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Inspiration is a tricky thing. It comes and goes, and mostly, its habits are unpredictable. If I knew how it all worked, believe me, my second novel would’ve been out by now. Usually someone in front of me has to do something stupid, or something horrible has to happen to me, and when I stop whingeing long enough to laugh and think, ‘Gee, that’d make a great story…’ – inspiration happens, and the words aren’t far off.

I’m not one of those gushing author fanboys who runs up to authors saying, ‘Wow, you inspire me so much.’ In fact, I was saving that baby up for when I met Terry Pratchett for the first time… but I found myself saying it to an author I’d only just met, and whose work I hadn’t read (obviously, since then, I’ve given it more than a glance, and it’s pretty awesome). That author was Patrick Ness, and that was Tuesday.

But our story begins on:

Monday: Melina Marchetta and The Piper’s Son Sydney launch

William Kostakis (moi) with Susanne Gervay

Book launches are great. They’re inspiring. I haven’t been to many (in fact, I’ve been to two, my own – which was pretty darn inspiring – and Melina Marchetta’s). It wasn’t being surrounded by peers in the industry (and making an awkward spectacle of myself as I was introduced to authors I’d been a fan of for a long time, and was trying to remain calm as I told them about a little blog I wrote for) that inspired me.

In fact, blame for inspiration rests solely on Melina Marchetta.

I haven’t known Melina very long. I met her a year ago. I was on a panel with her, scared to death of how I was going to introduce myself to the Melina Marchetta when the closest I’d ever come to reading her books was watching five minutes of Looking For Alibrandi on Channel Ten. So, I approached her, ready with a rehearsed and completely fake, ‘Whoa, your writing shaped my youth!’ (You know, the stuff she hears all the time.) Before I’ve started the spiel, she calls me by my first name (I haven’t introduced myself) and says how much she loved a short story I wrote in high school, and that she used to show it in class when she taught English. Cut to me thinking: ‘Melina… likes… my… writing?’ over and over and over. In fact, before our session, she didn’t even give me time to spew out the spiel. She just kept talking about me. I was struck by how normal, and humble, and nice, someone whose success can only be measured with ‘mega’s could be.

And Book Launch Melina was no different. Someone told me once, you’re not measured by how you handle the bad times, but the grace and humility you exhibit during the good times. There’s no doubting that, with her current career position, Melina is experiencing the good times. And you would never guess it. Having, since the panel, read all of her work, and knowing how successful she’s been (on account of my not living under a rock), I don’t know how someone can be as level-headed as she is.

Her writing inspires me as a writer (I hesitate to use the word ‘fellow’), but her personality, her warmth, and general Melinaness inspires me as a person.

Congratulations, Melina. Everybody here at Boomerang Books wishes you all the best with The Piper’s Son, and we’re already anticipating Book #5.

Tuesday: Patrick Ness speaks at Sydney Uni

To say Patrick Ness is popular would be to understate the fact considerably. I’d never read any of his work, but a lot of you have emailed me about him, so I thought I’d go along to see him speak (my class in the adjacent building finished at 6, he started at 6 – it was practically fate). I went expecting a room filled with teens, but what I found was a room filled with peers, authors I recognised, publishers, editors, and, granted, some teens.

He was a little late. The air was thick with anticipation – you could cut it with a [insert horrible pun with book title here]. Then, showtime.

“I think a reader can tell if the writer is joyous.”

After considering how daunting a task speaking without a topic is, he settled on establishing his own topic: joy. He said he never liked talking about author stuff, and proceeded to talk about his process: joy, joy, joy. To write is to write free of the mechanics of writing, and to just write joy.

It was great to hear such an acclaimed writer (he won the Guardian Prize), talking about writing for young adults like I do, albeit, with more flair, and more experience to back him up. It made me almost feel like I knew what I was talking about…

Namely, if you’re writing for kids: don’t write “lesson” narratives, with “issues” tick-boxes to work your way through, because they don’t equal good novels.

“Write for the teenager you were. If you think you were atypical, well, the point of being a teenager is being atypical.”

