Davis: Harry Kehl.
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah. Yeah. I had a picture of him because I thought one day I was doing something, the kids were collaging or something and, and I came across him and I thought, oh my God, that’s James. That’s just how, how he looks. And that’s how I would imagine him.
Steve Davis: That’s quite ominous. ’cause soccer might come up later in this program in the Adelaide Visa Council, yet we’ll see.
Bronwyn Stuart: Dam Mo’s gone. He’s not getting another mention. Sorry, dam Mo.
Steve Davis: So you don’t overplay that card?
Bronwyn Stuart: I try not to. No, not for me. Um, o obviously you give them a hair color and eye color, a skin color. Um, but, but for me, I definitely try not to [01:34:00] overexplain that,
Steve Davis: which is what parents will be doing in 20 years with technology, choosing all those things for their kids maybe.
Um,
Victoria Purman: and clothes and clothes are a way we use, we, we describe characters too. What people are wearing
Bronwyn Stuart: and how they wear them. Yeah.
Steve Davis: Again, something I’m almost blind to, I, I really don’t notice much what people are wearing. Male or female.
Bronwyn Stuart: James was probably wearing breaches, I think
Steve Davis: in, in your novel
Bronwyn Stuart: in Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. I didn’t
Steve Davis: get down that low.
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah, no, no, I did. Um, but definitely, um, clothing definitely comes into it as well because there are some, and, and as a woman, when you’re reading, you’ll know that some people can’t carry off a pencil skirt, so you’ll know that she’s, she’s quite slim if she’s wearing something like that.
Steve Davis: See, if I knew what a pencil skirt was, um, I would, that’s straight up and down. That’s the straight up and down one.
Victoria Purman: But, but Trisha’s, um, hero in, um, stone Castles is a country boy.
Bronwyn Stuart: Mm-hmm.
Victoria Purman: So he’s, there’s gonna be a certain way that you can describe what he’s wearing, which tells people immediately that he’s a country boy.
He’s [01:35:00] jeans
Trish Morey: and blood stones.
Victoria Purman: Yeah.
Trish Morey: And who doesn’t look good in jeans and blood stones.
Victoria Purman: Exactly. If your character wears a suit, for example, that that tells the reader something about who that person is.
Trish Morey: Hi, I’m Mel, and when I listen to a podcast, the only podcast I listen to is the Adelaide Show.
Steve Davis: There’s one question I need to ask. I’m asking all my secret sealed section questions to get them out the way. Good, good. When you imagine your readers turning the last page of your novels, they’re in bed, they’ve been reading at night in bed, do you expect them to be wanting romance or do you expect them to be so satisfied they’ll curl up and go to sleep?
Trish Morey: Um, well, apparently I’ve heard it said that romance readers get more sex than a. Other readers, so maybe at least I’m wanting a little bit more. So the lucky ones are the guys, his wives read [01:36:00] romance guys, buy your woman for romance.
Steve Davis: Um, Broman.
Bronwyn Stuart: Uh, okay. Um, I guess when I finish reading a romance novel, of course I, I want romance.
I think every woman should always want romance. I don’t, and I, whether that be sex or not. Um, I think once you stop wanting romance, there’s probably something a little bit sad happening in your life. Um. I look at the end of my novel, if you wanna put a, throw a leg over to go for it, but it’s not 50, not 50 shades of gray.
Um, but Trisha’s Right. And
Trish Morey: don’t tell us, you
Bronwyn Stuart: know,
Trish Morey: don’t email us.
Bronwyn Stuart: No. Tell us. Please, please go. Don’t do that. No, no. Definitely don’t wanna know how it went after that. But, um, no, I, I think, um, it, it’s, that’s satisfied. You wouldn’t know because you didn’t get to the end of the book.
Steve Davis: So I’ve gotta keep reading till the end yet, don’t I?
Bronwyn Stuart: Well, yeah, I don’t wanna know that much information either though.
Steve Davis: Um,
Victoria Purman: well, one, one of my mom’s friends, my mom is my biggest fan, um, [01:37:00] and she has converted all her friends into my readers, which is just hilarious. And they go around to Big W, Kmart and, um, target, and they rearrange my books for, which is great.
They, I’ve a little street team. They put them at the front and one of them is 70. And she said to my mother, I got a tingle in places I haven’t had a tingle in for years.
Steve Davis: Oh, wow.
Victoria Purman: And I thought achieved, you know, I was really happy. I’ve given a woman a tingle and she was, she, her husband had died years before.
I thought, you know, that’s good.
Steve Davis: You don’t think she just hadn’t moved enough in bed and she had pins and needles. Well, that’s interesting. But don’t you, this is what my fear is. The woman is revved up nicely for romance and not necessarily to leg over a broman to use your idiom, but they turn and they see that they’re not next to that hero, then they just go to sleep.
Bronwyn Stuart: Um, no, no, no. I don’t know about anybody else, but if I roll over in bed, my husband, look, I’m not gonna go so far as to say he’s my hero, but for me, [01:38:00] he’s, he is the love of my life. So if that’s, I want to roll over in bed after I finish a romance novel and, and, and see him, but then I want him to say something nice, you know, that’s where the romance comes in.
I want him to, I don’t know, notice that I dyed my hair or that I had a haircut or, or whatever. I want him to, I want him to be not a hero. I want him to be a hero. But it, it certainly is not going to come down to, um, a, a physical thing. No, no. Although he does have ab so that, that’s
Theme: right.
Bronwyn Stuart: Working in his favor.
Yeah. He, he is the love of my life. So if I was to roll over in bed and think, oh God, I’m not laying next to, you know, some guy in jeans, some blood stones, then I’m, then I’ve got a problem.
Steve Davis: So the lesson I’m taking from this is apart from getting some abs and I, I believe there are places you can order them online.
Victoria Purman: You can paint them in these days.
Steve Davis: Apparently you can paint them in. Look at this to be ours. I think it’s touch dry now. Um, but read the romance novels, so, you know, not so [01:39:00] much lines, but you know, the level of detail that you’re expected to observe.
Victoria Purman: No, look, I think it’s about our, our heroines are seen. By the hero.
Mm-hmm. That’s what’s really attractive for a reader with the women. There’s, you know, we can analyze it in an academic way, but it’s about giving agency to what a woman wants. And tr said it earlier, women get what they want on their terms. Yeah. Okay. That’s true. Some women don’t get that in their real life, you know?
