Where Every Indie Book
Has a Place to Be Found

I have been writing since I was a very young girl, lying on the floor with my pencil and yellow paper. But it wasn't until a little over a year ago, after reading some very poorly written werewolf romances that I decided that I could do better. And here we are.

I’d wanted to write a novel since I was in my twenties, but for most of my life I never really believed I could do it. There was always work, family and everything else that gets in the way, and writing a book remained one of those things I thought I might do ‘one day’. When I reached my sixties, I realised that if I was ever going to do it, ‘one day’ had probably arrived. The real inspiration for *The Long Grass* came from two places. The first was a childhood friend of mine who had passed away a few years earlier. He’d had an incredibly difficult life and I wanted, in some small way, to pay tribute to him. He became part of the inspiration for one of the novel’s most important characters. The other inspiration was Far North Queensland. I spent time in Weipa in the mid-1980s, when the novel is set, and it was an extraordinary place. It was remote, isolated and sometimes pretty wild, and I witnessed some things up there that stayed with me for the next forty years. Eventually those two things came together. I began imagining a murder mystery in which the victims weren’t necessarily innocent, and the killer wasn’t simply a monster. I wanted to explore what might drive someone to kill, and whether understanding why they did it could change the way we felt about them. Once I had that idea, I finally had the story I’d been waiting all those years to write.

A deep and unsettling desire to see the world from a more fairer, compassionate and cooperating lens than the current competitive, exploitative and self-boasting lens that seems drive a lot of public policy, social welfare and personal philosophy schools.

Starting at a young age, as I read books, I always imagined different variations, different stories, different ideas. Reading, in other words, made me envision telling stories myself, which of course led to a desire to write stories of my own. Through the years, that has evolved from simply wanting to tell stories to wanting to explore ideas and eventually into sharing experiences and knowledge. My inspiration to write was never one thing - it has been a constantly growing and expanding process of understanding that I strive to discover words to share with others.

My life suffered steep ups and downs, twists and turns. These experiences forced me to introspect. The conclusion was eye-opening. Self-respect stands above goody-goody behavior. Setting boundaries and the ability to say a polite but firm "no" are very important for living a peaceful life.