He emphasised not worrying about the genre and the audience. Cue the subtle glances from my editor – she was in the row in front, and had told me that exact thing about a bajillion times in the past year.

Just focus on joy.

“Write with joy, everything else will follow.”

The words made me want to whip out my pen and pad right then and there – well, my pen and pad were out (I was taking notes for Boomerangers), so I wanted to turn the page and plough through my new book then and there. He was really quite sensational to hear speak, and judging by what I’ve read of his work since, he has the words to back him up.

He made me want to write again, and not write to get the novel done, but write for joy.

Fans of both Patrick Ness and Melina Marchetta should keep their eyes on the blog, we have some really great prizes for you coming very soon. Signed prizes.

The Biggest Loser’s Commando Steve talks to Random House about his upcoming release, No Excuses!

I started The Slightly Skewed Life of Toby Chrysler about three years ago. However, about that time I thought I’d like to start publishing other authors’ books so I had two careers happening at once. The trouble is, I’d created a monster with Ford Street Publishing. Although publishing seven to eight books a year doesn’t sound too hectic, it’s easy to forget the major publishers have staff to edit, do accounts, market/publicity, proofread, design, liaise with authors and illustrators, write contracts, etc, etc. With a small press, it’s usually just one person that does all that.

Moi in other words.

So I wrote Toby in dribs and drabs whenever I had a chance. I knew I wanted a character, Fluke, to have a certain character trait. That is to say, words in sentences that change the meaning of the sentence.

I didn’t know what a malapropism was until I started researching for Fluke’s character. They’re sentences that have a substitution of a word that doesn’t really make sense but have a comic effect. So a “decaffeinated coffee” becomes a “decapitated coffee”; “for all intent and purposes” becomes “for all intensive purposes”; “charity begins at home” becomes “clarity begins at home”. The trick is to make sure the verbal gaffes all relate to the actual story. Some of my favourite malapropisms are: “the town was flooded and everyone had to be evaporated”; “dysentery in the ranks”; and of course, “Kath and Kim’s friends who are very effluent”.

The characters’ names come from anecdotal stories. Toby is nicknamed Milo, because he’s not Quik. Fluke was named after his mother tried conceiving on the IVF program, gave up, then conceived. Hence, Fluke.

Once I’d finished The Slightly Skewed Life of Toby Chrysler I wondered which publisher I could send it to. After all, most know me as a science fiction writer – I don’t know why this is because I’ve written many more fantasy novels than science fiction novels, but there you are! So taking a leaf from Doris Lessing’s book (she also sent two manuscripts to publishers under a pseudonym), I sent the manuscript to all the major publishers under another name. Like Doris Lessing, it was rejected. One publisher did say I could send more of my work because I “showed promise”. But one editor loved it and recommended another publisher because his company was being subsumed by another publisher. So I took up his suggestion and waited . . . and waited. And despite having a great recommendation from this eminent editor, my manuscript waited in a slush pile for four months. I enquired about it, but received no reply. I waited another month before withdrawing the manuscript. The editor then said it was nearing the top of the pile to be read. Now this is a very subjective statement. The slush pile could be a mile high, and three quarters way near the top is months away from being read, but is still “nearing the top”, right?

I withdrew the story. I was then faced with a dire predicament. Where could I send my new book? I was judging a writing competition called the Charlotte Duncan Award at the time. Celapene Press was the publisher. So under the pseudonym I sent Toby to Kathryn Duncan, the publisher at Celapene. It was accepted within the week and within four months it was published. So, there you – this reads more like the slightly skewed life of the author, hey?!

Paul Collins

Each year, there are more and more books on the topics of happiness. Not only how to get it, but how to keep it as well. There are books like “The Science of Happiness, The How of Happiness” and “Be Happy”, just to name a few. As the medical reporter for ABC TV, I’ve read most of them! So when I wanted to write another health book, I really thought long and hard about whether the world needed another happiness book and what my book could say that hadn’t already been said before.