They, and, and
Trish Morey: the hero is, is so aware of the heroin. Yeah. You know, he’s not oblivious. Oblivious isn’t attractive.
Steve Davis: That is so it’s
Trish Morey: being seen
Steve Davis: poignant. That’s beautiful. I think that is the most profound. Outcoming of romance novels. That’s beautiful. I, I’m, that was my second light bulb moment that I’ve had with you three ladies tonight.
Victoria Purman: Hallelujah.
Bronwyn Stuart: You have to write these down, by the way.
Steve Davis: Oh, don’t worry. They, they’ll, oh, I haven’t told you this yet. Our podcast is actually [01:40:00] archived in the state and national archives in perpetuity. They’ll, they’ve promised to always keep it updated no matter how technology changes.
Bronwyn Stuart: We’ve made history. Yeah.
Steve Davis: Have, yes. You might regret some of your lines, thus Farron.
Bronwyn Stuart: Never. No, no, no. Never.
Steve Davis: I, I wanna go, come back to Trish if I may for a moment. ’cause with Stone Castles, it was based in Kadena and around that area in South Australia. My wife said loved it because I could easily imagine everything. I didn’t like that part of it.
’cause I don’t like anything based locally to me, because it breaks the suspension of disbelief for me. I, I’m not allowed. To in, uh, create everything in my mind. So it’s my world. So my question is to you, how do you see this? Because for, uh, it depends on your percentage of South Australian readers. ’cause if that’s a small percentage for them, they’ve got what I’m hankering for.
But [01:41:00] there’s a number of south Australians like my wife, who love the fact that it’s here.
Trish Morey: Yeah. It’s, I think a lot of South Australians actually love to find a book. Um, the Victoria’s readers are the same. They, they can recognize the locality and they know the location in, in Victoria’s case, down the South coast.
Mm-hmm. Um, and, and Kangaroo Island, uh, mine, it was the York Peninsula and I’ve had so many people just say, um, they can see those characters walking down the street. They know those streets so Well, I understand what you’re saying about not being able to create the world. Um, I come from a place where I’ve written 30 novels for Harlequin as well, and I have created a lot of exotic chic kingdoms, um, um, islands in the middle of the Mediterranean where a prince rules on a craggy rock in a palace, it’s crumbling.
Um, I’ve made up a lot of places. It’s actually really fantastic now for me to bring my stories home closer to where I live. And I love the Adelaide Hills. Um, I’m just loving the thought of writing these four books that are set, um, on the seasons in [01:42:00] the Adelaide Hills. Um, and it’s just, I understand that the readers may not like it so much, but for me it’s just sheer joy.
Steve Davis: Do I have to get over it? Am I suffering cultural cringe?
Nigel Dobson: Yeah. In like, uh, in movies as well. I think when you actually do see areas that are familiar to you. I’m thinking of the, there’s a local movie called a hundred Bloody Acres that was actually set up in the Adelaide Hills. And even though it was sort of a schlock sort of horror story, the fact that it was actually familiar and the roads, even though you didn’t know the exact dirt road that certain scene was filmed on, it sort of gave a sense of familiarity of, yes, I know that place.
I can relate. That actual place and, and other, other little areas of that in the movie were the same. And reading in fiction where yes, you understand the name and you can imagine when you were last there and things, it actually fills into this sort of seems a believable real place. Yeah. It’s, it’s not, you know, a complete made up fantasy that actually this novel is in some way, grounded in, in reality.
Yeah. Sort of adds as sort of an extra to the, to the whole, uh, reading of it.
Theme: True. Yeah.
Victoria Purman: I’ve had [01:43:00] people, my, as Trish mentioned kindly, my first three books were set on the south coast, around, um, around Middleton. But I changed the name to Middle Point because I wanted to put a pub right on the top of Middleton Point.
And there isn’t a pub, there are homes. Mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: Thank you Victoria. Yes. I can’t wait to dive into that one.
Victoria Purman: Yeah, yeah. And so, and I thought there should be a pub because the views are right down to the cruel wrong. They’re absolutely stunning.
Steve Davis: Yes.
Victoria Purman: So I changed the name and, and partly to protect the innocent as well.
I didn’t want people to be upset that I hadn’t, I got the street name wrong or anything, like anything, but I had someone contact me who said, I live where your pub is Oh
Theme: wow.
Victoria Purman: In the lighthouse. And I’m so jealous, um, that this person lived right on the top or middle from point since she had the views. And, and the feedback I’ve had is exactly what you’ve had Trish about.
I can imagine the characters walking on the, on this beach. Um, you’ve mentioned Victor Harbor, it’s great. But I think the point is there’s a, our readership in comparative terms across Australia is probably small. And so other [01:44:00] people find those places exotic. Yes. Yes.
Steve Davis: Could I just say. I’ve just had another, my third, um, light bulb moment.
Victoria Purman: You need to do this.
Steve Davis: Yes. I think when I was reading the book that I knew my wife had just read, and we met that country boy in the, who was a hunk. I thought, my wife’s reading him right now and thinking, yes, that is delicious. And so I instantly hated him. So do did
Trish Morey: you like the heroin? Did you like
Steve Davis: her?
She look, I, I think even though she had to take the sports car, um, that’s not a bad thing. I, I, I, yeah, she was All right. Why did I just,
Nigel Dobson: you can
Trish Morey: edit this, Steve. I
Steve Davis: was wondering, is that called hypocrisy? Is it?
Trish Morey: Yeah. How did your wife feel about you fancying the heroin?
Steve Davis: I only fancied her from purely an academic position.
Trish Morey: Oh, I’m sure your wife was totally the same.
Nigel Dobson: Remember Steve? You can totally edit this to whatever you wanna say here.
Steve Davis: No, I’m beyond editing Now. You can edit out the honesty if
Nigel Dobson: you [01:45:00] want.
Steve Davis: This is no tonight’s episode. I want to be as authentic and as transparent as possible. It’s too important. Is too important
Bronwyn Stuart: in Stone castles.
You really just noticed she was driving a sports car. Yeah. This, this is why you’re a guy. It
Trish Morey: was red, wasn’t it?
Bronwyn Stuart: It was, yeah.
Trish Morey: And what model was it? It was.
Steve Davis: An Audi. There you
go.
Trish Morey: Yeah. See boys
Victoria Purman: cars.
