A few months back, while listening to the audiobook of The Lodger, my Dad called me. Dad never minces words and I can always rely on him for an honest assessment of what works and doesn’t in any of my books.
 
But his assessment of The Lodger was a bit different. I was surprised to hear that the stuff that he found really compelling was the grounded toxic relationship drama side of the story following miserable married couple Ryan and Sophie on their failing farm. The action driven chapters reuniting my recurring antiheroes Maggie and Jack Carlin on a hunt for my recurring villain The Driver, wasn’t really landing for him. Curious, I asked why and his answer stuck with me.
 
‘Do you think Maggie might be holding you back?’
 
To get out ahead of any potentially outraged responses here, no I didn’t and no I don’t. But I make it a rule to at least consider any piece of criticism I receive even if I ultimately don’t agree with it. Dad’s feeling was that the Ryan/Sophie material in The Lodger represented a step forward for my writing that considered self-deception and mutual resentment in mature and nuanced ways that felt a little undermined by the schlockier, bloodthirsty elements that came with Maggie’s role in the book.
 
Which begged a different question – had I started finding excuses to include Maggie in stories that didn’t really need her? And if so, why?
 
***
 
I’ve written before, at length, about how Maggie came to life. How, when writing a short story for a horror anthology in 2017, I introduced her perspective and immediately just knew this character was something else. When two years later I signed a major book deal off the back of an expanded novel version of that same story, my belief was set in stone. This character was special. This character, I would hold on to.
 
Audiences seemed to agree. Early on I allowed myself to believe that Maggie could be my Jack Reacher or James Bond, a character I would come back to again and again, dropping her into all sorts of different misadventures. Even as I wrote The Inheritance, I was already outlining future stories for her. The success of The Hunted made me confident I’d get to tell them.
 
But then, strangled by Covid and a depressed market, The Inheritance underperformed. And not just commercially. There was a sense that whatever undeniable quality The Hunted had was not shared by its follow up. I think part of that is due to its troubled gestation, but ultimately I don’t think The Inheritance has the same visceral drive and punch as its predecessor. It’s a story with far too many moving parts that don’t always cohere in a satisfying way.
 
What I have always been proud of in that book though, is how it develops Maggie. The Inheritance shines a light on all the contradictions that make her so fascinating. Maggie is an instinctively violent, ruthless person who knows all too well that her violence comes from the father she killed for the same reason. She wants to change but has no clue how or who she would be if she did. She craves family and connection but is perpetually denied it by her own nomadic, unstable lifestyle. She protects the vulnerable but never quite knows if she’s doing it because she actually cares or because she wants an excuse to unleash her killer instincts. The fundamental question of Maggie, then, is how she resolves all of these things. The problem with a fundamental question like that, is that at some point you have to answer it.
 
The disappointing reception of The Inheritance put in doubt just how likely answering those questions would be. The feeling at the time was that my smartest next move would be to write a standalone book that didn’t rely on previous ones. So I wrote The Caretaker for HarperCollins. Meanwhile, suspecting that there would be readers out there who still wanted more Maggie, I gave her a prominent (but not leading) role in The Hitchhiker, my next Audible Original. The gambit worked. The Caretaker was a bestseller and The Hitchhiker spent a month at number one on Audible’s Australian charts. It went on to get a print release and a sequel (the aforementioned Lodger) also featuring Maggie. Off the back of The Caretaker I made plans with HarperCollins for another standalone book, High Rise, and decided early on to involve Maggie in that one too. So while she might not have gotten that third book I’d always planned for, fans who wanted more of her certainly were not going hungry.
 
And let’s be real here – chief among those fans is myself. I love Maggie. How could I not? She’s one of those rare characters who writes themselves, who you know inside and out, who feels as real to you as your best friends. If I have the chance to put her in as many stories as possible, why would I ever stop? 
 
***
 
It’s no secret that a lot of the hype that surrounded The Hunted’s release in 2020 was to do with the film version being in development at the same time as the book. I was as susceptible to that hype as anyone else and even started making tweaks to my plans for the books to dovetail more neatly with the film.
 
But Covid stalled the movie early and, in that first iteration, it never unstalled. There were occasional signs of life but soon enough I accepted that the film would never happen and decided not to compromise what I wrote in my books for the sake of movies that would never happen. Even when The Hunted changed hands and was acquired by John Michael McDonagh, one of my favourite writer/directors, the 2023 Writer’s Strike quickly tempered my optimism and so I continued my resolve to not think about film adaptations of my books anymore.
 
Except then the film actually started to move. And with that came interest in my other works from other companies. And suddenly, Maggie turning up in so many stories became a problem. For example – last year we sold a film option on The Hitchhiker, but a major issue was the fact that Maggie could not appear in it due to her character rights being tied up with The Hunted movie. The same issue has arisen with other adaptations. I had ended up in a situation where my books were losing appeal to potential buyers because the character rights were a mess.
 
Some gentle urging was coming my way to stop using Maggie so much, to instead foreground new standalone stories that could be sold outright without having to carve out certain characters. I couldn’t argue that it was sound advice. The crossovers were impacting the chances of one of my books being made into a movie, and that was partly due to my own stubbornness.
 
But, I reasoned, readers still loved Maggie. I was being asked about her at most events I did. I was getting messages from those thrilled at her surprise reappearances. The problem was that I knew an outright third Maggie novel would be a tricky sell after The Inheritance, but that my regular readers wanted it. For a while, my poorly thought-out strategy had been to tread water with cameos and supporting roles until The Hunted movie happened and then hopefully use renewed interest in the books to pick up Maggie’s story where I left off. It would be wrong to resolve her big longstanding questions in novels that were not her own; my intention, then, had always been to return fully to Maggie down the road.
 
But the situation had gotten trickier. I was working overtime to lay the groundwork for a proper return that I could not be sure would happen. And in the process, I was risking stunting those other books’ potential to break out the way The Hunted once had. And while I believed I had audience goodwill on my side, just how many times could Maggie turn up halfway through a different character’s story before it became boring and annoying?
 
A new sense was growing – that I was doing neither the character nor my own career any favours with this scattershot strategy. I had claimed from the start that while my books might take place in a shared universe, they would not rely on each other to make sense, nor build up to some grand Avengers-esque showdown. Each book was intended as a complete work in-and-of-itself, not a smaller puzzle piece that needs five others to make sense. At some point, I had lost sight of that. The Lodger was the biggest victim – what was sold as a direct sequel to The Hitchhiker had also become a sequel to The Inheritance and The Caretaker while setting up High Rise.
 
I needed to rethink some things. This wasn’t to say that I would throw the whole idea of the Maggieverse out the window, but that I might tone down the constant crossovers, make the stories a little more standalone, and make Maggie herself a little less central.
 
But this still left her story up in the air with no sign of a landing.
 
***
 
As far back as writing The Inheritance, I had considered wrapping Maggie’s story up in a trilogy. I’ve always liked trilogies as a shape for a multiple book series – there’s something clean and definitive about three books representing a beginning, middle and end. It implies that each book is important to the overall story and that nothing is extraneous. I’d already written one trilogy with Boone Shepard, and wondered if I’d be better served crafting one final bow for Maggie that resolved everything in explosive and satisfying fashion, than I would be continuing for an undefined number of books.
 
To finish Maggie’s story I would have to answer those questions about whether she can overcome her violent nature, reveal the truth about her mother’s whereabouts, touch on Detective Olivia Dean’s obsessive pursuit of her (strongly set up in The Inheritance as an ongoing concern) and resolve one last major twist that I had threaded into The Hunted and had always known would be instrumental to Maggie’s end. It felt like a lot to jam into one book, at least a book that would feel at all cohesive or not reliant on previous instalments to make sense. So I sort of left the trilogy idea and continued with my semi-improvised model of putting Maggie in various other stories without really progressing or concluding her own.
 
And then, a few months back, an idea struck me. An idea for exactly the inciting incident that could be a riveting standalone story and also fulfil all of the above obligations, but in a way that would feel not obligatory but natural and inevitable. A full-fledged Maggie novel but a different sort – a borderline reboot closer to Unforgiven than the Wolf Creek or John Wick infused earlier novels. The story of an older, worn down, regret filled Maggie coming out of hiding for one last stand.
 
I felt the story, so strongly. I knew what it would be about. I knew how it would end. And I knew with furious certainty that if I pulled this off, it would not feel like some sort of truncated ending to Maggie but rather a complete and satisfying farewell that built on all the earlier books to craft something totally new and totally distinct and totally right. Something that would seize new readers by the throat while giving old readers some closure.
 
The timing felt particularly fortuitous, with The Hunted’s film adaptation slated to go before cameras in a matter of months. There was, then, an opportunity to time Maggie’s literary goodbye to release alongside her cinematic hello. The more I thought about it, the more fated it felt.
 
There were a couple of elements that sat a little oddly for me. I mentioned above that Maggie appears in High Rise, and the way that book ends means that she would appear in at least a first sequel. Ideally I’ll write a couple. Assuming those go ahead, would it then be a bit odd to give Maggie a big emotional farewell in 2026 only for a younger version of her to turn up a year later in High Rise 2?
 
