Last November I took a leap and signed up with a few writing friends to do NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, a competition that challenges you to write 50,000 words of a fiction manuscript in thirty days.
This frenzied exercise came off the back of my shortlisting in September 2023 for HarperCollins' Banjo Prize, a competition that sought to find new unpublished fiction authors. This, and a couple of other prize commendations, gave me the confidence to know that I have enough of a handle on writing a novel to work on pulling off another. This is my third completed novel; the first is stashed in a drawer and will never see the light of day, and the second is in pitching phase.
So, by the end of November last year, I managed to make the NaNoWriMo deadline (yeeha!), and what emerged was the nucleus of my current Work In Progress, as well as a crick in my neck that required a good beach holiday for recovery.
This week I hit 90,000 words and am working on Draft 1 edits, so that I can hand the completed manuscript over to a couple of treasured beta readers for feedback. Then, I'll work on further edits in the New Year, before I start pitching it to agents in Australia.
This is a little sneak peek of what it's about...
I'd Sell My Soul is a psychological suspense novel in which a much-loved Sydney newsreader is forced to defend her husband when his affair with a hot young relationships influencer puts him at the centre of the city’s biggest ever serial killer investigation.
I can't wait to tell you more.
Great, Tash. The site is looking really good.