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. 

In my twenties, I prided myself on being a geek. I reacted with overblown excitement to new Star Wars or Lord of the Rings announcements. I saw every Marvel film opening weekend. I obsessed over Game of Thrones theories and went to see Doctor Who episodes in cinemas. I collected random merchandise pertaining to whatever properties I liked, from action figures to posters and mugs and whatever else could clutter my room. In one share house I lived in, we had maps of Westeros on the walls, which a visiting girlfriend proclaimed was ‘a bit sad’.
 
I didn’t feel that way, but my attitudes to these things did slowly change. Around 2015 I remember beginning to feel a kind of self-consciousness about being excited for the new Marvel film, largely due to a suspicion that I was getting all worked up over a homogenised corporate led franchise that was suffocating the film industry with its ubiquity. Around the same time I remember watching episodes of Star Wars: Rebels with a housemate and starting to wonder if our giddy anticipation for an animated children’s show was just a bit performative.
 
In the 2010s, geek culture had become popular culture. It was no longer embarrassing to like Doctor Who or  or Star Wars or Game of Thrones or superheroes because everyone liked at least one of those things. The biggest TV shows and movies were all brands that, once upon a time, had been nerd stuff. And maybe, partly bolstered by a snooty ‘I liked this stuff before it was cool’ mentality, I played up how into it all I was.
 
For all my ‘geekiness’ I don’t know if I was ever a true obsessive of any of these things. I never went back and watched classic Doctor Who or delved into the Star Wars books or Marvel comics. The Lord of the Rings movies were seminal for me, but I only read the books once as a kid and I couldn’t get my head around The Silmarillion or any of the expanded lore stuff. I think I liked the idea of myself as a ‘real fan’, whatever the hell that means, and acted in accordance with that conception despite more realistically being someone who liked the more accessible mainline versions of these franchises but didn’t have much time or inclination for the serious deep dive. And while I’ve certainly gone about as far as it’s possible to go down the Hannibal or Animorphs or A Series of Unfortunate Events rabbit holes, all of those offer a comparatively manageable range of materials to consume.
 
The turning point for my understanding of fandom was the release of The Last Jedi. Seeing the starkly divided and outraged reaction to that film made me wonder if intense passion for anything in pop culture is really a good thing. As the arguments intensified and culture wars sprung up around the film and involved creatives were sent death threats I found I was no longer comfortable referring to myself as a Star Wars fan because in that moment, who the hell wanted to be a Star Wars fan?
 
Maybe I got wary about overt passion after that. Bit by bit, the intensity of my feelings towards the things I’d once loved started to wane. I stopped watching Star Wars shows and Doctor Who. I washed my hands of Marvel after Endgame. I gave up on The Rings of Power halfway through the first season.
 
Understand, my love for the original works that initially drew me in has never gone anywhere. I still adore the Eccleston/Tennant years of Doctor Who and I’ll love The Lord of the Rings until the day I die. But I think I’ve come to realise that liking something, even loving it, doesn’t mean you have to define yourself by it or keep up with every new development or even have any opinion at all on its current state. I don’t need The Acolyte to be for me because it’s not and that’s fine. I’m happy to leave my Star Wars fandom where it started; with the six movies I loved as a kid.
 
None of this is to suggest that I’ve entirely sworn off obsessive love for certain books or movies or TV shows. I’ll be first in line for new Saw movies. I buy every Animorphs graphic novel on release day. I wrote a whole fucking book about Hannibal Lecter. And yeah, I have a display of my Hannibal collection in my room and entire shelves devoted to Animorphs and A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I’m not trawling through forums or getting aggressive online about what minutiae from a fictional story has offended me today.  
 
My first love will always be stories and so in some ways a loss of passion is a bit of a sad thing. But passion is a double-edged sword. I think the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to realise that I’d rather love something at arms’ length than to let that love turn me into an objectionable jerk. 

It might surprise people how old many of my story ideas are. This isn’t always the case – next year's High-Rise, for example, was conceived literally days before I pitched it to my publisher, while The Hitchhiker came about because Audible were looking for a contained Wolf Creek type story and I’m a working writer who will say yes to almost anything that secures me a contract, then make the story work after the fact.
 
But other stories have had a much longer genesis. Anyone who halfway knows about my writing life will be aware of the tortured saga that is my dream project Windmills (still yet to be published with no sign of that changing soon). The Hunted, published in 2020, started out as a horror movie concept in 2011. Andromache Between Worlds, published this year, was originally conceived when I was writing the Boone Shepard books in 2013. And Boone himself originated during my high school days, well before those books were published and before he reappeared in Andromache.
 