Steve Davis: No, but I’m not a car person. I just remembered. Do you know what I remembered reading it, thinking it’s hard. Why is she mentioning Audi all the time?
Is she sponsored by Audi? That’s what I thought.
Trish Morey: She probably wishes well let me, clever product placement. I’m still waiting for the call,
Steve Davis: whereas I would’ve been happy with a little. S four Volvo. I reckon that would’ve been lovely.
Trish Morey: Well, she wanted, she wanted a
Steve Davis: Toyota. She want something. She
Trish Morey: wanted
Steve Davis: that.
She was very
Trish Morey: frustrated
Steve Davis: over in New York. Did the wrong thing by her. Yeah.
Bronwyn Stuart: What color was her hair?
Steve Davis: Her? Did she have hair? Yeah, she had hair.
Bronwyn Stuart: She had,
Steve Davis: uh, oh. And it wasn’t red because I’m just
Bronwyn Stuart: pointing out the difference between a man reading a, a romance novel and a woman, and not all men, because that would be nasty to all men.
But, um,
Steve Davis: just me. [01:46:00]
Bronwyn Stuart: The fact, thank you, Wyn. The fact, the fact that you think your wife was salivating over the delicious hero and he was delicious. Um, but all you took away from it was the car.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
Bronwyn Stuart: May I suggest that you go back? No, no. I’m not trying to magazine
Steve Davis: was
Trish Morey: Did you like the dog?
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah.
Steve Davis: Was there a dog?
Trish Morey: Turbo? Turbo
Steve Davis: the dog. Oh, turbo his dog.
Trish Morey: Yeah.
Steve Davis: Yeah. No interest. No interest. Um,
Nigel Dobson: well that’s a relief,
Steve Davis: but I’m not a dog man. I’m more into ipu it like cats cat. I’m more of a cat man.
Trish Morey: Right.
Steve Davis: Thank you for saying what you about to say. And so with her, she had a sports car and she had a coffee. She, she grabbed a coffee.
Trish Morey: Mm.
Steve Davis: The thing that I didn’t understand is she didn’t drink it for about 17 pages and it went cold. And she was surprised.
Trish Morey: Well, she had a lot to, she had a lot on her mind.
Steve Davis: She had a dying person.
Trish Morey: Yeah.
Steve Davis: As she said. Well, when
Victoria Purman: I do that, I make cups of coffee and sit there at my desk and, um, then pick it up and it’s cold.
Trish Morey: Yeah.
Steve Davis: Yeah. I don’t, for me, the most important things to life are the perfect espresso. Do you think, here’s a question. If you were gonna cast [01:47:00] me as a hero, how would you describe, what sort of traits do you think I could carry off in a novel? You can be blunt ’cause I can edit this.
Trish Morey: Dark,
Steve Davis: dark, dark.
Victoria Purman: I can’t see if you talk ’cause you’ve only been sitting down,
Steve Davis: right?
Victoria Purman: Uh, deep voice. I would,
Trish Morey: I
Steve Davis: would’ve said voice.
Trish Morey: I would’ve said voice
Victoria Purman: as well. Voice
Trish Morey: and brown eyes.
Steve Davis: I,
Bronwyn Stuart: I think we’d go
Trish Morey: caramel,
Steve Davis: hazel
Bronwyn Stuart: chocolate. I think
Steve Davis: chocolate hazel
Victoria Purman: kind. Hagues, peppermint frog, brown eyes.
Steve Davis: That sounds manly. He was tall, dark with hagues. Peppermint chocolate eyes.
Victoria Purman: No, women get that, believe me.
Steve Davis: Oh, do they? What?
Victoria Purman: Just like the chocolate wine,
Steve Davis: right?
Bronwyn Stuart: The chocolate and the
Victoria Purman: wine. But good with technology. You could be, you
Steve Davis: know, yes.
Victoria Purman: It hero.
Steve Davis: So there’s hope for me yet.
Victoria Purman: Okay.
Trish Morey: I know. I, you see, you al Also listen, which is very important in the heroes. Listen. Oh yeah. A lot of heroes. Well, a lot of guys don’t listen.
Steve Davis: Don’t listen. But heroes. Listen, I think there’s a subtitle for tonight’s program. I’ve
Bronwyn Stuart: got it. I’ve got it.
Steve Davis: Okay.
Bronwyn Stuart: I reckon you are heroine. [01:48:00] She would be a radio announcer and she has perhaps been dumped that morning by a guy that she thought she was gonna marry and she’s completely losing her shit. Yeah.
And you are the, I don’t know what the technical word is, but the sounds guy behind the scenes and you have to take over the mic while she. Loses her shit. Yep. Uh, and you save her, and then she really sees you for, for the, and then you
Steve Davis: already as a hero her, and you’ve already always seen her.
Bronwyn Stuart: We’ve all, we were in her point of view when we opened.
Okay. And, and she, so I was invisible and, yeah. Well, no, ’cause that’s the truth. I don’t even think the hero’s ever necessarily invisible. Usually he’s a pain in the ass at first. Yes. Yeah. I can do that. And he can be kind of annoying. So maybe you messed up her coffee and she just thinks, oh my god, Steve, get my latte.
Right.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
Bronwyn Stuart: But then you save her in her moment of, you know, meltdown.
Steve Davis: I’m there with my finger on her fader, and I, I hope bring her, that’s
Trish Morey: the title finger on
Steve Davis: her. Fade
Trish Morey: out.
Steve Davis: Perfect. Wow.
Trish Morey: His finger on her fade
Steve Davis: fader.
It’s
Trish Morey: beautiful. That’s, that’s poetry.
Steve Davis: And we’ll call the, the book Love fm.
Bronwyn Stuart: My [01:49:00] god. I just tingled.
Steve Davis: Oh.
Um, so, uh, there was one, so the question was about, uh, setting stories locally, and we’ve dealt with that. The other thing that was a burning of burning importance to us to cover tonight was the list of acknowledgements in your novels. It’s almost as long as a novel itself. How much research goes into these novels to get things right.
And, and who are all these people? Are they just friends that you’ve borrowed a cup of sugar from and you’ve, you’re sort of paying them back with a, with a, a list.
Bronwyn Stuart: How desperate was I for a Coffee with a Sugar in it? I’m not. I’ve got a, I know there’s a couple of acknowledgements in here. Um,
Steve Davis: on a, on a Kindle, it looks longer than it might do on the printed version.
