The Marsden Park Series

Since when did May end?? I swear I just posted a week ago…..and now we’re halfway through June! I doubt that anyone actually missed my posts or me…(except my number 1 fan, my mother ❤️ Hi Donk!)

I’ve been back at work for a few weeks now. The fun part is that I’m not yet full-time – our max hours per week are 25 hours, which is 4 days of work, 3 to write.

I’ve been working on A Homeless Affair (temp title) almost every non-work day since I submitted my assignment for uni. I’m still dreading that result coming back…but anyways.

A Homeless Affair is taking a lot of time to come to fruition. I have put in endless research for this one, and it is very close to my heart – even more so than Catalogue of Disaster.

I can’t remember if I discussed this in a previous post or not. AHA is a much darker story, and touches on childhood abuse (not sexual abuse), homelessness, and mental health.

As this plot has evolved, my characters have grown into two complex (and lovable) souls. Every time I think about writing ‘the conflict’ scene, which is about to happen, I get all upset because I know it is going to hurt them both deeply, and I feel like a bad author-mum lol.

Warning: some readers will probably cry while reading this book.

Why so dark this time?

I want to draw attention to homelessness. For many, we see people sleeping at Central Station, and begging in Dawson Mall or near Westpoint (Western Sydney). We don’t see the ‘why’.

It can be financial woes, drug addiction, or mental health issues.

There are many reason why, and this can be something such as domestic abuse causing someone to be homeless. It can be to escape family abuse (in the case of a child), fear of being institutionalised, or it can be because housing is so bloody expensive in Sydney.

Whatever the reason, homeless people are people, and they matter too. The Australian government is still slow in addressing this issue, but luckily we do have a lot of services here to help. We do need to do more as a country to address this though.

There are a lot of themes in this book, and I want to get it absolutely right. This isn’t a rush-job like Catalogue of Disaster. This one is a special project, so it may take another month or 3 before it’s ready.

I should mention that AHA is set in the same area / timeframe as COD. If you have read COD first, you may even notice a few sneaky crossovers in there. As such, I have nick-named this the Marsden Park series.

Series? Yep. I may write more Western Sydney stories over time, and I may even flesh out COD a little more and re-publish down the track. But for now, I will be revisiting The Darkest Realm once AHA is sitting on my bookshelf.

I know some of you are begging me to hurry the eff up with TDR. This is how it is: write something crap that is a shitty book 2, of sit on it for a while, and come out with something that’s even better than book 1, that carries the story forward and does Nika and Freyne justice. I’m sure you’d just love to meet our villain and get inside his head, right?

My goal is to have TDR published in time for Fair Day 2021, which is in February. So that’s 8 months. I can do this! This will give me 4 books to sell at Fair Day 😁

Anyways….don’t forget to follow me on Twitter or Facebook – those are the two socials I am most active on. You can also subscribe to this blog, and receive emails whenever I post to my blog.

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Take care lovely’s 😘