With a little over four weeks until The Cinema at Starlight Creek hits the shelves in Australia and New Zealand (it will be released as The Cinema of Lost Dreams in November throughout the rest of the world), I’m gearing up for lots of events that will have me travelling Australia far and wide in the months of May, June and July. I’ll be posting a calendar with all the events shortly, but for now I want to announce my first event which will be appearing at the Capricorn Coast Writers Festival in Yeppoon, Queensland.
I’m really excited about this festival as it’s the inaugural one and I know the organisers have been working so very hard to make this happen. It is so wonderful to see the passion and care they have put into this event and I hope that if you are in the vicinity of Rockhampton and Yeppoon that you can come along and support this festival.
I’ll be running a workshop on Creating Memorable Characters and also doing a breakfast panel about the state of the publishing industry. I’m really looking forward to these and also attending other sessions presented by some of Australia’s most talented and loved authors.
If you know of anyone in this region, please let them know about this wonderful festival and if you’re in the vicinity, please come and say hi!
You can find out more details about the festival HERE
Today I’m delighted to introduce you to Juliet M. Sampson. Juliet is an award winning author. Dance Demons, her third novel won 2016 Book of the Year in the Reader’s Choice Awards in the AusRomToday competition. She was also one of ten finalists for 2016 Author of the Year in the same competition. Her other three books are Behind the Mask, Bon Voyage! and Outback Wonder. Grace’s Mystery Seed is her first picture book.
The famous writer had made one final request to collect the seeds and distribute them to others. I have kept my promise. The seeds have been shared with people of all different ages and from various walks of life.
BLURB:
I am delighted to introduce you to the lovely Cheryl Adnams. Cheryl lives in Adelaide, South Australia. She has published four Australian rural romance novels and a Christmas novella. Cheryl has a Diploma in Freelance Travel Writing and Photography and has lived and worked in the United States, Canada and spent two years with a tour company in Switzerland and Austria. Her passion for Italy, volcanology and cycling have made their way into her stories and her favourite writing retreats include Positano on the Amalfi Coast and Port Willunga Beach just south of Adelaide. When she’s not writing, Cheryl is still creating in her busy full time job as a trainer and learning designer.
The first forty thousand words came fast. I knew my characters, I knew my plot and, since the story was based on factual happenings, I had my climactic point already written for me, — the big battle at the Eureka Stockade. Right? Except, I wasn’t writing a non-fiction book and I had to figure out how to weave these real events into my story without it coming out as a regurgitated text book.
There are so many little things you have to be aware of when writing Australian historical, basic questions you have to ask yourself like: How much did a nobbler of whiskey cost? What was the British soldier’s uniform of the day? What food did they have access to in such a remote but rapidly growing region? Things were changing fast in the 1850s and 1860s because of the gold rush. There was sudden wealth and staggering poverty living side by side. Melbourne was the fastest growing city in the world on the back of the gold rush. I buried myself in the history of British military, women’s clothing, food, diseases, weaponry, a police force made up of convicts, bushrangers, carriages, mining equipment, dances of the time. Hours of research could be undertaken to ensure just one line of text was historically accurate.
On the sun-drenched goldfields of Eureka, a wild colonial girl and an honour-bound soldier will break all the rules to claim a love worth more than gold …
Alli Sinclair 