Bronwyn Stuart: Okay. In the back of my book, it’s only really a, a page and a half.
Victoria Purman: You may notice there are certain names in the back, Steve
Bronwyn Stuart: there,
Steve Davis: such
Bronwyn Stuart: as
Steve Davis: Victoria per,
Bronwyn Stuart: there, there is a Victoria perm. Trish Moy, there is a Trish Moy because general, it, it writing is such a solitary thing. [01:50:00] Um, it, it, it is, it you, you know, you’re in your rugby boots, in your pajamas and, uh, drop the kids off like that sometimes as well.
But it does take a lot of people to get a book published. Um,
Steve Davis: it takes a village to write a
Bronwyn Stuart: book. It does take a, no, it takes a village to get the book printable, I suppose. Okay. Um, Trish, she answered every, Trish was actually my first point of contact with, um, south Australian romance authors and romance writers of Australia.
Um, she kindly read some of my pages after I had a request and, and sent it off. She’s read a couple of my books, first pages. Now, Kelly, Ethan, I think I also mentioned in here because she, she’s always my first reader, Victoria. She drops the F word a lot. I love her. But, um, Victoria’s also, we share a publisher.
So every time I needed to ask a question of anything I, I asked her
Steve Davis: the F word being Fabio.
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah, no, no. Fun,
Steve Davis: fun,
Bronwyn Stuart: fun. Fun’s the F word. Um, it, it really does take a village and you have to, you can’t acknowledge everybody in the back of the book. There’s just not enough room. [01:51:00] But at the end of the book, you know, or those people are always the forefront of my mind.
Uh, the people who helped me. Along the way. So it’s, and it’s not just my editor and my publisher, it’s the one that you can ring up in tears because you’re, everything’s just gone south and you feel like you’ve just written 50,000 words of shit. You know? It’s that person who is on the end of a, I can email her and say, how much was your advance?
Because this is what they’re offering me. And you know, it’s, it’s all sorts of things like that that go on behind the scenes. And that’s, for me, that’s my acknowledgements.
Victoria Purman: I think there’s something, um, unique to the romance writing community all over the world. And that is some, I would attribute to the fact that we’ve been so marginalized.
People think what we do is, you know, easy. Um, so we’ve, romance writers have created their own community of support and we have a brilliant conference every year full of workshops about writing, about publishing. It’s a really professional experience. No other genre in writing in Australia at least has that.
So we, well, and Trish was already multi published [01:52:00] by the time I met her, but when you go to those annual conferences, you meet other. Um, aspiring authors. And so you get to follow each other’s careers and follow each other’s successes and celebrate with ’em. And so that’s in, to me, that’s why the acknowledgements are so long, because we are really supportive community and, and we with a, a bunch of other writers meet once a month and we talk writing stuff.
That doesn’t happen in other parts of the writing world, does it, Trish?
Trish Morey: That’s right. Yeah. Um, we are pretty special. Um, and we’re also, I think we’re very giving, we are very generous, I think with advice. I had so much advice when I was trying to get published, and so you sort of pay it forward, you know, you, you sort of pass that on.
Um, my acknowledgement probably seemed like a chapter to you when you were looking at them. There was a lot, but then it was a case of two. It was a special book for me in that, um, my father had died and there was a lot of family history in there and there’s a lot of family involved. Uh, and also just the way the story came about, um, I was truly grateful for, for [01:53:00] a publisher who wanted to, um, who thought it was worth publishing.
Um, I mean, I, I wanted it to be published, but um, the way it happened was so fast and so fabulous. It was really, it was another dream. You know, my first publishing contract was a dream come true. Um, yeah. Lucky to have, you know, another dream. Pretty, pretty lucky.
Steve Davis: Just before we move into Nigel’s, is it news quiz on the topic of dreams?
I wanna leave with one question for each of you. Have you ever dreamt. One of your heroes is if that’s not a psychopathic
Bronwyn Stuart: question to it. No. No. Okay. So no, for me, um, no, not, not at all. Actually, may, maybe I’ve dreamt up the next sequence because I’m stuck. Um, and then I wake up and I jot it down in a notebook.
But, um, yeah, no,
Trish Morey: certainly he fancies a heroine.
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah.
Trish Morey: He doesn’t fancy me. He’s somebody
Bronwyn Stuart: else’s man.
Trish Morey: You know. Um,
Victoria Purman: I, I dream of Chris Hemsworth a lot.
Steve Davis: Um, is it problem [01:54:00] me to say I was actually dreaming about you three all last night? I hardly slept. I woke up almost every hour and in anticipation of the night with the three romance writers.
Trish Morey: Just hope we haven’t disappointed you, Steve.
Steve Davis: Not at all. I’ve tingled just like Bronwyn. It’s been one long tingle.
Let’s pause because Nigel is gonna continue the romance theme next with Is It News? Thank you so much for your generosity of sharing stories and getting us into the romance genre and giving it its due moment in the spotlight.
Bronwyn Stuart: Thank you. Thank you for giving it a spotlight.
Speaker 13: You
Nigel Dobson: in our week of romance. It’s that time of the week again for is it news where we go through newspapers from years gone by to work out which stories are true and which are fake. In particular, we have three stories, one of which is not true. [01:55:00] And starting this week, we go back to 1923, the 12th of January in the register.
Steve Davis: Where was the register? Was that uh, south
Nigel Dobson: Australian
Steve Davis: Adelaide?
Nigel Dobson: Yes. Advertiser? Yep.
Steve Davis: Before the advertiser. Back in the time when you used your story, a lot of your stories are pitched around 1923. Oh, I may know
Victoria Purman: the
Steve Davis: answer. Victoria per has an advantage. Okay,
Nigel Dobson: so romance and near tragedy, young lovers fell overboard.
Both saved is the headline.
Steve Davis: Okay.
Nigel Dobson: Little bit of intro into this. One detail of a lovers near tragedy at sea, which occurred on a German sailing vessel, which arrived at Port Adelaide recently have been revealed. The captain of the ship during the war was attached to the German Naval headquarters. He had his wife and family on board, and the second officer and one of the daughters became attached.
The young man informed the father and asked his consent to their betrothal, which was accepted. [01:56:00] That’s the first story.