Probably. But here’s the thing – publishing, like everything, is unstable right now. With the cost of living crisis and all that’s going on in the world, the certainty and stability of a yearly book isn’t something anyone can rely on unless they’re at like a Stephen King level. And if there is one thing I have learned from the last decade of my working life, it’s that nothing I creatively plan for ever quite plays out.
 
In 2019 I figured my next five years would be alternating Maggie and Nelson books. But then The True Colour of a Little White Lie flopped. The Inheritance struggled. The Hitchhiker blew up. The Caretaker hit. As did Andromache Between Worlds, which had never been intended as a series until suddenly there was demand for one.

In each case, my plans changed. What I write next has always been directly shaped by the reception of what I wrote before.
 
In a perfect world sure – I’d write a couple of High Rise sequels and then dovetail nicely into a big finale for Maggie. But I know better than to plan so specifically so far ahead. I don’t know what’s coming around the corner. I don’t know if The Hunted movie will be a mega hit that means I suddenly am writing twenty more Maggie books. I don’t know if High Rise will get made into a movie and have me doing Jack Carlin books for a while. I don’t know if Backstory on Audible will blow up or if one of my several film projects will catch fire or if everything will bomb and I’ll wind up in the gutter. Like every creator on the planet right now, my stories are at the mercy of too many factors to count. As such, I have to decide which ones I want to prioritise when I'm given the opportunity to tell them.
 
What I see with the utmost clarity is this; I owe Maggie my career. It’s because of her that I get to live a life I love. It’s because of her I get to travel regularly and live in my favourite suburb and have two dogs and mingle with the kinds of people teenage me could only have dreamed of. It’s because of her that I get to be a full-time writer.
 
I have rewarded her by putting her through hell. She has been shot and stabbed and savaged and disfigured, thrown down stairs and bludgeoned and burned and has still always got back up to rejoin the fight. She is the best character I have ever created and I love her and because of that I have selfishly kept her from the answers she set out looking for.
 
She deserves peace. She deserves resolution. It’s time I gave it to her.
 
***
 
In 2018, the final Boone Shepard novel came out. It was less a victory lap and more a limp to the finish line. Whatever excitement I’d once felt for those books had waned and I wanted to move on.
 
But right before the release of the final novel I was struck by an impulse. I went down to the pub and without planning or forethought I wrote a short Boone story. A piece that was less a new adventure and more a summation of everything he had meant to me. A last chance to write as this friend who had been with me for a decade of my life.
 
The moment I wrote out the final line I realised that this would be the last time. Suddenly he was gone. For weeks, I felt depleted and empty. You might wonder why I couldn’t just write as him again, but whenever I looked to the place in my mind where Boone used to live, nothing was there. His voice had vanished. His story was done.
 
I’m scared to experience the same thing with Maggie. But I think it’s time. Now, I want to enjoy every moment of this last book. I don’t want to get bored of her, or resent having to write her because I’m looking at moving on. I don’t want to make the same mistakes.  
 
Of course I did end up seeing Boone again – as a supporting character in the Andromache books. And it was special and familiar and put a smile on my face, but those books were not his story. I imagine the same thing will happen with Maggie. I might be wrong even about that, but what I know for now is that in a time of deep instability and uncertainty for my industry I’m getting the chance to end Maggie’s story on my terms and I can’t be anything but grateful for that.
 
So, to answer my Dad’s question – no, Maggie is not holding me back. But I think, maybe, I’ve been holding her back.
 
The Reckoning hits shelves in November 2026. I hope you’ll come along for the ride. One more time.

My top three favourite films, Jaws, Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, are all based on novels. Given I have seen these movies hundreds of times and can quote them back-to-back, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I have a similar relationship to the books they came from, but that’s not quite the case. Of the three respective source novels the only one I really like is The Silence of the Lambs, and even then despite my avowed Thomas Harris fandom I tend to prefer the book’s predecessor, Red Dragon.
 
Jaws (by Peter Benchley) and Psycho (Robert Bloch) offer slightly uncomfortable propositions in book form because, even though they provided the template for the films I love, to me they lack the heart and soul and tone of their adaptations. Is that sacrilege? I don’t think so. There’s a reason the movies have eclipsed the books, a reason many, many film fans aren’t even aware the source material exists.  
 
So why don’t I like the novels? The reasons vary. In the case of Psycho it’s easy to boil down to one choice. In most respects the book and film are beat for beat the same story bar one main shift – Norman Bates, famous as the appealingly vulnerable and awkward boy-next-door played so perfectly by Anthony Perkins, in the book is an overweight and unsettling forty something voyeur who so clearly is bad news. The film’s twist works because we like and feel for Norman. In the book, he’s so slimy that the final reveal is borderline obvious.  
 
Jaws is also a matter of character, but the changes are more evenly spread. Spielberg famously said that upon reading the novel he disliked the characters so much that he wanted the shark to win, necessitating a major rethink. Reading the book it’s not hard to see his logic. Where the film sees decent but flawed characters come together to deal with the matter of a bloodthirsty shark, in the book the shark often takes a back seat to self-pity and middle aged malaise and a fairly skin-crawling affair between Chief Brody’s wife Ellen and Matt Hooper – on the page more preppy playboy than nebbishy nerd. In the film, the shark’s explosive death is a moment of punch-the-air catharsis. In the book it just kind of dies of exhaustion mid showdown. Having reached the end of the novel you can sort of relate.
 
I’m being somewhat glib here. The films I love would not exist without the books; in particular the famous shock ingenuity of Psycho is all there on the page. I doubt I’d be so hard on either book if I didn’t know the films so well. But I would argue that the filmmakers refined what was on the page to deliver versions of the authors’ stories that have managed to endure for decades.
 
The question of changes to source material is always contentious. George R.R. Martin famously despises alterations and on more than one occasion has accused screenwriters of thinking they know better than him. Anyone who sat through the second season of House of the Dragon or the last four seasons of Game of Thrones will likely see his point. But this does invite a question without an answer – if changing an author’s work is inherently an act of arrogance, then why is it okay sometimes and not okay other times? More to the point, why does it work sometimes and not in others?
 
The obvious answer would be that sometimes a book, as I would argue is the case with Jaws and Psycho, is more of a flawed blueprint for what would become a great film with some massaging. But you could hardly blame Peter Benchley or Robert Bloch for taking umbrage with that interpretation. I often wonder how I might feel if The Hunted film ends up making brazen changes to my signature novel only for the world at large to agree that they had been for the best, implicitly designating my original version of the story the lesser one despite my having created it. From the perspective of an author, it might almost be better if a heavily altered adaptation is a flop, or at least more vindicating. 
 
I often think about the miserable 2020 Disney adaptation of Artemis Fowl, a book series I liked a lot as a kid. The entire hook of Artemis Fowl was that he was a twelve year old criminal genius with very little in the way of a moral compass. The first book has him kidnap a fairy for ransom, leading to a siege of his family estate. It was one of those early 2000s kids’ books that felt spiky and irreverent and like it wasn’t talking down to its readers. Anyone familiar with the series would tell you that was the appeal.
 
Disney disagreed. In their interpretation Artemis is just a nice kid trying to save his missing Dad. Within minutes of him kidnapping his fairy target (here done for much more noble reasons than the financial incentive of the book), he asks his captive ‘are we friends?’ to which she replies ‘forever friends!’ and then he lets her go and now they’re forever friends. I fucking hated that movie.
 
It begs a question – why adapt a book if you’re not going to adapt the book? Especially if the book in question is a multi-million copy bestseller with a string of sequels and a large fanbase. My assumption can only be that in the case of Artemis Fowl, Disney thought they needed to soften the sharper edges of the novels, despite those sharper edges being the whole reason anyone liked them to begin with. It’s still one of the most incomprehensible adaptations I’ve ever seen.
 
One particularly fascinating case study I only fully delved into recently is Jurassic Park. Despite my longstanding love of the films, I’d never read the book until very recently. I think I’d always had the notion, probably from some article I read as a kid, that it was another Jaws/Psycho situation – a classic film that came from a mediocre novel.
 
So I was pretty blown away to find that the novel is not mediocre at all. But nor is it playing the same game as the film. At a glance, the plot, structure and characters are mostly the same. But where Spielberg’s film is all about awe and wonder at the resurrected dinosaurs that turns into nail biting terror when they get loose, the book is far more of a chilly, cautionary science thriller that right from the start sets a tone of bleak horror. The opening chapters detail the scavenging little compies sneaking into the bedrooms of sleeping babies to eat their faces – a concept that disturbed me so much as a kid that it’s a big part of why I didn’t read the book until now. The novel shifts between dense scientific description, pages of philosophical musings, and terrifying set pieces that more often than not feature the kind of gore more at home in a Friday the 13th film than anything Spielberg’s film franchise attempted. Periodically the book allows itself beats of wonder and melancholy, but it’s a darker, harder, tougher story that, adapted faithfully, would not be nearly as beloved by so many generations of children.
 
So which is better? The film here is not a faithful adaptation like The Silence of the Lambs, or one that makes some notable changes but stays true to the spirit of the source material, like The Lord of the Rings. It’s not a clear improvement like Jaws or Psycho and its not an act of rampant destruction like the latter seasons of Game of Thrones or Artemis Fowl. It's more like two alternate versions of the same story that offer their own distinct but equally valid delights.
 