Happiness was on my mind, because I had suffered a personal and family crisis. My mother, my only parent, had died quite suddenly from cancer. And I was finding it really tough to move through the stages of grief. It got me thinking about the advice that happiness experts give out. We’re constantly told that happiness should be our goal, but how can you actually achieve it?  Does the advice of the experts actually work?

I wanted to find out if you can be happy when things in your life are not going according to plan. Let’s face it. For most of us, life is like a rollercoaster of ups and downs, some slight and some really big. Just when you think, everything is OK, off you go again. So I wanted to investigate whether the advice of the happiness experts would work, if life wasn’t going the way you hoped.

I interviewed some of the world’s experts, from Buddhist monk Mathieu Ricard (the world’s happiest man) to Timothy Sharp (aka Dr Happy) from the Happiness Institute, to explore the science of happiness. Then I set about trying out their advice, road-testing their ideas, if you like. 

I knew that the source of my unhappiness and my journey to happiness would start with my thoughts. So I investigated cognitive behaviour therapy. Everything starts in the mind and how we think about the events and people around us. Cognitive behaviour therapy involves challenging your thoughts, and not just accepting them. It means challenging ‘all or nothing’ thinking and black and white statements, which often aren’t true. I started to think about how I was reacting to the world around me, and I focused on thinking about my reactions, rather than just reacting! It definitely helped me to focus on the positive things in my life.

I spent a year researching happiness which I write about in Roadtesting Happiness. I tell my own journey and the stories of many others. But for now, I want to give you my top tips for happiness, so that you can bring more joy to your own life.

Count your blessings. Much has been written about the importance of gratitude. But it’s something that most of us ignore. We take the people we love for granted and it’s only when something goes wrong that we realise how much they mean to us. Hug your children and kiss your partner each day.

Nurture your relationships. Happiness is contagious, just like the common cold. Invest time and energy in the people around you who bring joy to your life. Enjoy the love and affection of people who care about you.

Use your strengths to find your passion. Finding something you love doing will increase the fulfilment in your life.  
Don’t be afraid to volunteer. The happiest people in the world are also the most giving. Give your time and love to help those less fortunate and you will benefit as well.

Eat well, to feel well. Nurture your mind and body with good food and exercise. Regular exercise such as walking or weight training is one of the best things you can do to clear the cobwebs from your mind and find a place for happiness.

Make happiness a priority. Invest in your emotional wellbeing and commit to reading a book like Roadtesting Happiness to get the life that you want.

My goal in writing Roadtesting Happiness is to help people be happier and to stay that way. I’ve compiled the tools and the short-cuts so that you can ‘road-test’ your way to happiness to. It will help you develop strategies for coping when things get tough.

Through my research, I tried meditation, gratitude, exercise, eating healthy foods and exercise. Happiness is personal, and not a one size fits all prescription. Roadtesting Happiness will give you the road-map to happiness so you can see what will work for you. It helped me, and I hope it will help you too.

- Sophie Scott

About Roadtesting Happiness
With a unique and compelling blend of personal experience and scientific evidence, this book has the research, inspiration and tools to make your life happier than it is right now.

The Piper’s Son will be available on March 1… To prepare yourself, read Melina Marchetta’s classic, Saving Francesca.

Patrick Ness is the author of the Chaos Walking trilogy, which includes the award-winning The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008), The Ask and the Answer (2009) and Monsters of Men (2010). Join him on Tuesday, March 9, 6-7.30pm for a unique FREE event at the University of Sydney. Seats are limited, bookings essential. Email your full name and contact number to marketingwba@walkerbooks.com.au

1. How did you first get the idea for the Chaos Walking books?

I always say they started with a serious idea and a stupid idea. The serious idea was about information overload, that the world is already pretty noisy with mobile phones, the internet, networking sites, etc. The next logical thought was, what if you couldn’t away at all? That’s where Noise came from. And the stupid idea is that I don’t like books about talking dogs because they never talk like an actual dog would talk. So I thought it’d be funny to write one the way I always thought my own dog growing up would talk. It was good fun. And from those two ideas, a story started to form.

2. Did you always intend for the Chaos Walking books to be aimed at a young adult audience, and what is appealing about writing for this demographic?