Steve Davis: How do we feel? Um, can I say ladies? Is that horrible? No, no, that’s,
Bronwyn Stuart: well, I’m okay with ladies.
Steve Davis: Ladies.
Nigel Dobson: 19 23,
Steve Davis: 19 23. Are we thinking that’s plausible or is there something that’s peaking your suspicion radar?
Bronwyn Stuart: Most of the women that came over at that time didn’t come over with men. They came to meet their man who had already come. On the ship.
Steve Davis: Oh, really? Bronwyn. Thank you. That can’t
Bronwyn Stuart: be a taboo word.
Steve Davis: This is why you, you own historical fiction. ’cause you know, detail like that. Um, Victoria,
Victoria Purman: I don’t think there would be an engagement on the ship.
Oh.
Trish Morey: I think then may well have been, I’d like to know where they fell overboard. Or were they tossed
Steve Davis: Nigel or they were tossed,
Victoria Purman: I don’t even realize they tossed either.
Steve Davis: Uh, this could be the first episode we’ve ever done with an adults only rating. No, no. Nigel. Uh, to [01:57:00] me, I’m keeping that open at the moment.
I’m not sure.
Nigel Dobson: We next jump back a few years to 1915, the 15th of February from the Daily Herald, yet again, one of our smaller newspapers from the top.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
Nigel Dobson: Jupiter works over time. A shattered romance and Adelaide’s widow’s disappointment. That was all of the headlines before we get into the story.
Theme: Wow.
Nigel Dobson: Matrimonial hopes energized by a young woman were shattered on Saturday by the dramatic arrest of the prospective husband who is already a married man with a wife living in Glenelg.
Trish Morey: Yeah, totally true.
Steve Davis: Hang on. No, no. True. This is 1915. It wouldn’t have happened back in 1915.
Victoria Purman: Totally true. Totally true. Yep.
Yep.
Steve Davis: Yeah. Why are all three of you thinking this is totally,
Trish Morey: there’s no Facebook, there’s no Twitter. How are you gonna find this out?
Victoria Purman: And and papers did print some really salacious details of others of relationships. For instance, in up until, uh, well the [01:58:00] fifties, late fifties, the reasons for people’s divorce were printed in the advertiser.
Wow. Actually, I’ve used that in the book. That’s why I know. But you know Mr. And Mr Up up by the readers. Yes. Yeah. Mr. Mrs. Smith, um, divorced by reason of adultery, you know that gossip column? Yeah. And there was no, there was no such thing as no fault divorce. So there had to be reasons why. So yeah, that was very, very gossipy and salacious and it always appeared in the paper.
I’m
Steve Davis: going true.
Nigel Dobson: Jan. Need Janine extra. A few words here, Steve, just to, I’m, you seem sort of shocked at this point in time.
Steve Davis: I am shocked. I’m ready. No, keep moving forward. Okay. We’ll come back to this one. At this point, I’m salvaging some faith in my fellow male and thinking this one could be the fake, but let’s move on.
I’m shocked
Nigel Dobson: around about the same point of time we have from the male, the 29th of March, 1919, tragic. Adelaide Romance minister marries his own daughter [01:59:00] to aristocratic bigamist. One of the most remarkable cases of deception following a brief and romantic love affair with a tragic sequel has been revealed in South Australia the circumstances of how a young and attractive military officer returned from the war, met an Adelaide girl in Melbourne, where both were staying on a holiday shortly afterwards, became engaged to be married within a few months, celebrated the ceremony, make startling reading in the face of the subsequent revelations that the officer was already married.
Steve Davis: Oh goodness.
Nigel Dobson: With his real wife and three children residing in the suburb of Sydney.
Bronwyn Stuart: Drew,
Steve Davis: I’m,
Bronwyn Stuart: I’m, I’m gonna say the first one was bullshit.
Victoria Purman: Um, I’m not sure about this one. No.
Steve Davis: Yeah. I wonder if what Nigel’s done. He is picked up on a theme. He’s found the second one, and then he is made the third one up, or vice versa.
There’s only one [02:00:00] bigamist in the room.
Victoria Purman: In fact, it’s the same bloke in all three stories.
Steve Davis: Yes. ’cause the first one is when the wife discovered
Trish Morey: Yeah.
Steve Davis: That, oh, there’s got to be a romance novel in that story.
Victoria Purman: No, no romance in him. He’s a No, he’s a Daly.
Steve Davis: Alright. So Bronwyn’s saying the first one is the fake.
Victoria Purman: Yeah, I’m saying that the, the engagement on the, on the ship. I’m saying that one’s the fake.
Steve Davis: That was fake.
Victoria Purman: Oh. See, I went fake for that one too, but. I’m thinking number three is the fake.
Steve Davis: And where are you sitting at the moment, Trish?
Trish Morey: Well, I’m still wondering why they fell overboard. Um, but I, I’m, I’m, I’m thinking number three is fake.
Steve Davis: Alright. So what Nigel’s got now for us
Trish Morey: mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: Is just a smidgen more mm-hmm.
Of each of them. Another passage from each of them. I haven’t showed my hand. I’m torn having the second one is bigger missed as well. I figured me standing up for, you know, for male kind would be bigger me, but, [02:01:00] um, obviously it’s not enough.
Victoria Purman: Sorry. Just got that joke. That was bad. It
Steve Davis: was, wasn’t it? Uh, but it’s a dad joke.
You slip it in towards the end of the night, you always get one in. Um, I am thinking the third one just sounded so fanciful that made me think I’m gonna throw my lot in with the second one and think it’s so meat and potatoes that maybe he faked that. So that’s where I’m sitting at the moment.
Nigel Dobson: So men can fake it as well.
So
Steve Davis: men, see I wasn’t that crass, the whole podcast. I’ve not been that res. Oh,
Nigel Dobson: you have so been that cress.
Steve Davis: Um, well, not that what’s gonna get through the editing process will, uh, uh, support Nigel
Nigel Dobson: when halfway between Australia and the last port of call of the vessel, they fell overboard while the vessel was bowling along at about 10 knots with a good sea running.
A boat was lowered, but night was approaching and difficulty was experienced in finding them. The mate was recovered, but nothing could be seen of the girl who evidently had found a watery [02:02:00] grave. Moments before giving up, giving her up, she was also spotted and rescued near death. The second officer for some time afterwards, was in a serious condition as a result of the experience.
