Suzanne Cass's Blog, page 2

Book Recommendations – The Dry by Jane Harper

BLURB:

Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well …

When Federal Police Investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge.

MY THOUGHTS:

This book was always going places. It won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2015. Then recently The Dry also won Indie Book of the year for 2017. It has sold more than 50,000 copies since its release last year in May. And now Reece Witherspoon’s company has bought the options to turn The Dry into a movie.

Jane Harper’s book deserves these accolades and so much more. I couldn’t put this book down, finishing it in only three sittings. (Quite an achievement for me)

I’m a huge fan of any story set in Australia and especially outback Australia. The setting is a small town, Kiewarra, in rural Victoria, which Harper brings to life with her wonderful description of the ruthless and unrelenting heat and endless dry of the drought. It’s hard to believe Harper is a city slicker and has only ever visited the county a few times – her depictions of the sparse fields, dried up creek-bed and dusty roads wending their way over the horizon are so embedded into the existence of the book.

This is a book that highlights what is so often the case in isolated rural communities – that opinions of the community count more than the truth, or even the law. And it is through this prejudice the murderer is able to get away with his awful deed for so long.

Harper is able to link a tragic event that happened to Falk when he was a teenager in the town with the current events of the supposed murder-suicide, but this time-travel is done in a faultless way as Harper drops in flashbacks showing the reader what really happened. Throughout the whole weaving of her tale, I found Harper’s characters to be truly relatable as they slowly exposed their painful truths.

This is a fast paced, nail-biting thriller. A well-written and easy to read book that is so evocative of rural Australia it deserves to be on any good TBR pile. I love that Aussie authors can mix it up with the any of the world’s best.

My Favourite Thing – Time

“My favourite things in life don’t cost much money. It’s clear the most precious resource we have is time.”

Steve Jobs

I’m now one of those rare people who’s revelling in the luxury of time. (see my first blog Living the Writer’s Dream) But not many people (writers) have this luxury available to them. So how do we find more time to do the things we love – in this case write.

This is possibly a writer’s greatest challenge. If writing isn’t your day job, then finding the time can seem impossible. But when most writers say they don’t have enough time to write, what they’re really saying is they’re filling up their days with something more important than writing. They let the mundane get to them. The day is spent completing tasks – sometimes important tasks, like feeding the family, getting kids to school on time, pesky stuff like earning a living to pay the mortgage, that kind of thing. And if all these tasks are more important than writing then you should definitely get on with them. But if all you’re doing is letting these tasks get the better of you, then it’s just an excuse not to put pen to paper or fingers to the keyboard.

Suzanne Brockmann, a New York Times bestseller of romantic suspense, with two RITA awards under her belt, started her writing career back when she had a young family, husband and busy life to contend with and she’s still managed to write over 50 books. (and still counting) She says “The only difference between a published and unpublished author is that the published author never quit”. I’m sure she still has a million and one things to get done every day, but has always managed to keep writing at the top of her priority list.

One way to physically show yourself how you actually spend your precious time is to write a time-diary over a week or two. Take a small notepad with you for the next week and write down what you really do in those 24 hours every day. You might be surprised.

Here are a few tried and true ideas for finding time to write.

A lot of writers swear by the set-yourself-a-routine Always write at the same time every day, for the same length of time, without fail. Be it at 6.00am in the morning before the rest of the family is awake, or during your lunch break at work, or after you’ve packed the dishwasher once dinner’s over. As long as it’s the same time every day.


Along these same lines, a lot of writers like to write first thing in the morning, before all those little tasks have a chance to overwhelm you. Set your alarm half an hour earlier and just write. This does work, I’ve tried it, but it also takes a fair bit of determination, especially if you’re not a morning person, like me.


On the flip side, many people say a routine is damaging to their creativity and do the opposite, writing in little snippets whenever they can – often called snap-writing – on the bus on the way to work, in the car waiting to pick up the kids, half an hour alone before the everyone comes home from work/school.


500 words per day. This is a mantra I live by and it really works. This allows for a bit of both set-yourself-a-routine method and the snap-writing Because all you need to do is find the half hour to forty five minutes sometime in your day to get down 500 words. But try not to get too hung up on word counts, and don’t stop if the mood (and the time) strikes. I often find I sit down to write 500 words and end up with over 1000.


Perhaps some of us are wasting the time we do have available to us – on social media for one, or watching TV for another. But then again if your obsessing about the next episode in the new season of Outlander, then I’m not one to point the finger. Turning off the phone, the iPad or the TV can be a big surprise when you find out how much free time you actually have.

But even the people who do have the luxury of time sometimes find that the dream of writing full time is not what they expected. The pressure to write all the time can become overwhelming. Or the shame of not producing thousands of words every day stifling. I haven’t encountered these problems yet, after only three months of full-time writing, but that’s not to say they won’t eventuate later.

Here’s to not wasting our most precious resource. Time.

Living the Writers Dream

“The writer wrote by day and night and he cried in the face of Fate —

‘I’ll cleave to my dream of life in spite of the cynical ghosts that wait.”

The Writer’s Dream by Henry Lawson, 1897

Thanks for joining me here on my very first blog post.

This year has been a catalyst for me as an emerging writer. I was made redundant from my job in December last year, and have decided to see this change of life as an amazing chance. I’m going to take four to six months away from work to Live the Writers Dream. Which means I now have the luxury of time. Time to think. Time to relax. Time to walk my dog. Time to read more books. Time to plan and scheme and plot. And most of all, time to write.

In that time, I’ve managed to complete the first draft of my fourth manuscript, Glass Clouds and Lavender (see excerpt).

I’ve also done an online course in how to brand myself ( thanks to Nikki Logan – Author) and another one on how to create my perfect website (thanks to Lana Pecherczyk – Romance Writers of Australia webmistress) which has allowed me to post my first ever blog.

And very soon, I intend to self-publish one of my books, Island Redemption.

So many authors I know (both aspiring and published) are all juggling full or part-time jobs, usually with young kids causing havoc in the background, and the demands of a hectic life bearing down on them. But even with all this going on, they still manage to fit in their passion; writing. Late nights spent with eyes burning, or alarms set so they can squeeze in an hour writing before they go to work. I used to be one of these people. But now I’m revelling in the luxury of time.

And I promise to use it well. I will not squander this extravagance.