The story itself kind of told me it was for young adults rather than the other way around, which I think is probably how it should really go. I was as surprised as anyone. What’s appealing is that teenagers aren’t snobs! If you respect them and tell a good story, they’ll follow you anywhere. But you do have to tell that good story, so you’ve got to be on the ball all the time. It’s a great challenge, very liberating, too.

3. Who are some of your favourite young adult books and authors?

There are some excellent young adult writers around, aren’t there? People like Meg Rosoff, Marcus Sedgwick, Terry Pratchett, Siobhan Dowd, Mal Peet, I could go on…

4. I’m intrigued by Noise and how it affects the men of New World. Do they feel disempowered by it? Would New Elizabeth be a safe and happy place if it wasn’t for the Noise?

Well, I tried to show that there could be different reactions to Noise, with Prentisstown being the worst. But as they journey along, Todd and Viola see places like Farbranch where it’s not so bad or Carbonell Downs where it’s less good but plausible. And then there’s Haven, where things are complicated. It’s what you’d ask of any place, I think; safety and happiness are tenuous things that need to be worked for against our natural fears.

5. Mayor Prentiss came to New World as a settler. Were his intentions on setting out to wage war and dominate, or did he start out as a good man?

I suspect the answer’s messier than just one or the other. People never get to power by a single action or intention; there are opportunities along the way that you can take or not take and those build on each other. In fact, it’s the theme of The Ask and the Answer about how you can even take what seem to be a series of small right decisions and still end up possibly doing something terrible. I suppose it’s about how many compromises you’re willing to make before you lose your humanity. As for the Mayor, maybe he had a predisposition, but you still need the circumstances to help you along. I suppose the crux of it is that I don’t think anyone is beyond redemption. You have to have hope for everyone. Now, whether they want to be redeemed is a whole other question…

6. Is Todd the rightful president of New World?

Ah, well, is anyone the “rightful” president of anywhere? It’s that old axiom that wanting to be in power should automatically disqualify you from ever having it. Todd would probably be an excellent president of New World, but he’d never want to be it (which is probably what would make him an excellent president and so on around the circle…)

7. How would you describe the intense relationship between Todd and Viola?

They learn that they really have to rely on one another, in a way far beyond just a simple teen romance.  They’re lost people who found one another, and they may not being able to understand all the depths of that just yet, but I think they’re more than smart enough to know how important the other is to them.  And that’s because they’ve each earned it, through hard circumstance.

8. Your upcoming book tour includes stops in Australia. Have you been to Australia before, and do you have any favourite Australian authors?

My very favourite author of all time is Australian, Peter Carey, and I end up reviewing a lot of Australian fiction for UK newspapers because I’ve read so much of it, like Tim Winton and Murray Bail. I can even reference Patrick White with confidence! Peter Carey is fantastic, especially at implying a larger imagined universe than is just in the particular book. I love that. And I have been to Australia, way back in 1993 when I was a fresh-faced college lad. Can’t wait to get back there.

9. Briefly – what we can expect from Monsters of Men?

Hmmmmm: War, surprises and a killer ending. It may not be what you expect!
 
10. If there was one thing that you wanted your readers to take away from Chaos Walking, what would that be?

I always worry that if I start out thinking in terms like that then I end up writing a lesson rather than a story.  Hopefully, if I pay proper attention to what the story wants to be and try to make it the best story possible, then there will be things in there for the reader to take away anyway.  I think that’s the best way; that way you never preach.  Having said that, looking back on the books now, they’re probably most about how hope lies in the people we love, that if you can find someone to count on and who counts on you, then that’s probably the best meaning life is going to get.  A hopeful message.

SHANE THAMM ON MY PRIVATE PECTUS AND BODY IMAGE

The other week on ABC radio I was discussing boys and body image when the compere asked me if I had ever shaved my chest.

“I did once,” I told him with great enthusiasm, which was actually an attempt to hide my embarrassment.

We were talking about boys and bodies in relation to my novel My Private Pectus, a story that deals with male teenage body image concerns.