After arriving in Adelaide, the lucky couple had arranged a hasty marriage at a Lutheran church in Clems with a captain able to give away the bride, the crew, and some of the family’s friends who are on board will be in attendance.
Steve Davis: So were they a couple when she went overboard? Mm. Or is that when she noticed him as the hero?
Trish Morey: I think they were together and they got a little bit. Unbalanced
Victoria Purman: and they could have been trying to hide their Yeah. Coupledom.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
Victoria Purman: Um, because it was the twenties. It was 1923. 1923.
Steve Davis: Oh, okay. It
Victoria Purman: could have been ting in a lifeboat.
Trish Morey: Yeah. And they were compromised. Yeah, right.
Steve Davis: So their starboard get together when pear shaped.[02:03:00]
Bronwyn Stuart: I think that we’re, I don’t there’s anything to that. I think we’re, I know that lovers across time have, you know, shot the gun prematurely, but, um, that we’re thinking these, I’m sorry, but they’re German. Are they German or are they just
Nigel Dobson: Oh,
Bronwyn Stuart: because like they, they
Nigel Dobson: weren’t the cap. The cap was German and so I guess his family was probably German as well.
Yeah.
Victoria Purman: And they’re Lutherans, they don’t believe in dancing, much less cavorting on the boat.
Bronwyn Stuart: I’m, I’m, I’m still thinking this one’s the fakes.
Steve Davis: Maybe she saw Moby Dick and, and panicked.
Bronwyn Stuart: I think, honestly, it sounds a bit titanic to me to be, maybe they just bumped the edge of an iceberg and that sent them over the edge.
But no, I’m thinking that, um, they would’ve still been, probably not at a ca vaulting stage. They would’ve been at a holding hands or, and no, I’m still think, I still think fake.
Steve Davis: You still think it’s fake? The rest of us are still open at this point.
Victoria Purman: Yeah. I, I know. I’m like, it, I’m going with, that’s true.
Bronwyn Stuart: Mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: Okay.
Bronwyn Stuart: I like it.
Steve Davis: You like it? Yeah. Yeah. I don’t like it as far as empathy is concerned, but I, um, uh, but I, I’m with it as the [02:04:00] true story. Number two.
Nigel Dobson: Number two. So we’re gonna have to go on a little bit of a story here. Oh, tonight.
Steve Davis: Okay.
Nigel Dobson: Um, but it’s an interesting story. This one,
Steve Davis: we’re about to get kicked out of the hotel, I think.
Nigel Dobson: No, we’re not. We’ve got dirt on the guys here, so it’s all good. Um, okay. The pair, this is the cupid Works over time chat romance at later widows next appointment. The pair became acquainted under the strange conditions and the circumstances of their parting was also unusual to all outward appearances.
The man was a soldier for, he wore the khaki uniform of the men who are undergoing military training. How frequently had recently been at camp is a question undecided. About a month ago, the widow was renting a room in Rundel Street. One day the soldier called at her address and explained that a man mentioning the name of one of the young woman’s friends had asked him to look after her.
He asked her candidly if she would go with him. She replied that at so earlier period of their acquaintanceship, the matter could not be immediately decided. [02:05:00] However, the days passed, the visits became more frequent and by working overtime, cubit so arranged things so that this week was set apart for the marriage ceremony.
Jumping to the end. So it went on that the story then rented a new place, um, outta run away from Ronald Street where she was staying into the eastern suburbs. Sounds like a home of some sort. She set it all up, had new lino on the floor, got in some unit furniture and things, and then there were two police officers involved standing at the threshold of her house.
At first, she found it hard to believe the statement that the man who had just given her a brighter outlook on her marriage, on married, on being married, that he possessed, in fact a wife living in a metropolitan district. She realized that she, the woman who had but a moment previously been building castles in the air, had been victimized.
Um, story goes on a little bit further. Two detectives stayed in the home, the man on top pod on Saturday afternoon at 2:00 PM and the truth came out.
Steve Davis: Wow, I’m shattered. How could a man do that? [02:06:00]
Bronwyn Stuart: Is a cad a rake? The only thing I don’t like about that is that, was that a bit early for asking to go with me?
Steve Davis: Ooh,
Bronwyn Stuart: was that a little too early?
Nigel Dobson: This was 1915.
Bronwyn Stuart: That sounds like too early.
Steve Davis: That’s interesting. Coming from the historical romance writer who probably never had a character say, will you go with me yet? Have you? No.
Victoria Purman: No. In that sense, no. Oh, no. I, I’m thinking that’s true.
Steve Davis: You think it’s a true story, Trish, how do you use it over there?
Trish Morey: Um, I, I’m, I’m seeing that one. I, i still thinking that’s, I,
Steve Davis: I think
Trish Morey: likely.
Steve Davis: Do you know
Trish Morey: what? It’s possible.
Steve Davis: Hit us with a bit more of the third one,
Nigel Dobson: the tragic Adelaide romance with a minister marries his own daughter to Aris.
Trish Morey: It sounds like a different story to me.
Nigel Dobson: To aristocratic polygamist. Well, actually
Trish Morey: that sounds like a really bad story.
Nigel Dobson: Yes, it does. Until you add to aristocratic polygamist. And it is actually at all our appearances, a quite similar story. Cutting. A very long story short. Thank you. Um, yes. [02:07:00] ’cause unless you have time here, the facts of this matter. Is that Lieutenant Ronald Arnold Stanley? As someone mentioned before, the details come out, made, have come out in the press, who was reported would represent himself as a cousin of Governor Stanley Victoria, 12 months ago, was yet again a bit of a cad.
Um, how can
Steve Davis: they say that
Bronwyn Stuart: it was a popular word?
Nigel Dobson: After a few weeks holiday in the Victorian capitol, she returned to her South Australian home and engaged in regular correspondence with the officer who for a few months afterwards, came across to Adelaide and became engaged to the girl. Stanley then returned to Victoria, but sometimes later he rejoined his bribee and the parties were to be married.
However, cutting a long story short.
Steve Davis: Thank you.
Nigel Dobson: Um, I’ll hop down to the heart to broken girl aspect of this particular story. A very saddened, heartbroken girl was now compelled to yet again seek the shell of her father’s home where she remained some weeks in a prostrated condition. Consequent on the awful [02:08:00] revelation when asked by the girl why she had so shamelessly deceived, or that should actually say been deceived by Stanley is said Tove attached the blame to his wife for their living apart and declared that his fondness of the girl had led to him to act as he had.