I don’t think I’ve ever wholesale thrown out one of my older ideas. The truth is, there aren’t that many concepts I’ve seriously considered that I haven’t at least attempted to write at some point, and even if the writing doesn’t go the way I want it to, I’ll usually file it away as something to revisit down the line. As recently as last year I was playing with reviving a concept I came up with in primary school. This isn’t to indicate that any or all of these nascent childhood/adolescent attempts have inherent value, but rather than once I’ve lived in a story for any amount of time it's extremely hard for me to entirely let go. This isn’t to imply that every idea that has ever mattered to me is something I’ll one day pursue (except for Windmills, which it’s fair to assume I’ll be trying to get published until I go into the crematorium), but more that its not uncommon for me to periodically consider whether that half-baked concept I tried to write as a teenager might have something worth exploring today. To be fair, it worked for Boone Shepard. 
 
Part of this is, weirdly, pragmatism. Being an author fundamentally is being a freelancer, and even when you’re in the midst of one contract you’ll tend to find yourself thinking ahead to the next one, to what you might have in your head that could be worth pitching if the need arises. 
 
One concept I’ve come back to a few times over the years is Phoenix. I’ve discussed this one before but to recap; Phoenix was a web series I made with some friends in 2010. It was about five teenagers surviving in a house after a nuclear war. It was shot in black and white and edited on Windows Movie Maker. It was exactly as terrible as you think it was.
 
When I first developed Phoenix, teenage me had planned for an extensive, epic mythology and long-game twists and reveals. I envisioned something enormous and never once considered the limitations of how I’d tried to realise it. So when the series proved to be a bit of a joke among our friends and everyone involved decided they had better things to do than make something that existed to be laughed at, we let the series peter off after just sixteen of a planned thirty episodes.
 
Already the next year I was trying to convince friends to make a kind of ‘rebooted’ version, starting the story again with reimagined episodes. The year after that, I wrote much of my story arc into the first of a planned five book Phoenix novel series. I figured that free from the limits of a no budget web series made by a team with no film experience, all those awesome ideas I’d had would shine.
 
They… did not. I mean I think that book was probably as fine as anything I was writing in 2012 could have been, but I knew I hadn't written anything earth shattering and didn’t feel much inclination to forge on. Until, a couple of years later, I did, making a crack at a second book despite nobody having shown much interest in the first. That too, went nowhere. 
 
The weird thing here is that Phoenix was never one of those ideas like Windmills or Boone Shepard that I loved so dearly I would do everything in my power to see it realised. I don’t think I was ever all that passionate about it. But that’s kind of my point – even Phoenix, I struggled to let go of.
 
The other night I was thinking ahead to what I might move on to once my next Audible is finished. I spun again through the mental rolodex of old ideas and again Phoenix came up.
 
But it struck me that I no longer had that untrustworthy little voice saying “you know, maybe now it could work…” I just didn’t have that feeling of unfinished business or unrealised potential that characterises so much of what I’ve repeatedly returned to over the years. When I open the mental folder branded Phoenix, there’s just nothing in there I want to pull out to re-use.
 
Has time finally taught me to let go of weaker ideas? No. See, the difference with Phoenix is that unlike so many of those other old concepts, I did eventually finish it, just not in the way I would have expected or thought much of at the time.
 
I covered this fairly extensively in a contemporaneous blog post, but in 2021 the cast of Phoenix got together and shot a final episode. There was never any intention for this to see the light of day and it never will, but we did it for ourselves, as a fun exercise in nostalgia. We spent a weekend together, filmed the episode, edited it in Movie Maker (it was important to be faithful to the old style), and then got drunk and watched the whole series from its 2010 beginning to 2021 ending. It was a beautiful little tribute to our formative years that we did purely for us. No, the new episode wasn’t good, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to do it how we used to and put this silly thing that once united us to bed.
 
So the other day, when Phoenix popped up as a concept to potentially revisit, I was pretty quickly able to say “probably not though”. And the reason wasn’t because I felt like there was nothing worthwhile there or that it wouldn’t make for a potentially good YA series with the right tinkering, it was because whatever itch I had to scratch with that story was gone. I’d finished it.
 
In general the stories you tell as a working writer will on some level be dictated by the market. If you release a book that’s part of an intended series only for said book to flop, then there likely won't be a lot of publisher enthusiasm for another. But that doesn’t mean you as the author can just let go. When you put time and effort and care into the development of a story and the characters who populate it, that doesn’t just go away because the story wasn’t as well received as you’d hoped. And that can leave you in a weird position where you are left with a need for catharsis that very few others are demanding and very few options to achieve it. Can you really put time and effort into writing a story that you know will likely never see a public release, at the expense of something that might?
 
The Phoenix finale was obviously a unique case where it wasn’t going to take a huge amount of time out of anyone’s life to make and to boot it would be a fun exercise in nostalgia for old friends who never see each other anymore. Other examples are a bit trickier. When The True Colour of a Little White Lie underperformed, it meant that the sequel I’d already written, A Different Type of Ordinary, had no real path to release, let alone the third book I’d been planning. I’m still vaguely toying with the idea of releasing it online or something, just to let the rest of the story be told, but then I wonder if doing so would distract from the work I should be promoting, and so that book remains in the drawer.