It would be tempting to say this is how we should see all book-to-film adaptations. But the common (yet wrong) refrain of ‘the book is always better’ tends to come from a valid place; if you’re going to see a story you love on the big screen then you want to see the story you love. Likewise, if a favourite film is based on a book you later discover to be very different, that can be its own sort of jarring. Often our opinion depends on which version we consumed first. But not always.
 
Like Jurassic Park’s hybrid dinosaurs, adaptation is an imperfect scienced influenced by so many factors. Budget, studio interference, the power of the director, the popularity of the novel, the size of the fanbase, the influence of the author, whether the adaptation is getting the space and time afforded by a TV series, or the more constrained and distilled interpretation of a movie. It’s a subjective, case-by-case practice with no formula for success. But to me, the adaptations I remember and talk about the most are the ones that took at least a few risky swings all their own. For better or worse.

In my upcoming Audible Original Backstory, I’ve included a character who is more than a little self-parody. Devon James is a thriller author who insists his books are in fact great literature, that his protagonist Achilles Ghost’s name is an act of layered allusion rather than an adolescent attempt at sounding meaningful, and that his dwindling sales are because people just aren’t quite smart enough to understand his books. The tragic joke of Devon James is that he can’t reconcile what audiences want from him as a writer with what he thinks he is as a writer.
 
I seriously hope I’m not like that but at the same time I do write very pulpy books (that an ex-girlfriend once dismissed as 'airport novels') and I do like to believe there is some thematic heft and depth of character to them despite all the ridiculous action scenes and severed limbs. Within the bounds of my own perception and capability I think I’ve achieved that, but no author gets to declare the value of their own book. You can have be proud of your work, but the real measure of creative success is whether the general consensus of readers matches up with your intention, and even that is hard to gauge because opinions vary and readers find things in your writing you never meant to be there. Which is a good thing, but can certainly obscure any attempt to know for sure that you achieved what you set out to.
 
This is why I think that knowing what you want to achieve and coming back to it throughout the process is so important. This isn’t to say that things can’t change or that a story won’t evolve and surprise you, but that you should have a pretty robust idea of the experience you want to give your readers. That experience is what they’re paying for so it’s helpful to know what you’re intending to offer in exchange for their money.
 
Does this all sound extremely obvious? Maybe, but I have a suspicion a lot of writers might get why I’m saying it. When you start out, for example, you’re far more likely to think about what the story means to you than to your readers (you need to learn to think about both). My first plays, like Hometown or Reunion or Life Without Me, were completely about my own early-adulthood angst; less narratives than hour long expressions of feelings only I had any reason to care about. Later, when I shifted into pseudo noir thriller territory with Below Babylon or The Last Supper, I took to emulating the dark and serious vibes of what I thought a thriller was without actually engaging with why these stories might thrill my theoretical audience. If I had, I wouldn’t have devoted so much of those scripts to drawn out quasi-philosophical conversations that did absolutely nothing to drive the plot or keep audiences on the edge of their seats.
 
Recently I revisited the subject of my perpetually unpublished passion project Windmills and considered why I’ve never been able to realise it despite trying since high school. One of the potential issues I have to reckon with is that the obsessive development of it through my formative years has left it with many big ideas and vivid characters, but little consideration of overall intention because at the time I most worked on it, that was the furthest thing from my mind. I was far more concerned about how the story made me feel than anyone else. The longer you work on something in one particular way, the harder it becomes to change perspective or focus.  
 
Writers in development should be selfish. The job at its most fundamental is to write about what matters to you and with time and experience find ways to make it matter to total strangers. You can’t learn to do that unless you learn what matters to you enough to spend years thinking and writing about it. Because trust me, if you write about what seems important and timely but doesn’t actually eat at you on a fundamental level then your work will always ring hollow. Want proof? Check out any undergraduate creative writing class ever. Also most plays I wrote pre 2015. 
 
But while centring what matters to you is essential, unless you are such an exceptional writer that anything you put on the page will be compelling no matter what (these people exist, they’re just very rare), then you have to learn to consider your audience.
 
Genre is one way to do this. By way of example: if you want to write about the very personal fear of being at a place in your life where you’re not advancing but everyone around you is, then a romantic comedy might be a good place to do it. Look at Bridget Jones’ Diary.
 
This invites the risk of another mistake a lot of writers make – in the same way that it’s pointless to write about themes that aren’t genuinely important to you, you shouldn’t write in a certain genre unless you understand and love that genre. I am often staggered by aspiring writers I speak to who think they can just write a thriller even though they don’t read them. Thriller readers have certain expectations. The only way to understand those expectations is to have them yourself. The only way to do that is to love and know and widely read the genre you intend to write.
 
Figuring out your voice as a writer and how to achieve your intention often comes from consuming stories that make you want to do something similar but in your own way. For my thriller writing, I always bring up the TV shows Hannibal and Banshee, which both found a way to balance deliberate absurdity, dark humour, shocking twists, extreme violence, fascinating characters and emotional depth. They’re very different shows – Banshee is fast paced action and Hannibal is slow burn horror – but both work because there is such clarity of intention from the start. They prove that you can be ridiculous and profound at the same time, and it was somewhere at the nexus of the two that I started to find my own voice and storytelling intention.
 
My thrillers are schlocky. I have never denied that. But my intention is always to make them more than solely that. The Hunted might feature a freshly removed scalp used as a wig, but it’s also about the dark side of small-town masculinity that I grew up around. High Rise involves both a flamethrower and a human head used as defensive weapons in very unconventional ways, but the heart of the book is a father and a daughter learning to understand each other.
 
And my kid’s books aren’t that different. Andromache Between Worlds has dinosaurs fighting cowboys right before a scene where our teenage hero has to grapple with the fact that her mother might never have wanted her. The True Colour of a Little White Lie is about learning empathy and also features a grown man explosively shitting himself during a game of pool. And on it goes.  
 
How do I know the combination works? I don’t. But I know that The Hunted was intended as a read-in-one-sitting pulpy thrill ride that might also make you care about these lonely characters thrown together in an impossible circumstance. Strong sales and hundreds of reviews hailing it as exactly that indicate that for many readers, I achieved what I set out to.
 
Other times, it doesn’t work out. I lost sight of The Inheritance early in the writing process and it wasn’t until a desperate last-minute rewrite that I settled on my John Wick in Melbourne action extravaganza intention. But by that point I was basically doing major surgery to try and make the book not suck, which left very little room for refining what I wanted it to be. There is so much of The Inheritance I’m proud of, but there’s also a reason it never struck the same chord as The Hunted.
 
I always want to entertain you and make you laugh and take you on a ride and also have something human under all the over-the-top action. But it’s important to know how I plan to achieve those things and what my newest book, in and of itself, is. Sometimes it works better than others, but the books that have been the best received tend to be the ones where I’ve been clearest on my intentions from start to finish. 

This is an addition to my 2021 Animorphs ​retrospective - check out Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

If you knew me in 2021 then there is a very good chance you were subjected to a lot of Animorphs talk. If so, then you have Chris Grine to blame.
 
To explain – early that year, during a break in lockdowns, I went down to St Kilda (where I now live), and while browsing the local bookstore I saw Grine’s graphic novel adaptation of The Invasion, the first Animorphs book by Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant. I had loved Animorphs as a kid in the 90s, but never finished the series and or revisited it. But I’d remained nostalgic for it and so I bought the graphic novel. That afternoon I went to a cocktail bar overlooking Luna Park and read it cover to cover.
 
Immediately, I was reminded of everything I’d loved about the series as a kid. The vivid characters, the fascinating lore, the tragic aliens. By the time I got home I’d resolved to buy and re-read the entire series. It was lockdown. We all had our things.
 
My mission proved easier said than done though. Animorphs has been largely out of print since the early 2000s. In fact, the graphic novel adaptations were intended as a way to reboot the series for new readers without having to republish 62 often dated and disposable Scholastic paperbacks. But those paperbacks were my childhood, man. I wanted them all. And with full sets going for a couple of thousand dollars online, I took to scouring second hand bookstores and buying bulk boxes of old kids’ books until I finally got the set. And as I wrote about extensively at the time, the re-read stunned me. The books were dark and tragic and beautiful and wrenching and far better than I remembered. Sometimes they were also stupid and obviously ghostwritten. But by the end, not only was I an evangelical Animorphs convert, I discovered many others were too. And now, the graphic novels were giving the series a new lease on life. Every year, I looked forward to the new one coming out. I’d buy it, go back to that same bar, and enjoy getting to revisit the world and characters in a new medium.
 
But recently it’s become clear that Grine’s adaptations will almost certainly end with the just-released sixth. The reason for this is unclear, but Grine and Applegate have both said online that Scholastic are yet to commission more. Given the time it takes to make a graphic novel, and the fact that kids move on fast, its hard to imagine they’ll continue if they haven't made the call already. Which not only leaves the adaptation unfinished, but potentially marks the end of Animorphs overall.

So, given the lengthy blog posts I wrote about the books in 2021, it felt unfair not to do the same for the graphic novels.
 