Trish Morey: It’s always a woman.
Nigel Dobson: The remorse was that has to be true ‘
Victoria Purman: cause bloke’s always blame their wife
Nigel Dobson: by her age, father a the sorry outcome of what appeared to be a promising future for his young daughter may very well have been understood, particularly in the light, that by his very own acts that his daughter had entered the bonds of mat money for better or for worse, within the sacred prospects of his man’s being the priest who, who officiated over the marriage.
Mm-hmm. For some time he had not been in good health and the recent unprecedented discourse disclosures have dealt a severe and telling blow. To his Infe constitution.
Steve Davis: I have no idea what that last passage meant, but I’m getting the impression this is like a, if you wrote a novel like this, it would probably be [02:09:00] rejected because it’s so far fetched.
Trish Morey: Oh, I don’t, no, it’s lovely. It’s great. My brother married me
Bronwyn Stuart: and my husband, so I like that.
Trish Morey: And, and my, what? My father married, my father married, uh, my father-in-law married me and my husband, so there
Bronwyn Stuart: you go.
Steve Davis: This is what I love about Hill Community.
Bronwyn Stuart: This is not Tasmania. We’re in Adelaide. Remember?
Nigel Dobson: Yeah.
You’re a very close knit community.
Bronwyn Stuart: I, I’m still going The first one. I’m still
Victoria Purman: thinking
Steve Davis: the first, you’re the first one. Victoria. Have, have you swung either way? Oh, yeah.
Victoria Purman: I’m torn. I think that’s true. I think that’s true. And maybe number one is the fake.
Steve Davis: So you’ve swung to Bronwyn’s side. Uh, tr really
Victoria Purman: good think I
Trish Morey: stand.
Someone has to stand firm. I’m gonna go with one and two being true, and three being the imposter.
Steve Davis: And so can I match you with my firmness? Is the question? Dunno. And I think that that one is just a comedy of errors. That’s like Shakespeare on a bad day had overdone the absence and wrote a shocker play that never really saw the light of [02:10:00] day.
Uh, and so therefore, I’m with you Trish. I’m with you on number three. So you’ve split us. Uh, so Nigel, please take us out of our misery. Which one will it be?
Nigel Dobson: So we both, we all agree.
Steve Davis: Yep. Number and number two is the correct story. True? Yes. Yes. We do Uhoh.
Nigel Dobson: And yet it is indeed true.
Steve Davis: Well done.
Nigel Dobson: And in this case, we did have the CAD from Glenelg.
Steve Davis: Yes.
Nigel Dobson: Deceiving the young woman from Rundel Street.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
Nigel Dobson: She’s setting up a new home in the eastern suburbs.
Steve Davis: Okay.
Nigel Dobson: And he was taken away by two policemen.
Steve Davis: Beautiful.
Nigel Dobson: The end of the story. Cool.
Steve Davis: Thank you. We are satisfying
Bronwyn Stuart: ending.
Victoria Purman: Mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: Very esteemed.
Victoria Purman: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Davis: So right now what’s gonna happen is either one romance writer or two romance writers are about to lose their kudos within the romance sensibility.
No, it’s
Victoria Purman: two against two. You and Trish.
Steve Davis: I’m not a romance writer yet.
Yeah.
Victoria Purman: But there’s four of us. And
Steve Davis: this too. I know. Okay. You did
Nigel Dobson: do the introduction to the show tonight, Steve?
Steve Davis: I did. Which? Oh [02:11:00] yes. Okay. You’re a
Trish Morey: romance writer, right? I’m also fairly gullible, so
Nigel Dobson: I’m not gonna lose much actually.
Steve Davis: Okay, here we go.
Send it down, Huey.
Nigel Dobson: Cutting to the chase. Story number three on the tragic Adelaide Romance Minister marry his own daughter. He did indeed marry his own daughter, and yes, was to a Eastern States CAD who was deceiving the poor young girl, which means the first story was true. But this doesn’t have a happy ending people, ’cause I’ll now read out the truth
Bronwyn Stuart: doesn’t.
Why the Titanic? Does she die?
Nigel Dobson: I’ll now read out the truth. Very good. The true story was romance and tragedy. Young lovers jumped overboard. Oh, both drowned. What actually happened is details of a lovers tragedy at sea, which occurred on the German sailing vessel. And the captain refused to allow his daughter to marry the second mates.
It is understood that the captain angry. [02:12:00] The complications which had arisen, shown some sternness and harshness in the matter. And to all appearances, the lovers entered into a death pact. Oh, so they actually jumped overboard. When the boat was between Australia and its last board of call while going at a good 10 knots in a good sea running, the second mate was rescued alive.
However, the daughter of the captain did indeed drown and was never found.
Victoria Purman: Those heavy frocks and clothes they wore, she would’ve just got wet and sunk
Steve Davis: and sunk.
Nigel Dobson: And a addendum to the story, after arriving at Port Adelaide, some of the crew went to the police and complained of the behavior of the captain towards them since his trouble had come upon him, trouble being the death of his daughter through drowning
Victoria Purman: inconvenience.
Sure.
Nigel Dobson: Inconvenience. They declared that it was impossible to sell with him and asked if something could not be done to get them. Assure the trouble in the first place is that they, that they are prohibited immigrants. [02:13:00] And then there is no German cons in South Australia, who would’ve been the proper person to act on their behalf.
The police advisor semen to go to the shipping master, who cutting along show Stewart couldn’t help. And so the men had to stay on the boat Wow. With their captain whose daughter had just drowned due to a love that could not be fulfilled. So
Steve Davis: I’m taking away from this as a father of two little girls, five and seven, whomever, they come and say to me, dad, I wanna marry them.
I’ve got a grin. And bear it.
Bronwyn Stuart: No, no, no. I’ve got two little girls too. I’ve got a grin and bear it. But
Nigel Dobson: don’t tell ’em no on a ship.
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Davis: Okay. So if I say they can’t marry them. Just don’t let them buy any cruise line of tickets. Is that the, the story,
Nigel Dobson: Satan, a safe location.
Bronwyn Stuart: My girls are going to a girls’ school, so I don’t have to worry about this for a while.
Nigel Dobson: Oh yeah. You, you think? Yeah. Romance and, and affairs never happen in the girls school.
