It's been an exciting few weeks. I was Highly Commended in a writing contest and then discovered that the book I thought I was going to write isn't the book I'm going to end up writing.

I had a firm vision in mind for the next novel (which features Harold Chesterfield from On Jacaranda Street), and he was going to be battling Sydney razor gangs in the late 1920s.

I've been quiet on this blog because I've been working out the plot and . . .  it's not remotely like what I thought it would be. How this came about was because I started thinking about travelling from the Central Coast (in New South Wales, Australia) to Central Station every day for work. The journey was around two hours each way, every day, and the train was the Newcastle Flyer. For part of the journey, islands along the Hawkesbury River can be seen (such as Dangar Island, which I visited once by ferry from Brooklyn). I also used to live in Berowra, so the area is very familiar.

I often wondered if those islands could be cut off from the mainland by flooding. I've seen how the Hawkesbury can burst its banks when high rain levels cause the river to swell. And hey, presto: the plot for the novel came into my mind.

It's a large cast of fourteen characters, although some are peripheral, and it's set in 1933 (not the late 1920s as I'd originally envisaged). I've spent the last few weeks writing a detailed outline, chapter by chapter. I now have a twenty-seven-page outline with thirty-four chapters. The tentative title is Everything to Hide.

I hope to begin writing soon - just have to clear some major editing projects.