The compere, it seemed, wasn’t convinced that body image was something that many boys were worried about.

So I put things into perspective: Australian youth rated body image alongside drugs and family conflict as their three issues of greatest concern in Mission Australia’s Survey of Young Australians in 2008. Twenty per cent of boys and one quarter of girls called body image a serious concern.

Given that backdrop, My Private Pectus and the story of its main character Sticks, is actually very common. Teenage boys, like girls, negotiate body image concerns, often fraught with doubt and despair.

But for Sticks, his life seems even more complicated than that. He lives with a father who wants to him to turn into what sounds like a robotic man. It’s about doing well at footy, and getting into the army. It’s about achievement at the expense of emotion or civility. Sure, Sticks would love to score the winning try (and of course the cute girl), as well as everything else a man’s meant to do, but whenever he tries, it just goes pear shaped.

He falls in love with a girl the boys all hate, he reverses his best mate’s car into a retaining wall, and he vomits on his Dad’s best friend’s Turkish rug. It couldn’t get worse. But of course, it does. He has a secret chest deformity. It’s called Pectus Excavatum, and it rears its ugly head during the teenage years. It causes the chest to concave at the sternum. Sticks keeps it hidden from everyone he can, including his Dad.

My Private Pectus is a rollicking ride about what a boy will do to turn into ‘man’. It evokes images of teenage boys as hormone-driven machines without the capacity to experience doubt, fear, or even love.

Yet these are the things Sticks seems to have too much of. He’s constantly trying to summon strengths that are emotional, not physical; and in moments of intimacy, he’s confronted with very real fears about what people might think about his chest.

My Private Pectus is stacked with those sticky moments that every teenager seems to find themselves in. Those moments we look back on in later life and laugh and cringe.

It is, I think, a great book for high schools, not only because it’s the only book that intimately deals with male body image concerns for teenagers, but because it raises a host of questions about alcohol, casual drug use and relationships.

A few weeks after that first ABC radio interview, I had another one with the ABC in Alice Springs, where I had spent much of my childhood.

The compere told me that My Private Pectus is like a Judy Blume novel but for teenage boys.

“What do you think of that?” she asked.

“Great,” I said, but with reservation. I was actually wondering, who the hell is Judy Blume? What am I agreeing to here?

Thinking the name sounded familiar, I went home and did my research. Considering I had studied literature at university I couldn’t believe I didn’t know this famous American novelist.

I sat back and thought, “Geez, I hope that she’s right.”

- Shane Thamm

TENDER MORSELS AND JUICY BITS

Every story needs something to keep its author going.

For any story I’m writing, I need to have an object in mind, a point, a reference that, when I look at it or prod it, starts leaking story-juice, starts multiplying possibilities, starts re-igniting my interest.

For a short story, I only need the one interesting element. Often it’s the thing that sparked the story in the first place: the two odd objects that need to be brought together (the snipers and the clowns, maybe); the transformation that requires making (the girl into eagle, or the man into warlock).

For a novel, I need a number of these objects or events; it’s possible to write a juicy bit dry for a while, and I need other areas to focus on while it changes shape in response to what I’ve done, and plumps up again in my subconscious.

With Tender Morsels, the bears were such a thing. They were in the original stories I was ripping/riffing off, Caroline Stahl’s ‘The Ungrateful Dwarf’ and the Grimms’ makeover of the Stahl story, ‘Snow White and Rose Red’. In neither story did they make any sense in terms of story structure, so part of my project was to make them make sense. The split between man-nature and bear-nature suggested the split between the real- and the heaven-world, which became the crux of the story, my main area to explore.

The Ungrateful Dwarf from Stahl’s story was another element that never let me down. Collaby Dought leaped fully formed from the source material, snarking and snatching stuff for himself. The vision of him rising from the swamp water cloaked in his silver hair, his eyes blazing out but his mouth not yet free to rant, was a key that always worked, into the atmosphere and energy of the story.

