Novelist's Notes: June

One flat tyre, one house SOLD and one very special note from a friend!

In this newsletter:

• What I got up to in May

• An important Meanwhile In Mount Merry-Glen announcement

• A VERY special note from Anthea Hodgson Author (you don’t wanna miss this one)

• A book recommendation

Dear Book Besties

Guess what? We’ve sold our house!!

We’re only moving around the corner (I can’t leave my river), but I’m so relieved that the painting, wall washing and cleaning for home opens is finally OVER. We should be moving at the end of the month, and I can’t wait to focus properly on my writing again. With any luck, my next monthly update will be written from my new office in our new home.

Even without the house move, May was a busy month. Mercedes Mercier and I received the structural edits for The Number One Insta Detectives Agency and have been working hard on those. We’ll share more in the next instalment of our Beginner’s Guide to Co-Writing series (New here? You can check out the last few posts here, here and here).

At the start of the month, I flew to Sydney for two wonderful lunch events.

The first, Booked for Lunch, was organised by Georgia from She Journeys . Alongside a delicious meal, I joined Pip Drysdale/Knight, Hayley Scrivenor and Ashleigh Kaligian-Blunt for an author panel hosted by the delightful Sarah Kearns.

The second, Lit and Lunch, was organised by Jackie from Global Girls Online Book Club. It was lovely to catch up with familiar faces from the Rachael Johns Online Book Club and meet new readers too. I was interviewed by my friend Amy Hutton.

I love seeing passionate readers create these wonderful bookish communities, and I’m always honoured to be invited into them.

I also spoke at two events in WA - one in Pinjarra and one in Manjimup. The librarians went above and beyond (Amy in Pinjarra even had a bucket of ice-cold Diet Cokes waiting on stage), and the audiences were fantastic. Check out my gift from one reader :)

Getting a flat tyre on my way home and having to change it myself (my first time) was not so great, but at least I know I can do this now!

June is shaping up to be another big month. We have our annual in-person Rachael Johns Book Club retreat in Geelong, and my funny, talented work wife/book bestie/travel partner/etc, Anthea Hodgson Author is releasing her fourth novel, The Palace of Lost Virtue . I’m looking forward to interviewing Anthea at several WA events.

Substack is telling me I’m nearing the email length limit, so I’ll love you and leave you, but keep scrolling for more bookish goodness!

Love,
Rach! x

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A quick note for PAID subscribers: I’ve made the difficult decision to put MEANWHILE IN MOUNT MERRY-GLEN on pause again for a while.

Life is particularly hectic at the moment, and I don’t have the bandwidth to give this story the attention it deserves. Rather than do a half-arsed job, I’m stepping away from it while I finish edits, move house, and complete my next solo novel.

I’m sorry to disappoint those of you who’ve been enjoying it. I love this story too, and I’ll be back to it eventually.

Monthly payments will be paused, and annual subscriptions will be extended by Substack. Thanks so much for your understanding.

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I’m thrilled today to have one of my fave people delivering a note to us all. Anthea’s book The Palace of Lost Virtue releases TOMORROW and if you haven’t pre-ordered your copy, be sure to rush out and buy it ASAP. You won’t regret it.

Dear Rach’s Book Besties

Kalgoorlie is the wild west. It’s rough, a bit dangerous, dusty, hot, and drenched in history. When Rach and I headed out to Kalgoorlie we were looking for a story. The good thing about Kal, is that it’s a long way from Perth so we had plenty of time to talk about my next novel. Rachael is lucky that way – I will always find a way to oblige her to help me with my work.

And here’s the thing about writing fiction that’s a bit hard – you mostly have to find things for your characters to do, or things can get a bit boring, or worse – you’ll find you have written a quiet novel. Rachael LOVES quiet novels. I hate them. Well, let’s face it, hate is too strong (and exciting) a word for how I feel about quiet novels. But if I ever wanted to read one, I’m sure I’d find that just sitting on the couch staring into space would provide me with the same level of excitement, without the expense. But I digress. You need stuff for your characters to do.. and there is no shortage of that in Kalgoorlie. My keen interest in sex work was a good starting point for a number of reasons - being bloody fascinating chief among them, but I couldn’t just pop a bunch of ladies of the night in a brothel and allow the reader to watch them work. I had to have a character with a goal.