These adaptations are quietly fascinating for a few reasons. Among the fanbase they’ve proved a little divisive even if the overall feeling seems to be of goodwill. To me, they’re ultimately a noble failure that illustrates exactly why Animorphs has been so hard to revive.
 
For the unfamiliar, the six graphic novels are essentially what they sound like – direct adaptations of the first six Animorphs books. They tweak or remove a few 90s pop culture references and make some judicious storytelling choices to visually realise the often internalised narratives of the first-person books, but if you’re a hardcore fan they’re basically as faithful a retelling as you could ask for.
 
And that, maybe, is the problem.
 
Chris Grine was always adamant that he intended to remain true to Animorphs as fans remembered it, and he did. But this begged a question that there never seemed to be a solid answer for – how the hell did he or Scholastic intend to adapt the whole series? There are fifty-four mainline books plus eight spin-off or prequel novels that are so beloved that to not include them would be outrageous. And despite some attempts to speed up the process, Grine tended to average one volume a year. Given the work involved, it’s hard to argue that anyone should have expected a faster pace, but a book a year meant that finishing the series would take about six decades.
 
In its 90s heyday Animorphs books, like other Scholastic titles, came out almost monthly. This was made possible by extensive ghostwriters working to outlines provided by Applegate and Grant – essentially the TV showrunner model, used in books. But Grine had always made it clear that he didn’t want to work with another artist or share the job, which was of course his prerogative. Even if he had collaborated or delegated, its hard to imagine you’d get more than two or three books a year, which still makes it a two-decade project.
 
Of course, not every Animorphs book was essential. You can get a pretty complete experience by reading roughly half of them. But, as online debate over my own reading guide has illustrated, this creates a new issue because who gets to decide what’s essential? Yeah, we can all probably agree that the one where Cassie gets stranded in the Australian outback isn’t all that important, but there are plenty of books that don’t move the plot forward yet are worth reading for their character development or worldbuilding or themes. Combining storylines also poses problems because Animorphs is very episodic. There’s an overall narrative but the series is structured more like a TV show than anything else; ‘mythology’ episodes interspersed with fun side quests and standalone ‘morph of the week’ diversions. And the truth is that some of the early books, including some adapted by Grine, are pretty repetitive. This isn't so much an issue when the next installment is just weeks away, but a year becomes a long time to wait for something that doesn’t feel especially vital.
 
There’s an argument that Grine could have been a bit bolder with his adaptation, working towards a retelling of the story that could be done in ten volumes or something more realistic, but I’m not sure that would have worked either. Animorphs fans can be intense and they’re also your only guaranteed buyers. Deviating from Applegate and Grant’s storytelling in ways fans disagreed with would be a risk likely not worth taking.  
 
But without either a clear plan for how to ensure the series could be adapted in its entirety or more overt willingness to make changes, the Animorphs graphic novels were never realistically going to reach their conclusion. And this is the problem any future attempts to revive the franchise will face. It’s not practical to rerelease the entire series in physical form, as a failed 2011 attempt to do just that proved. Releasing ‘combined’ or abridged volumes provides its own issues, as touched on above. And so, as a fantastic Paris Review retrospective says, Animorphs remains a ‘cult religion that will never gain another convert’.
 
If we can concede that the graphic novels didn’t revive Animorphs in the popular consciousness, then what’s left is to consider them on their own terms, in how they succeed as adaptations. The answer to that is mixed.
 
Online there has been some criticism of Chris Grine’s art style – not in terms of its quality, but its suitability for Animorphs. I can’t stress this enough for those who haven’t read the series; Animorphs is dark. Really dark. It’s violent and bleak and depressing. By the final book each of our teenage protagonists has killed many, many people. There are multiple acts of genocide and harrowing descriptions of how it feels to see your body being taken over by a malevolent entity that makes you a mute observer to your own subjugation. The reason these books have branded themselves on the brains of so many despite not being readily available for years is because they dared to go places that no other children’s series did. Harry Potter ended with our central heroes marrying their childhood sweethearts and living happily ever after. Animorphs ended with them being accused of war crimes at the Hague before signing up for a suicide mission because none of them could cope with peacetime.
 
Do you see now what the issue with a visual adaptation might be, regardless of the artist’s style? I once wondered if my own Andromache books are too dark for kids, until a bookseller pointed out that young readers take on board what they understand and leave the rest. It’s a lot harder to get away with that in a visual medium. Now granted, Grine never got to any of the really heavy stuff, but he still had to depict severed limbs and one character’s suicide attempt and another character in dolphin morph being bitten nearly in half. To Grine’s perpetual credit, he didn’t shy away from any of this. But his soft, kid-friendly illustration style didn’t always naturally fit with the heavier material.
 
But that’s the thing – Animorphs is for kids. Scholastic were never going to get Frank Miller to illustrate this thing. And while older fans might grumble about Grine not capturing the depths of darkness they adore about the series, he committed to what he could and did it in a style that wouldn’t have parents refusing to buy the book for their eight year old. 
 
Some of his books were better than others – and funnily enough, his best were the ones that posed the biggest challenges to any kind of visual adaptation; The Encounter, which largely details Tobias’ psychological torment over being permanently trapped in the body of a red tailed hawk, and The Capture, in which Jake is taken over by a Yeerk and held captive in his own mind. In both, Grine found clever, compelling ways to dramatize internal conflict. It’s cases like this that underline what a shame it is that we won’t get to see more of what he can do when the books get increasingly weird and heavy.

Was Grine the perfect fit? It’s a pointless question. He’s the guy who wanted to do it and wanted to do it in a way that was true to what Animorphs was. The more you think about this endeavour, the more you realise how deceptively difficult it is. 
 
But Animorphs has endured this long despite those barriers to revivals or reaching new audiences. If anything, its fandom has only grown and it’s possible that is thanks to Grine. I’m a prime example – to return to the cult religion analogy, I’m a lapsed member brought back into the fold explicitly by his work. So personally I’ll always be grateful for what we got and hopeful that one day we get more.

Fair warning; this post is going to be a bit more ‘writing technique minutiae’ than normal. But it discusses something that only came into focus for me recently, which I wanted to share in case it helps any other writers as much as it helped me.
 
Recently I have had three main novel projects. There’s Andromache in the Dark, out in early July, a middle grade adventure full of colourful characters and parallel worlds. There’s High-Rise, out late July, another action-packed siege story in the same vein (and universe) as The Hunted. Then there’s Backstory, on Audible in October, a murder mystery told entirely through emails, articles, interviews and four unreliable accounts of the same night. They are all extremely different, they are all at different stages of editing, and at the moment I’m effectively working on them interchangeably.
 
There are generally three major stages of editing a book goes through once you’ve delivered a draft to your publisher. The first is a structural edit, which deals with the overall story, shape, characters, themes. Basically, does this thing work as a story and if not, what major changes are needed to get it there? This is the most labour-intensive part because depending on the notes you get back you could be either massaging certain elements to make it stronger (as I did with The Hunted) or rewriting entirely (The Inheritance).
 
Once you’ve delivered the structural edit, what follows is a copy edit, focusing more on smaller elements of logic, consistency and character. By this stage the shape of the story should be basically set, it’s just about making sure that everything is working as it needs to. The final stage is the proofread, which is largely checking spelling, grammar, and any last little tweaks that might need to be made.
 
The lines often blur. For example, if your delivery draft is unusually solid then your structural edit could be closer to a copy edit and so on. And I have had major problems caught in the proofread stage that have necessitated scrambling last-minute rewrites. Which just goes to show how essential all of these stages are because even with that many eyes on a book, things can still get missed.
 
So of course it gets trickier when you’re working on several books at the same time, necessitating a split focus that isn’t ideal for any of them. Currently I’m juggling the structural edit for Backstory, the copyedit for High-Rise and the proof-read for Andromache in the Dark. Which is tricky because as any writer will tell you, editing is often the least fun part of any story. It’s the stage where you bang your head against the wall trying to solve problems you’ve created yourself, where you second guess everything you write and become convinced your career is over. Don’t get me wrong, a good edit can lead to all sorts of thrilling discoveries, but it’s never the same as the rush of a first draft, when you’re getting everything out for the first time and not fretting too much over coherence.
 
What this can lead to is a stalemate where deadlines loom for every project, you have major problems to solve for all of them, and you would rather do anything else. So you focus on the work you’re most enjoying and leave the genuinely pressing issues until you’ve left them too long and you start to panic.
 
A few days back this happened for me. I’d faced a bit of a crisis moment as I realised the copy edit deadline for High-Rise was around the corner. The problem was that whenever I sat and opened that word document I just could not engage my brain. I’d lost the mindset.  
 
Finally, thinking a change of scenery might help, I walked down to a local café, the whole way trying to force my head back in the game. And then an idea struck me.
 
Lately I’ve taken on an exercise during the drafting process of any story, which is that the deeper I get and the most lost in the reeds I am, I more outlines I write. By which I mean if I’m struggling, I write a full start to finish synopsis of the story. I try to keep it only to a couple of pages, to not get lost in minutiae because there more minutiae I get lost in the more likely it is that the story is too messy and confusing. Instead I focus on the big picture sweeping plot events and in doing so try to remind myself of the overall structure of the story, the logic of how the narrative progresses, and what, at its core it’s really about. Very often I’ll do this before I’ve reached the end of the story, and very often focusing on the major bones of the thing helps give some sense as to next steps.
 