The orphan witch Hotty/Muddy/Lady Annie, had a similar effect. She and Collaby compensated for the fact that my three heroines were passive and puzzled for a great deal of the story. Every time either dwarf or witch opened their mouth, something sly or smutty came out; they had senses of humour, which my heroines were sadly short of, and they lived large and lackadaisically, while Liga, Branza and Urdda were trapped in a tiny, if pleasant, world.

These three elements, the bears, the dwarf and the cheerfully incompetent witch, were what led me back into  Tender Morsels when I’d been away from it for a while. They brought it back alive for me, gave it breath and fur and body odour, and made it tower in the doorway of my writing room, growling and griping, demanding to be written.

- Margo Lanagan

Tender Morsels was recently selected as part of the 2010 Sakura Medal Reading List, was shortlisted for the 2008 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel, won Best Novel at the Ditmar Awards 2009, and was (joint) winner of Best Novel at the World Fantasy Convention 2009 – it’s safe to say that it comes highly recommended.

Today, Clinton Walker drops by the Boomerang Books Blog to discuss his latest release, the buzzed-about Golden Miles. Part-autobiography, part-mediation on beauty, loss and national identity, Golden Miles is a must-buy for Aussie rev-heads and pop culture lovers alike this holiday season.

I wrote Golden Miles for the same basic reason I’ve written all my books – I’d been gripped by the story and simply wasn’t going to be happy until I’d got it down and out there in some form. I guess you could say my speciality is sort of underclass or overlooked history and for Golden Miles, these cars that I’d grown up with and been entranced by could be, I could see, a great vehicle for my broader interest in the social and cultural history of life in the Australian suburbs and fringes.

It’s always seemed to me, perhaps because it’s all still so close, that people seem to look down on the suburbia they came from or even still live in. But in the course of seven books over the past twenty or so years, this history has proved not so close that the people who lived through it aren’t starting to drop off. This was certainly the case with my book about aboriginal hillbilly music, Buried Country: statistics said many of these elderly aborigines should have been dead a long time back, and in fact, a few have died since the book (and film and CD) was completed in 2000, but that only doubled my original determination to get their stories down before it was too late and it’s one my great prides that I did.

More than once, people have said to me, ‘You write books for people who don’t read, or don’t buy books.’ Apart from the fact that at different times with diffferent titles, I’ve sold a lot of books (my 1994 biography of late AC/DC legend Bon Scott has sold around one hundred thousand copies and is still selling at a rate of knots), what I think these people are saying is that my subject matter is declasse. Writers can write all sorts of books about all sorts of things and hope (or expect) that readers will come to a subject that they might not ordinarily broach. I write books about subjects that are not ‘legitimate’ – aboriginal hillbilly singers, small-time Australian football culture, suburban rev-heads… and I ask, just because those subjects are not populated by people who are readers, is that any reason not to cover that subject? Or for typical readers to come to it? In fact, to me, of course, it again doubles my determination.

I grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, and I was probably a slightly precocious kid who was into comic books and bubblegum cards and hot rod magazines and, increasingly, rock’n'roll. I drew rheems of my own dream-machine custom cars because I just loved the lines and I loved the promise in them, a promise of break-out and sensuality and speed and glamour and all possible tomorrows.

I wanted to be a car designer, I told people. Life intervened of course, and by the time I finished high school in Queensland, I was running right off the rails, intoxicated by drugs and rock’n'roll, and so it was only very reluctantly that I started an architecture course at university because, I suppose, my parents thought it was the thing I should do with my talents for design. I soon dropped out and enrolled in art school… but soon dropped out of that too, to start writing for rock magazines. I fell into writing because I had a story to tell, not because I was ambitious to be a writer, and in a lot of ways, my motivation remains the same.

After writing a few books about Australian rock (including Inner City Sound, Stranded and the Bon Scott biography, Highway to Hell), I realised my interests were broadening out or returning to my general fascination with vernacular, popular culture, and thus almost stumbled over the stories I wrote in  Buried Country and Football Life.

Golden Miles is a love song to these particular cars of this particular era in Australian history, and if it’s true, as I admit, that I am in so many ways a dilattante, because I’ve never owned such a car and wouldn’t know how to do more than change a tyre on one if did, I think this unconsummated aspect of  our relationship only makes my dedication more ardent!