We wondered about a ‘save the brothel’ story, and a duel timeline, about an old aunt who left the brothel to her niece in her will… we wondered about stolen gold, a fish out of water trope, or a haunted table. We wondered about a shooting, a hidden nugget in a hat stand, or a long-held grudge and a secret child. We arrived in Kalgoorlie with a speeding ticket (mine!) and a thirst for knowledge (and wine). We stayed at a very nice, but boring apartment, so I’ll ignore that, and tell you that we stayed in the magnificent York Hotel on Hannan Street. It was built in 1900. It’s tall and glorious with a huge staircase and at least half a dozen ghosts.

When we asked the publican just how many he estimated he had in residence, he seemed to think we might be trouble and began serving the other end of the bar. The next day we travelled to Menzies, which had been a thriving town once, but which is now a few fine buildings silently observing road trains as they roar past to mine sites further north. There, we met a man from Queensland who’d been bitten by the prospecting bug 30 years earlier and who lived in a shack on the side of the semi-trailer highway. He showed us his magpie, and a picture of a gold watch he’d returned to its original owner, a life-time after it had been buried near the railway tracks, around the time of the first World War. We wondered about the man who chose to live beside the roaring trucks, and the man, long gone, who’d buried the watch in hopes of his return.

We pulled in briefly to the Niagara Dam, built from tonnes of concrete carried by huge rambling camel trains to be engineered into the dam before water was discovered nearby in Kookynie and the fledgling town and its dam was left to gather the bush around it again like a dusty cloak. We pulled into Kookynie where we were greeted in the main street (there isn’t one) by a horse named Willie. He meandered over, popped his great and beautiful head in the car window and assured us he ran this town. We didn’t doubt it for a second.

Later, we did a tour of the last brothel in Kalgoorlie, Casa Rosa, with the indominable Carmel, who was over eighty, with a walking stick and the attitude of a boarding house mistress whose girls had made some interesting life choices. I could easily imagine her pitching a wayward customer out on his ear. She told us about the time a young man ‘died’ before he could seal the deal, how surprised everyone had been, including the corpse himself, when he woke from his narcolepsy to see police officers and the ladies of the house gathered around the bed!

After a visit to the Kalgoorlie museum, we had a wine or two at the Exchange Hotel, served by a couple of Irish Skimpies, with jet black hair and a ‘can do’ attitude. I imagined they didn’t get many orders for Semillon Sauvignon Blanc, and I almost felt bad for a moment; a middle-aged woman killing the buzz – but when I saw the Skimpy drop to the bottom shelf of the drinks fridge in an effortless low squat in platforms so high they were more like playground equipment, I realised what a favour I had done the bar, and I returned to Rach with a couple of cold SSB’s and a sense of goldfields camaraderie.

And did we find the story? Well, yes, but that’s another tale...

I can tell you that The Palace of Lost Virtue is a tale of friendship, gold, forgiveness and revenge. That it is based on a couple of real Kalgoorlie stories; that of Pansy Arlington, a prostitute from Kentucky who suffered a terrible fate, and her friend, Marigold, a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who were trying to save the locals from the evils of drink. It is also the story of the 1926 murder of two Gold Detectives, Alexander Pitman and John Walsh, the trial, and the punishment of the villains, Coulter and Treffene…

Finally, it is my duty to report that your friend, Rachael Johns, was an absolute trooper through it all. She was everything you’d want in a fellow traveller - cheerful, easy to get on with, keen on breakfast and wine (not at the same time - but also not never at the same time) adventurous, but not so adventurous you end up bungee jumping or artificially inseminating an elephant, or something.

She’s the exact right amount obsessed with ghosts, she’s a bit too keen on cats (I have a pretty strict anti-cat policy, but I can pretend, just to be polite) she loves Diet Coke, which is beyond me, and she’s obsessed with her hair, which, for the record is ALWAYS FINE!!! She’s happy to drive, or, if she knows I’m going to throw up in the hire car, she’s happy for me to drive, she’s willing to go to bed ridiculously early, because she knows I’m old and I’m on nursing home hours now, and she suggests about 50 new things a year, only maybe two or three of which I will knock back.

Thanks for coming to Kalgoorlie, Rach, and for allowing me to spend some time on your marvellous Sub-stack machine!

Love,
Anthea.

The Italian Correspondent by Belinda Alexandra on audio - Belinda has been one of my favourite Australian authors since Southern Ruby, and this may be my new favourite. Set just after WWII, it follows a former war correspondent rebuilding her life and career. The three equally compelling love interests make it a great read.

Between the podcast, book club, edits, and moving-house chaos, I haven’t had much time for reading this month, but hopefully I’ll have more to share next month.