Bronwyn Stuart: Can I just say like, thanks for bringing the mood down too. I like that was not a [02:14:00] romantic ending. We could have had something a lot happier than that.
Steve Davis: I know. This is why we have Nigel on the program. Yeah. He’s got such a gift
Nigel Dobson: for him.
However, you were exactly spot on for, is it a Titanic ending?
Steve Davis: Oh,
Bronwyn Stuart: I, I wasn’t so spot on though with the, you know, fridge of German. Aspect though, um, no.
Nigel Dobson: Frigid as in how the young German girl sank frigidly below the ocean.
Bronwyn Stuart: No, no, no. About how they wouldn’t have been engaged in a lovers’ tri. Um, my, my husband’s, we spent the whole weekend with my husband’s grandmother who told us about her immigration on the ship coming over five weeks from Germany.
Um, her hus, her husband to be, had already been here for two years. Um, and she gave us quite a lot of details about her, about that whole story. So as soon as she said gma, I just thought no mo most of those women were in fact coming over to be with the men who had already come to start a life.
Nigel Dobson: Yes. So you picked up on the fact that she wouldn’t be picking up a relationship on board?
Bronwyn Stuart: Yeah. Her father. Yeah. But maybe she was a rebellious sort, but she did. Yeah. Maybe she was rebelling. Um, but she did. Yeah. I, I [02:15:00] don’t know. Maybe because her father was telling her no. Where was the wife? Why, why didn’t his wife say she was a hon? Maybe the first mate really was just an asshole.
Steve Davis: I’m gonna write a romance novel on that called Fe Bolton Leben.
Bronwyn Stuart: Mm.
Steve Davis: And I think that’s gonna be a Okay. My
Bronwyn Stuart: good luck. We’ll read it for you.
Steve Davis: Yes. And I’ll use a pseudonym. Nigel, happy ending Dobson King. Um, thank you Nigel once again for Is It News?
Nigel Dobson: Thank you very much.
Speaker 13: And now it’s time for the musical pilgrimage.
Steve Davis: In the musical pilgrimage. Something a little bit different. I mean, writers’ festivals, they exist at their best to put uncomfortable ideas into a room and let them breathe. The question [02:16:00] of what ideas the community is willing to sit with and which ones it would rather not hear.
That’s precisely what Adelaide Writers Week found itself at the center of this year. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, what started as an administrative decision by a festival board became through the sequence of events that followed a very public conversation about artistic freedom, about institutional courage, and what it costs a society when it loses its nerve around difficult subject matter.
Adelaide Writers Week has occasionally occupied the uncomfortable ground before. I mean, Jermaine Greer when she was here being Jermaine Greer, the writer week, cracked into the headlines, the exposure of the fabricated Holocaust revisionism behind the Helen Deko affair. Patrick White in 1986 urging writers to ignore critics entirely if they wanted to avoid producing the kind of safe, [02:17:00] uninspiring work that pleases no one and challenges nothing.
I think Patrick White were he alive today, could say the same about ai, um, but that’s a topic for another day. Writers’ festivals are by their very nature, both unsettling and necessary. They’re unsettling because they surface ideas that people would sometimes refer to leave alone, and they’re necessary because a community that can’t examine uncomfortable thinking out loud.
It gradually loses the capacity to protect itself from ideas that go unexamined. We lose that courage. We lose the skills. Our musical pilgrimage song today is actually called Uncomfortable Ideas. I wrote it to speak directly to the that tension. I hope you’ll hear that. It addresses the shortsightedness of those who believe audiences need to be shielded from [02:18:00] difficult thoughts, and it echoes White’s call for the kind of artistic bravery that does not ask permission.
Um, listen out for the bridge. Two, because that captures the specific feeling of an invitation to speak in the open air being pulled back by voices that underestimated what a real world read audience is capable of holding. So from the particular pleasure of thinking in public here is. Steve Davis and the virtual osos with uncomfortable ideas.
Theme: I wrote a story about an naughty man. Some parts were gory, but then he joined the cloud. I went quite deep. Into his mind as he lost me crime after crime. And then one day a stranger came, said, change your way street all the same. The naughty man just shook his head with gun in [02:19:00] hand. He shot him. It isn’t, it isn’t heart, but the narrative is risky and the dialogue runs free.
You need darkness in a story to add contrast to the light. And critics need ignoring by those brave enough live forever.
Then the Nazi man was in the Middle East, said he had a plan to lead to more so a
said it was from a human. Then some people said, I would be to [02:20:00] blame if I end up dead. If I end up, if only they would read, right. They would read my plea. Humans.
It’s not Charlotte Bronte and it’s not Patrick White, but if you are thinking deeply, you are approaching my
you darkness in story to a contrast to the light, and critics need ignoring
live forever.
Invitation came for me to speak. Outside in the [02:21:00] sunshine and at Adelaide, right as we, but hidden in the shadows came voices of descent who demanded publicly that I needed.
It wasn’t those who read and I know it wasn’t patrons. Even those who disagreed came from simple minds who cannot understand the wonder and the wisdom from having in.
You need darkness in a story to add contracts to the light. And critics need ignoring by those brave enough to write up books that left forever, that stay with us for years by writers who never threw one to.[02:22:00]
You need darkness in a story to wear contrast to the live and critics need ignoring Bible brave enough to write books live forever that stay with us for you.
Steve Davis: Uncomfortable ideas, Steve Davis and the virtuosos. I would love a local performer to take that song and make it their own. Would be so good. Perhaps it could be sung at next year’s Adelaide Writers Week. Thank you very much for listening. I hope this scratched the itch, uh, of not having the full Adelaide Writers Week this [02:23:00] week, and you’ve picked up some things.
I thought Maybe it’s inspired you over this rather rainy weekend at the time of recording to perhaps find a book and lose yourself in it. Until next time, it’s goodnight from me, Steve Davis. Goodnight Don.
AJ Davis: The Adelaide Show Podcast is produced by my dad, Steve Davis. If you want to start a podcast or get some help producing creative content, talk to him. Visit steve davis.com au. Thanks, aj. I’m Caitlyn Davis and I agree with everything my sister said, but there’s one more thing to say. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating or a review ’cause that will make my dad really happy.
Oh, and one [02:24:00] more thing. If you really, really liked it, please help a friend put the Adelaide Show on their phone. Thanks for listening.
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