It's a process that I tend to abandon after the drafting stage. But I wondered, could it be a way to get myself into High-Rise copy-edit mode?
 
In short, yes. I sat down and despite having not looked at the manuscript in about six months, I wrote the entire plot out. The shape of the story, the arcs of the characters, everything. I did it in about half an hour and the moment I was done I opened the manuscript and I got to work on the edit and worked through three chapters there and then. Later that afternoon, three more. The next morning, six more.
 
By focusing on the big picture rather than some more nebulous notion of recapturing the voice, I reminded myself of the story I wanted to tell, of what really mattered and what is so good about the book. It blew away the cobwebs of Backstory and Andromache (at least until I’ll have to do the same for both of them) and somehow reset my brain to where it needed to be.
 
I’ve often quoted the best bit of writing advice I ever got – to write the first draft as though you’re in love, the second as though you’re in charge. But writing that second draft, especially with extensive notes and the overanalysing they can invite, doesn’t always leave you feeling in charge. You get lost in the reeds and lose your confidence and wonder if this is really the story you wanted to tell. The best way out of that trap it to blast away the reeds and write out that story in its simplest form. Even if you’ve done it fifty times before – especially if you’ve done it fifty time before, it can remind you of the most fundamental truth of this vocation, that nobody knows your story better than you. 

In 2013 I wrote an article exploring the box office failure of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s intended ‘comeback’ film The Last Stand. There had been a fair amount of buzz and no shortage of ‘he’s back’ headlines around the 80s throwback, but on release it sank like a stone.
 
This fascinated me, because The Last Stand was heaps of fun and who doesn’t love Arnie? But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that times had just changed. The star driven films of the 80s and 90s just didn’t have the same pull anymore, a capitalised surname above the title not enough to get audiences through the door. As I wrote at the time, we were now living through the ‘Age of the Geek’. A time where genre properties like Marvel, DC, The Hobbit and soon Star Wars dominated cinemas while TVs biggest hits included Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Doctor Who. It was a melancholic realisation, that a type of film I’d once loved had given way to another, but in the end it was hard to bemoan it too much.
 
See I adored those massive fantasy and sci-fi franchises. My early twenties bedrooms were always piled with memorabilia just in case anyone wasn’t aware. I saw The Force Awakens – and every subsequent new Star Wars movie – at the midnight screenings. I went to the cinema release of the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special. I hosted Game of Thrones nights and annoyed my friends with all my smug ‘but in the books…’ lectures. I saw every new Marvel film at the cinemas on opening weekend. For the massive corporations who realised this geek stuff was a goldmine, I was close to the perfect target.
 
It's funny to think now how exciting all the new Superbowl trailers used to be, or how I’d count down to Comic Con for big announcements from all my favourites. Funny because I can’t even really remember what that felt like anymore, to be so entirely enthusiastic for what now look more like cynical corporate products. But on balance it’s always better to like things than to not, and back then I liked a lot of things. I miss that feeling a bit.
 
But the issue isn’t that I turned around and started to dislike things. The issue is that I stopped caring. And based on the evidence, so did a lot of other people.
 
I’ll always suspect the tipping point for audience love affairs with big genre properties was The Last Jedi. Not because it was a terrible film – I still like it a lot – but because it was so deeply divisive that it changed the way fandom operated. It squarely put an end to the communal feeling of celebrating a new release because how can something be communal when audience opinions are violently split down the middle?
 
The result of this was an explosion of YouTube content creators who realised how profitable it could be to make endless videos geared directly towards people who didn’t like The Last Jedi. Or Captain Marvel. Or, soon enough, anything else perceived to be too progressive. Initially at least, the studios doubled down, resulting in the self-fulfilling prophecy of films and shows that actually were annoyingly preachy which led to more angry videos and so on. Meanwhile, the hubris invited by massive successes like The Force Awakens or Avengers: Endgame led to the in-hindsight mistaken belief that what audiences wanted was as much content as humanly possible, irrespective of quality. Hence the endless Disney+ shows.
 
I’m simplifying, of course. You can’t sum up the complexities of Blockbuster Hollywood’s past decade in a paragraph. But you can look at the results and recognise that at some point all of these bulletproof properties became very vulnerable indeed.
 
Star Wars hasn’t released a new movie since 2019, and its streaming shows tend to end after a single season due to low ratings. Marvel has suffered several major box office disappointments, their only recent unqualified success a film that brought back characters from the old 20th Century Fox superhero films. Star Trek is prematurely ending some shows, removing others entirely as tax write offs, and the closest thing they’ve had to a movie since 2016 is a universally derided streaming film. The Walking Dead has splintered into various spin off shows, none of which have seized the culture like the original. Doctor Who showed brief signs of renewed life due to a major deal with Disney, but with terrible ratings and no word of said deal’s renewal, the writing is on the wall. DC rebooted their entire cinematic universe after a string of failures, but with superhero fatigue an increasingly accepted reality it’s doubtful that will much help.
 
But all things considered the problem is less superhero fatigue than franchise fatigue. These big, special effects heavy, sci-fi/fantasy/comic book properties have dominated the culture for a long time now. With increasingly tangled continuities, unmemorable entries and noxious fan discourse, is it any wonder that at some point this stuff started to feel more like a pointless chore than the exhilarating entertainment it once was?
 
If you’d told me in 2013 that I’d be living in a time with a Lord of the Rings TV show, several Star Wars ones and a Doctor Who that had a bigger budget than ever, I’d think I was existing in a state of perpetual Christmas. Now? I don’t watch any of them.
 
Not long ago I read William Goldman’s industry classic Adventures in the Screen Trade. In the introduction he talks about the then recent collapse of the auteur driven ‘New Hollywood’ era due to the failure of Heaven’s Gate, and how it left executives terrified and uncertain of what audiences want now. The way he describes it sounds eerily similar to the last couple of years of insider leaks about desperate attempts to right the sinking ships of franchises that have kept much of Hollywood in work for, in some cases, decades.
 
This has happened before. Several times. The era of the star vehicle ended. As did New Hollywood. As did the western and the musical. None of these types of films went away, but their dominance did, as audience tastes and habits changed and attention turned to the next thing.
 
Likewise none of the above franchises will entirely die. Most of them have been around too long and endured plenty of changing tides, even if it meant resting for a while. But what I suspect has definitively ended is the ‘Age of the Geek’ I trumpeted in 2013, the time of once nerdy properties commanding bigger budgets, bigger box office, and near total cultural saturation.
 
That’s not a bad thing. At some point I’ll be able to look back on plenty of Marvel and Star Wars stuff with a lot more fondness than I can muster now. But as it stands? I’m ready for something new. 

There’s a familiar eye roll I direct at myself every time I write the word Windmills. If you’ve known me or followed my career for a while, then I do not for a second begrudge you doing the same before closing this blog post. But it’s been a while since I spoke about Windmills in any candid, updating kind of way, and I wanted to address it again.
 
If you’re relatively new here you might be wondering what I’m on about. So, a quick recap for the next couple of paragraphs, and also an invitation for those who’ve heard it all before to skip right ahead.
 
Windmills is, in the most succinct terms possible, my dream project. I’ve been unable to let go of it since I wrote the first version as a novel in 2009. This was followed by a stage version in 2010, a novel sequel manuscript in 2011, a rewritten version that I self-published in 2012, another stage version that same year, a TV pilot screenplay adaptation that won a major award in 2015, another rewritten manuscript in 2018 and another in 2021 that very nearly got published before the plug was pulled for reasons I’ll discuss below.
 
What exactly is Windmills? The answer to that question, or lack thereof, is probably the reason I’ve been unable to produce a version that works. Windmills is the story of Leo Grey, a 17-year-old straight-A student who gets a publishing deal for his first novel. But when a single bad choice at a party jeopardises his future, Leo is forced to decide exactly how far he is willing to go to protect himself. Leo’s increasing moral decline and its consequences spiral into the post school lives of his best friend and girlfriend, whose own resultant moral dilemmas the novel subsequently explores before returning to Leo many years later. In its most complete versions Windmills has always been a sprawling story about corruption and the clash between who we think we are and who we prove to be when the gun is to our head.
 
Ever since I wrote the first version in high school I have believed in this story on an instinctive level. Somehow, despite my perpetual inability to realise it, that belief has never gone away. I still think the characters are rich, both sympathetic and reprehensible. I think it packs in devastating twists and heartbreaking moments of wounded people trying to endure. I think at its core it says something fundamental about human nature, something dark but not without compassion.
 
So why hasn’t it ever worked?
 
I think the answer to that lies in something a high school teacher pointed out about the very first draft sixteen years ago. Upon reading it, he asked me point blank ‘what is it?’ Meaning; is it a YA drama, an adult crime thriller, a literary novel about morality or an airport one full of operatic drug lords and violent murders and corrupt cops and Machiavellian but slightly implausible string pulling?
 
The only honest answer I’ve ever had to that question hasn’t satisfied anyone. Because in truth, Windmills is all of the above.
 