It was a fascination I’d had since childhood and I finally wanted to understand what it was all about. And I think, having written the book, I now do.

The book always had to be illustrated, and beautifully designed. What point is a book about beautiful design that isn’t beautifully designed itself? As a former art student, I remain dedicated to the visual even though I have a line that says, ‘your literary credibility declines in direct proportion to the number of illustrations your book includes’. But how could I not include some of this beautiful, evocative and provocative imagery?

I designed the book in conjunction with my design partner, Jim Paton, who learned his trade at Reader’s Digest. I love the way this book looks.

When I go back and glance through it now, I enjoy the way it reads too.

The influence of my life and work on my writing…

Being a prison chaplain is an interesting business. I work in a world that is unknown and misunderstood. People say to me, ‘How do you manage to work with those men after all the stuff they’ve done?’ I say, ‘It’s okay. I get to meet the people my mother wouldn’t let me play with when I was a kid.’

Well, I used to say that. Then I gave honesty a try…

See, I remember returning to my home town, and visiting the mother of a primary school friend, Robert.

I knock on her door. She answered, a bit belligerent – just as I remembered. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Kim. I used to live next door.’

‘Kim,’ she exploded. ‘You’re the boy who set fire to my yard and nearly burnt the house down.’

Mind you, this instant response is thirty-five years after I’d left that town as a teenager.

She goes on to talk about me as a kid as if I’m not standing in front of her: ‘That Kim was such a bad influence that we had to send Robert away to boarding school.’ 

So, maybe my work as a prison chaplain means I get to work with the people like me, the ones other mothers wouldn’t let their children play with.

My recent book, They Told Me I Had To Write This is a young adult novel about a boy named Clem. Clem is at war with the world and with himself. He’s in trouble with the coppers and is now attending a school for toxic teenagers. And in this environment, he starts to deal with the sexual abuse of his childhood. 

The abused childhood autobiography is fairly common. But fiction novels about child sexual abuse are not common, especially for teenagers. Perhaps publishers shy away from the area. Perhaps people don’t feel qualified to write about it. Perhaps authors are waiting for the vampire thing to fade and it will be the next fad. Perhaps I will now be inundated from readers who want to fill in my ignorance. 

All I can say is that one sleepless night on holidays this book put itself together in my head. I got up the next morning and wrote an outline. Then I started to write. Five days later I had the first draft. Some holiday, don’t you reckon?

Competent people cast their eye over it. Author Hazel Edwards mentored me for some of the way. It got knocked into shape and was accepted for publication. Three years after that sleepless night it was on its way to the printer. I’m a bit blown away by it. 

I sometimes wonder where the story came from. The answer is, from my own mind. It was in there already. I know about boys in strife. I’ve worked with them, as teenagers and adults, for many years. I was one myself. My book has been getting some pretty good reviews. I love that.

People ask me if I am writing anything else. Yes, I am. I’m currently writing a follow-up to this book. It’s not a sequel, but it has resonances. There’s a supporting character in They Told Me I Had To Write This named Bundy. I’m telling his story. It’s a darker work and there’s a more menacing undercurrent. Bundy likes burning things down. It’s the story of a firesetter. I wonder where that could be coming from…

They Told Me I Had To Write This by Kim Miller

Clem is a boy in strife. Blamed for the death of his mother, carrying a terrible secret from Grade 5 and in trouble with the police, he’s now in a school for toxic teenagers. And that rev-head school counselor wants him to write letters.Through his writing Clem goes deep into the trauma that has defined his life. Then he comes face to face with his mother’s death. In a rush of bush bike racing, the death of one student and the consequent arrest of another, an unexpected first girlfriend, and some surprising friendships, Clem’s story is the celebration of a boy who finds an unexpected future.Tackles multiple issues affecting today’s kids: bullying; family dysfunction; grief; mental illness; friendship with a fast-paced plot. Adults who are looking for insight into how to approach instances of deep teenage trauma will also find something here, as well as a good story, well told.