Which isn’t to say that I haven’t tried to compromise. One of the reasons the 2015 TV version won the Sir Peter Ustinov Award and basically kickstarted my career (still the only award I’ve ever won) is because the pilot episode adapted only the first part of the story, the high school segment, without really setting up that this narrative would follow the characters into borderline middle age. When I met with interested producers and explained the fact, said interest waned pretty fast. How are you supposed to sell something as being similar to 13 Reasons Why if it turns into Breaking Bad in episode two?
 
The novel version I wrote in 2018 tried to split the difference by keeping the same events but transplanting them all to the high school setting. Which only brought the question of genre into even sharper relief, because suddenly it was the 17-year-old versions of the characters getting caught up in drug cartel wars rather than their older, more jaded incarnations.
 
The version that came the closest to shelves was the one I wrote in 2021 for HarperCollins. This take also stuck to the high school setting but focused on just the first part of the original story, fleshing out the characters and events and leaving the later crime related material for a potential future book. I was really, really proud of that one. And indeed it went as far as editing before the same old problem became clear; it was still just too bleak and dark to get away with being a YA novel, especially given it didn’t really have a resolution because, well, it was a quarter of a story. Eventually we agreed it wasn’t working and I wrote Andromache Between Worlds instead. Not a choice I regret, given how well loved that book is.   
 
So Windmills has been in a weird limbo for a few years now. I still wholeheartedly believe in the quality of that last version even if it feels unfinished. I’ve even tried to rework it back into the first act of the bigger story, but I’ve created new problems for myself because those far more developed characters and plotlines can’t be neatly shortened the way they’d need to be to not exhaust readers before they reach the halfway point. And besides, it wouldn’t remove the persistent problem of Windmills starting in high school and thereby creating the mistaken impression that this is a book for teenagers.
 
So what would? I don’t know. I’ve tried to write prologues that indicate where the narrative will eventually go, but they feel cheap and pandering. I’ve experimented with versions that jump back and forth between timelines like The Hunted or The Caretaker did, but trying to juggle four timelines rather than two feels like a recipe for confusion. I’ve tried to rework the high school material into university, but it doesn’t feel like it makes a world of difference given that the characters still have to be young and stupid for the first part to work and uni just doesn’t feel that different to school when you’re trying to appeal to an older audience. Besides, one of my favourite parts of the book is the way that adolescent mistakes reverberate well into adulthood, the consequences getting worse the older the characters become and the more to lose they have. 
 
It’s no secret that I’ve been seeding Windmills heavily in my other fiction. Several major characters from it have been introduced in books like The Caretaker and The Consequence. I’ve been alluding to its events since The Inheritance. Windmills has been in the background of my novels since I started writing novels, the hope being that one day it will get published and my longest-term readers will be rewarded in just how many threads get paid off when the whole picture becomes clear. But that makes it all sound like more of a grand plan than it actually is. Windmills pre-dated Maggie and Jack and the Driver. It’s the biggest part of my writing life. I can’t help but pay tribute to it even if nobody (yet) can recognise said tributes.
 
Every time I have a lull between projects I return to Windmills. I toy with different versions and I write speculative outlines and I always emerge with the same two conclusions; that I don’t have a solve to the story’s problems, and that I still believe the story is worth telling.
 
The longer Windmills remains unpublished, the more a new belief begins to cohere. That maybe the only version of it that can work is the version that doesn’t compromise. The version that is exactly what it is; a sprawling epic violent saga that follows a high school mistake into an adult nightmare. Maybe what makes Windmills a hard sell is what makes it special.
 
Maybe one day I’ll write a big enough hit that I’ll have carte blanche on what I want to do next. Maybe then I can finally tell Windmills the way I want it to. Or maybe I release it in a different way. Independently, in instalments on Substack, or something. Maybe I try another TV version, or even a film screenplay. I don’t know. Nothing is off the table.
 
But after all these years I know with hard certainty that I’m never going to be totally satisfied until Windmills gets its shot. And I don’t think a compromised release will be enough. I think I need it to aim for the biggest release I can manage, to know one way or another whether it was really as good as I’ve always imagined.
 
Is that hope too ambitious? Probably. But that wouldn’t be a new problem for Windmills. 

This is how much of an influence John Marsden had on me – I can’t even start a tribute post without his writing advice popping into my head. Within seconds of me thinking the words ‘It’s hard to know where to start when it comes to John’, his concept of the ‘delete cliché’ button is right there, demanding to be pressed.
 
So I’ll do my best to follow his lead and be honest, direct, unsentimental, and swear liberally.
 
I can’t remember where I was when I first read Tomorrow When the War Began. I can’t even quite remember how old I was. I think I was in year five but honestly it could have been year four or year six. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the case I was probably too young and that’s exactly why it was the right time to read it.
 
What I do remember is how it felt. The book was bracing and scary and brutal and devastating. The whole series was. It burnt itself into my brain and very quickly I was pushing it on everyone else in my year level.
 
To offset any accidental claims about my level of influence - I went to the Mansfield Steiner primary school and there were only nine people in that year level. But soon they were all reading it and soon we were all obsessed. We quizzed each other about minutiae from the books. We shared horror and heartbreak at certain moments. We debated and discussed the characters as though they were real people.
 
They felt like real people. I think that’s a huge part of what made the series so impactful. That you could have somebody like Kevin, nobody’s favourite character, a dickish farm lad who complains and pisses everyone off and yet still gets the job done with brutal determination. Or Chris, the loner poet who can’t cope with the war and ends up the first to die of our heroes – not in battle or a raid or an ambush, but because he drunkenly crashed a car getting more booze. His friends find his twisted, rotting body days later. I’ll remember that scene for the rest of my life.
 
Or Homer, the troublemaker turned leader. Lee, the intense, quiet, mysterious object of affection who proves a little too good at killing. Fi; a dainty princess who is in fact tough as nails. And Robyn. I don’t need to say much about Robyn. If you read the books, you know.
 
But of course it was all about Ellie. John often spoke about how her voice just popped into his head, clear and entirely herself. When you read the books, you believe that. Ellie was irreverent and down to earth and temperamental and stubborn and real.
 
When I learned as a kid that John’s inspiration for Ellie, Charlotte Lindsay, was a Mansfield local, I was starstruck. Charlotte now runs the Ink Bookshop and we’ve become good friends, but part of me remains a little in awe of her. She’s Ellie.
 
The Tomorrow series will always be what John is most famous for, even if it’s far from all he did. There really has never been any other Australian book series like it. It was aimed at teenagers but my Dad read them as fervently as I did. In fact, I’m pretty sure of that Steiner class, most of our parents ended up obsessed.
 
It was different to something like Harry Potter which was huge at the time. We all loved those books but growing up in a small Australian country town meant that a series about Australian country kids fighting back felt uniquely ours. The fictional setting of Wirrawee wasn’t based on anywhere in particular but you didn’t have to squint very much to imagine it as Mansfield. The surrounding mountain ranges, the farms and paddocks out of town, the deep bush where you could easily disappear, the Showgrounds – we had all of those. So did hundreds of other country towns all across Australia. That didn’t stop me secretly being sure that Wirrawee was really Mansfield.
 
John wrote plenty of other books too, and while none would ever reach the same level of success as Tomorrow, many of them packed powerful punches of their own. The ending of Letters from the Inside still haunts me. The Great Gatenby made me laugh a lot. And then there was the non-fiction. Secret Men’s Business was a guidebook to growing up with lessons I still rely on. Marsden on Marsden was like getting a chance to look behind the curtain. For a while there, if I was reading anything there was a good chance that John had written it.
 
What was it that made his work so singular? The characters were a big part of it but that’s rarely enough. There was the action too, sometimes the sex which was a bit alarming and a bit exciting at that age. But I think more than anything it was the honesty. John refused to patronise or censor. He knew his readers were thinking about sex and death and morality and growing up and so he wrote about them without dumbing anything down. I think, in the end, the secret to his brilliance is kind of that simple and that hard to replicate. Very few of us are able to be as honest and articulate and curious as John always was. In writing and in life.
 
Not long after starting high school, I went to John’s writing camp. He ran them out on his Tye Estate, a huge sprawling expanse of bush that is now home to his school Candlebark. This was about as terrifying and surreal to a twelve-year-old me as it was possible for anything to be. I remember arriving with Dad and looking around for our first glimpse of the man himself, only to realise he was already there, deep in casual conversation with kids and parents.
 
He was so unassuming. Even when the first workshop started there was no fanfare. It was just ‘alright, might as well get to it.’ I couldn’t believe he was real but he was.
 
Now here’s the thing I’ll always remember about John – not the writer, but the man.
 
At this time in my life, having just started at a high school that was nowhere near as small or welcoming as the primary I’d known, I was having a pretty rough time. I was a sensitive and creative kid in a place that rewarded neither of those things. I don’t want to either play down or inflate my experiences with bullying. I don’t think they’ve enormously shaped me but nor do I think there was no impact.
 
At the time though, it kind of dominated my life even if I thought it didn’t. After that first workshop I hung around as John packed up, wanting to talk one on one with him. John was friendly and direct, asking me about school and life and as I answered I broke down crying in front of him.
 
He didn’t offer platitudes or overt cooing sympathy. He asked me about it. Calm and reasoned and never less than kind. He listened. He was there.
 
I marvel at that to this day. It still feels embarrassing, to have a moment of such vulnerability in front of someone you admire more than basically anyone else. But he didn’t treat it like that. He just took the time and the care and the patience to hear me when I most needed it.
 
A couple of years ago, John was caught up in a controversy over some comments he’d made about bullying, Every time some holier-than-thou commentator spat and seethed about how John Marsden didn’t care about bullied kids or he thought they deserved it or any other bad faith misreading of his words, it made me want to throw hands. With what limited platform I had I told that story. Not because I wanted to, but because it revolted me that anybody could think that John Marsden of all people didn’t care about struggling kids. Caring about struggling kids was the cornerstone of his whole fucking life’s work. And more than that, it wasn’t just a philosophy he espoused in his writing – it was one that he demonstrated with a lonely crying twelve year old he’d just met.
 
I stayed in touch with John for a while after the camp. I sent him stories I’d written, which he not only read but gave feedback to. It’s only recently I’ve come to fully understand how special that was. I struggle to find the time to read stuff my closest friends send me and I’m not nearly as in demand or well regarded as John was. That John could read the not-very-good work of a kid who had once come to his camp speaks to the man he was.
 
But it also speaks to a truth about John that became clearer with time. He will be remembered for his books. But his true passion and his true life’s work was, I think, education. He was a teacher before he was an author and in his last years he went back to education, founding an alternative school on his own property. I’m not convinced John ever quite cared about his writing as much as he cared about the impact he could have on young people. There’s a well known story about how whenever John would visit schools, he would wait until every kid had a chair and was sitting on his level. He wouldn’t run the workshop if they had to sit on the floor. John’s philosophy was one of mutual respect. But part of respecting someone means being willing to tell them things they don’t want to hear. I think that’s why he got in trouble as often as he did.
 
I lost touch with John over the years, both as a writer and as a mentor. I think the last I spoke to him was when I sent him a copy of my badly self-published first book. True to form, John replied with a copy of his own latest book. I think he was sent The Hunted when it came out, but I don’t know if he ever read it. I hope he did but honestly I doubt he would have remembered me. I went to his camp in 2003 - by 2020, I can’t even imagine how many kids had been taught by him.
 
Last night, I heard the news that John passed away. It was a punch to the gut. I wondered if I had any right to feel grief, given how long it had been since I spoke to him. I wondered if sharing my personal story would be somewhat exaggerating what small relationship I did have with him.
 
And then I saw the posts. From so many of my author friends. Photos of them with John as kids and adults. Stories of the impact he’d had. And I realised something.
 
My relationship with John Marsden meant the world to me, but it wasn’t special or unique because John had those connections with so, so many people. He changed countless lives. And isn’t that just fucking incredible? To think that he could shape me, creatively and personally in ways that still stick with me, and I was just one of thousands?
 
Think about that impact.
 
That’s who John was. There was nobody else like him. I don’t think there will be again. There will be lots of articles proclaiming that we have lost a titan of Australian literature. And we have, even if I think John would have raised a bemused eyebrow at being referred to that way.
 
But what we’ve really lost is far more incalculable than someone who wrote a few good stories. The stories were never the most important thing to him. That they were as good as they were despite the fact just illustrates his brilliance.
 
John Marsden was one of the bestselling authors in Australian history. He wrote books that were beloved by millions, that were made into films and TV shows. He could have left it there and it would have been more than enough. But he cared too much to leave it there.
 
Thank you for everything John. You were my hero as a writer. You became my hero as a person.
 
Thank you. 

Now that The Lodger has been out in the world for a while, I thought I’d take some time to unpack the whys behind a lot of what happens in the book, including some choices that I suspect seem a little counterintuitive. If you haven’t listened to it yet, stop now, because from here on in I’ll be spoiling everything about this book that brings to a bloody end the story started in ​The Hitchhiker.
 
So, to kick off, let’s chat one of the biggest risks I took in the novel.

 
Ryan and Sophie
 
To delve into this aspect of The Lodger means touching a little bit on its background. Originally The Hitchhiker was only ever intended as a standalone book, but I enjoyed writing the murderous character of the Driver so much that I used him again in The Caretaker, also intended as a standalone. Given one of these books was (at that stage) only out on Audible while the other was a print novel, I couldn’t link them too directly but I also couldn’t help but think towards a third book that might bring the two together and create an unofficial ‘Driver Trilogy’.
 
Originally I toyed with the idea of having Maggie and Charlotte join forces to hunt down The Driver after their respective run ins with him, but that felt too obvious and cute. Plus I always knew that Charlotte was a one-and-done protagonist, that her story concluded in The Caretaker. Conversely Maggie was left in a place of unfinished business regarding the Driver. So I decided to focus predominantly on her desperate hunt for the monster that understands her all too well. I would touch on The Caretaker by having Maggie learn about the events of that book as part of her investigation, but otherwise this would be a direct sequel to The Hitchhiker.
 
But the more I developed the more I found the ‘hunt’ story increasingly thin. As compelling as the dynamic between Maggie and the Driver was to me, could it really sustain an entire book? Maggie might have been conflicted about what the Driver represents to her, but when push came to shove she wasn’t really going to hesitate to kill him. Which would mean contriving all sorts of ways to keep them apart, a problem I did not have with the far more cautious Charlotte in The Caretaker.
 
Around this time I was working on a prologue that would see The Driver play twisted marriage counsellor to a bitterly unhappy couple, as a way to establish who he is to new readers and give a ghoulish little ‘pre-credits’ scene to old ones. But the more I planned it out, the more I started to wonder if this ‘mini story’ was, in fact, the story.
 
I knew from the start that this would be contentious. Would readers really want to spend so much time with new characters, especially such unlikeable new characters, when this was supposed to be the grand finale to a bigger story?
 
My reasoning was this; both The Hitchhiker and The Caretaker got to have their own plots, characters and concerns distinct from each other. To me, The Lodger would have been lesser if it was only a culmination rather than a complete story in its own right. So I decided to split the difference. Alternating chapters focusing on alternating characters would allow me to parallel Maggie’s hunt with the Driver’s manipulation of Ryan and Sophie’s miserable marriage. Throw in a Jack Carlin return and the continuation of some older plot elements, and this felt to me like the way to give readers the best of all worlds. It allowed the book a kind of internal integrity but also meant that you do get a full fledged major Maggieverse instalment at the same time.
 
This also let me have some real fun with Ryan and Sophie. Because I knew the book would be regularly returning to well liked familiar characters, it meant I didn’t have to worry about making these new players at all sympathetic. Instead I could have some real fun doing the exact opposite.
 
Much of Ryan and Sophie’s story was shaped by what I found funny. I loved the idea that during their city courtship both of them played up a dream of settling in the country without ever seriously imagining it might happen – until Ryan’s Dad dies and leaves them the farm, and neither is able to call the other’s bluff. This felt like rich storytelling ground, especially once you drop the Driver and his games into the mix.
 
There’s something a bit satirical to both these characters, but I find them very sad at their cores. Sophie is inspired by people I knew at uni who borderline fetishised the idea of a provincial country existence without knowing the first thing about it. But at the same time she reflects one of my least favourite attitudes and one I’ve seen all too often; the belief that ‘my big problem is that I’m too good at too many things so I don’t try enough at any of them’. Arrogance as an excuse for apathy doesn’t go a long way to endearing people to your plight.  
 
Then there’s Ryan. This character isn’t as directly reflective of people I’ve actually known, but there are several things at play here. The whole notion of a country kid who hated the country and couldn’t wait to leave but starts leaning into where he came from the moment he realises it gives him social capital was a lot of fun. And furthermore somebody who doesn’t actually want to go into the family business but does in order to prove themselves to a disapproving father felt true to a lot of what I saw growing up. I’ve never known a Ryan exactly, but in totality his arc always felt emotionally honest and interesting.
 
If Ryan is someone who has never felt ‘man enough’ and Sophie someone who believes her brilliance has always been overlooked, then the Driver murdering people around town and making each believe the other could be the killer was a thrilling way to capitalise on their particular brands of toxicity. As Ryan dithers over what would be the most masculine way to respond, Sophie is alarmingly turned on by the idea that her hitherto disappointing husband might actually kill for her, tacitly reinforcing her belief in how special she must be. Granted it’s a lot, but I was laughing the whole time.
 
Of course it all had to end badly for them. I knew these were one-and-done characters so I didn’t hold anything back, and in the end Ryan accidently killing Sophie then, in an attempt to really demonstrate his manhood, killing the one person who could prove it wasn’t murder felt appropriate in that it was both deeply sad and darkly funny. And a way to comment on the key themes encapsulated by both of these characters; that refusing to accept or understand who you really are can never end well. Yes, it’s extreme, but come on, were you expecting anything else?

 
The Driver
 
Yeah, the Driver is dead, and yeah I still have doubts about the choice. But one of the reasons I had to kill him so definitively was to take off the table any temptation to bring him back for another round. He’s gone and this time it’s not a fake-out. Considering his head exploded, it really couldn’t be.
 
I knew, coming into this book, that I couldn’t pull the same trick as Hitchhiker or Caretaker. There was never going to be another “he’s dead… OR IS HE?” ending because there was no way I’d get away with it a third time.
 
But in the early stages I had no intention of killing the Driver off. He’s such a fun character and so easy to write that I figured I’d keep him around for future nightmares. In fact, my original intended ending for The Lodger was that Maggie decides to hand him over to the police, setting the stage for a book called The Prisoner where our beleaguered hero from The Hitchhiker, Jesse, is serving out a sentence only to find his tormentor locked up with him.
 
But as I wrote a few things became clear to me. The first was that as fun as the Driver is, he’s not a particularly layered character and the more he comes back the more diminishing the returns. At his heart he’s a happy go lucky middle-aged dag who happens to really enjoy serial murder. The one complicating factor is his hunt for a partner of sorts, and once Maggie, the most perfect partner he could find, rejects him that quest is basically over. There might have been a bit more I could have done with him, but not enough to justify contriving new stories that would be less interesting each time. The more I considered it the more certain I became that this would be it for the Driver. A trilogy of books I could be really proud of felt, to me, the better choice than some perpetually open-ended series that would start to repeat itself sooner than anyone would like.
 
So if this was to be it for my smiling psychopath, what was the most satisfying way to dispatch him?
 
Well, probably not the one I ultimately went with. If you’re disappointed that it was miserable pathetic Ryan who finally did him in rather than Maggie, then I get where you’re coming from. But Maggie’s ongoing journey is grappling with her own violent nature and the Driver represented the most thorough acceptance she’s ever likely to find. I’ll delve more into this below, but the entire reason Maggie is so drawn to him is because he sees the parts of herself she’s ashamed or scared of and he celebrates them. But Maggie’s final victory in this book is the moment she tells the Driver ‘I think I am like you, but I think I don’t want to be’. For her to then kill him would undermine that. And let’s be fair here – she tries to, its just that he gets the upper hand.
 
Remember that the Driver started out as an unfulfilled man in a depressing marriage. There was something fitting about his end coming at the hands of another unfulfilled man in another depressing marriage. I liked the idea that the Driver doesn’t get a big glorious final showdown. I liked the idea that Ryan’s final act of decisive ‘revenge’ is what damns him. I liked the idea that Maggie actually tries to save the Driver at the end but his death means she has to stay on the run. When it came to unifying the various threads of plot and theme that run throughout The Lodger, this was the way to do it.
 
Of course I question it. I question whether I killed him too soon or whether there was a better death for him. But we’re over a year out from me actually settling on this ending, and so far I have no regrets. You don’t have to like it. But it’s the right ending.
​
 
Maggie and Jack
 
All of which brings me to our two old friends.
 
Maggie, of course, was always going to be in this book. I might have hidden her role in The Hitchhiker (more or less), but this time around she would have to play a major part after the way that book ended.
 
Maggie has grappled with her affinity for violence before. In The Inheritance we saw her settle on trying to use it for good. But when somebody as psychotic as the Driver comes along and offers acceptance and understanding, I could see how much that would unbalance the already lonely and unstable Maggie.
 
This was where Jack Carlin came in. I’ve made no secret of how much I like Carlin. Apart from his supporting role in The Inheritance he’s also the lead of my first Audible Original The Consequence, appears in my lockdown web series The Pact and my short film The Retirement Plan, and will be on protagonist duties again in next year’s High-Rise. Clearly I’ll take any excuse to involve him in a story and I had a good one here – that Carlin would be Maggie’s most obvious source of information when it came to tracking the whereabouts of the Driver.
 
But what started out as maybe a little indulgent soon became a crucial part of the story as Maggie is forced to consider how much she can trust Carlin. I think after The Inheritance I’d assumed a loyal partnership between them would be the status quo going forward, but as I wrote The Lodger I realised that we hadn’t quite earned that yet. So Maggie, with the Driver’s voice in her ear, does what she always does and assumes the worst, becoming convinced that Carlin is going to betray her, to the point where she turns on him.
 
But Carlin doesn’t betray her. He comes through at the end and saves her from the Driver. And in that moment Maggie realises that not only is he her friend, but that somebody doesn’t have to understand or like every part of you to accept you.
 
The final scene between Maggie and Jack in the car is one of my favourite moments I’ve ever written. It’s the most vulnerable we’ve seen Maggie and the way that Jack handles it, by telling her without bullshit exactly what she needs to hear, made me love these two so much more than I already did.
 
I finished The Lodger thinking that this wasn’t the end for Maggie, but that this moment of warmth and love could be a good place to leave her for a few years. As it turns out, we’ll be seeing a lot of her in the next few years. But the thing I like most about The Lodger was that this character for whom happiness is always out of reach got to have a moment of real peace before I throw her right back into the fray again. 

Lately my creativity has been a bit off. There are a few reasons for this – it’s a been a uniquely busy year and in some cases I bit off more than I could chew. But also I’ve found the vast majority of new films and TV shows so uninspiring, shining a harsh light on just how much I rely on exciting new stuff to energise my own process.
 
A few months back I went to Mt Buller for a few days by myself, largely to clear my head and refocus after the insanity that was planning and writing Andromache in the Dark in two months. While there I really tried to hone in on what it was that had slipped away from me, and in doing so I ended up tracing some of this disillusionment back to my fading interest in screenwriting.
 
This, I believe, was due to the many frustrations on The Hunted movie and the struggles on Gremoryland, neither of which I am currently involved with (although good things are happening on The Hunted front that I can hopefully talk about very soon). These twin disappointments left me gun shy about pursuing any film work and so I opted to focus on the books, which gave me plenty to be getting on with. But while up on the mountain, I tried to work out whether I had enough renewed focus to try and write a film again.
 
There has been one movie this year that I found fresh and exciting and fun and thought provoking in all the ways I love, and that was Challengers. It’s the first time in years I’ve felt like I’ve seen something really new, something that isn’t aspiring for popular disposability or arthouse significance but rather is just a good fucking movie. While on that trip I read the Challengers screenplay and began to wonder if I could write something with that same energy. If that was the kind of spark I needed to reinvigorate this long dormant corner of my writing life.
 
In doing so, I thought back to an idea I had years ago, during the writing process for The True Colour of a Little White Lie. True Colour is about a teenage love triangle at a ski resort. It’s maybe the most overlooked of my books and maybe also my favourite. But while writing it I began to entertain the idea of a quasi sequel/companion story that gave protagonist Nelson and his (first) love interest Juliet their own Before Sunset, a chance encounter well into adulthood where they reflect on where the years since their last meeting have left them and on the lingering pain and lessons from their teenage entanglement. I pictured it as a two-hander play, a long conversation in a ski-lodge bar that maybe one day I could produce as a small theatre show.
 
But revisiting that idea through the prism of Challengers made me consider it differently. What if, I thought, the swooning Before Sunset stuff was just the first act? What if their fifteen-years-late reconnection ended with the discovery that they have both been lying quite egregiously about their lives? What if this discovery reopened old wounds and threw them into a charged game of one-upmanship that would force them to confront all the ways in which they haven’t changed and all the things they still need to work through?
 
Returning from the mountain, I was too busy to think about it much further. But the idea continued to percolate. Then, in Sydney a couple of weeks back, I ended up with a few spare hours in which I walked around Circular Quay and idly let the story unfold in my head.
 
By the next day I had an outline.
 
It wasn’t perfect. The third act was pretty loose and the central themes of the story were alluding me. But most importantly of all, I felt it. I felt the weird mix of hurt and fury and yearning that would draw Nelson and Juliet into increasingly bad choices that would start off farcical and funny until the point where peoplestart getting hurt.
 
The tone was a challenge. It wasn’t quite a comedy, not quite a romance or a drama either. But it was a story I wanted to tell and what was more, the first major thing I’d worked on since 2019 that didn’t have a contractual obligation looming over it.
 
I told myself not to write it. I was woefully behind on edits for both High Rise and Andromache in the Dark. I told myself I could start writing when both were done, maybe in November.
 
I finished it yesterday.
 
Is it any good? Parts, maybe. I think the first half absolutely crackles. The second more or less works, but it needs development and fleshing out to reach the place I think it could and should. But it was just so much fun. Nelson and Juliet’s spiky banter spilled on to the page, as natural and barbed and electric as it was in True Colour, only now shot through with a sadness and desperation that their fourteen year old selves couldn’t have because, well, they were fourteen. Writing now the characters felt as alive as ever, like they’d just been waiting in my head to re-emerge, older and jaded but not a whole lot wiser.
 
Does it have a future? I don’t know. I suspect any version of it that goes out into the world will likely have to be edited to be about totally new characters, to avoid the tangled rights situation that has tripped up attempts to sell Maggie’s various misadventures to different parties. Furthermore, I’m not sure it’s high concept enough to really seize the imagination of producers, although it’s enough like Beef that there’s at least another recent successful comparison.
 
But even if it doesn’t go any further, even if I leave it here, writing it was exactly what I needed. I got to spend some time with old friends in a new context with the freedom of knowing there was no pressure on if or when I ever finished it. If all it ends up being is a warmup exercise to a more commercially appealing script then that’s okay.
 
It’s called White Lies. I hope you get to see it one day. But if you don’t, you can at least credit it with a renewed excitement for whatever I write next.