Then there’s Boone. The first Boone Shepard novel did better than it should have. The second was a step down. The third got a stunted print-on-demand release that marked an obvious decrease in quality but meant I got to finish the story and say goodbye. And that’s a prime example of what I’m talking about here – I always knew that Boone himself would reappear in the Andromache novels but he’s effectively a minor character.  Since the release of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice in 2018, I’ve had no desire to try and tell another Boone Shepard story, even as a play or a short story or something. I’m not convinced I could find his voice anymore. When I open the mental Boone Shepard folder, like with Phoenix, there’s nothing there for me anymore. His story has been told.
 
Boone and Phoenix are outliers. As I said before I don’t think I’ll ever let go of trying to get a version of Windmills into the world. Maggie and Jack Carlin, ideally, have a lot of mileage left to go and indeed you’ll get plenty of the two of them in The Lodger and High-Rise. Andromache Peters is just getting started. But I’m also under no illusions here – the moment you’re not just writing for yourself anymore, you don’t have that much say over what comes next no matter how much you might want to write something. 
 
But this is also true; once you’ve started a story, you're compelled to finish it, for yourself as much as for anyone else. If you don’t, it will just keep on bugging you until you find a way to put it to bed. 

It’s no secret that the majority of my fiction takes place in a loosely connected shared universe, and as said connections come more into focus with each new book I get more questions about what counts as part of the mythology, what the reading order is, and exactly how they all connect.
 
So I thought I’d write a bit of an explanation.
 
Firstly, while I do catch myself referring to this as the ‘Maggieverse’, including in the title of this blog, there’s nothing really meaningful or significant in that. My books (and other work, we’ll get to that), don’t form some kind of Marvel-esque interconnected story where each instalment is to some degree needed to understand the inevitable Avengers style team up at the end. There’s no grand plan or intended culmination here. I started linking my stories and crossing over characters because I thought it was fun and I kept doing it because I liked the storytelling opportunities it afforded. For all intents and purposes we’re talking about a bunch of standalone stories that have a few recurring characters and plot threads running through them. You don’t need to have read The Hunted to read The Hitchhiker, or The Caretaker to read next year’s High-Rise. But if you are familiar with several of them you’ll have a different experience when it comes to the crossovers or easter eggs. It’s up to you how much that kind of thing matters to you.
 
But for the curious, here is what you might want to know about those connections.
 
The Maggieverse essentially encompasses any work I’ve done in the crime/thriller sphere since 2020. It currently includes three novels, two audio dramas and a web series. In the next year it will add another novel, another audio drama and a short film. Effectively, it’s everything I’ve written except the Boone Shepard and Andromache Peters books, which take place in their own shared universe that has nothing to do with this one.
 
There are, to date, four main plot threads that run through the Maggieverse. The first is the ongoing hunt of fugitive drafter Maggie for her long-lost mother, which takes centre stage in The Hunted and The Inheritance. The second involves the complicated relationship between rogue ex-cop Jack Carlin and his estranged daughter Morgan – this kicked off in my in 2020 lockdown web-series The Pact, was built out more in audio drama The Consequence, and will wrap up in next year’s action/thriller novel High-Rise.
 
The third involves the ongoing rampage of an avuncular serial killer whose M.O is finding vulnerable, desperate people and subjecting them to his warped version of a self-help programme. This story plays out across audio drama (and soon to be novel) The Hitchhiker, last year’s The Caretaker, and will conclude in audio drama The Lodger later this year. Maggie and Jack Carlin also feature prominently in some of these stories.
 
The final thread is the least explored but the biggest. It runs through the background of The Consequence and The Caretaker, and involves a Machiavellian power struggle over the Melbourne criminal underworld centred around ruthless but charismatic drug dealer Dominic Ford and his various rivals and allies. But so far I’ve only scratched the surface of that one.  
 
As you can see, there aren’t exactly clear delineations between all of these plotlines. Yes, you can loosely characterise certain stories as belonging mostly to one corner of the universe, but in truth plot points and characters cross over so much that it’s a bit murkier than that. As I’ve said before, my philosophy has long been that every one of these stories needs to work as both the first and last time you might see these characters, as a standalone work rather than part of a greater whole. This is partly for artistic reasons, partly for pragmatic ones. I hate the idea of anything I write being a piece of a puzzle rather than a complete work in its own right, but also I need to ensure that if story X flops terribly then I haven’t left a heap of unsatisfying loose ends that might never be resolved.
 
There are a bunch of Maggie and Jack Carlin short stories I’ve written that fall into this continuity but don’t have any huge impact on overall plotlines. The same goes for The Retirement Plan, a short film I wrote which releases later this year and features Jack. It’s 100% part of the universe and if you like the character you’ll probably enjoy it, but it’s not his story, isn’t crucial to his journey and is in no way intended solely for those already familiar with him. Then there’s The True Colour of a Little White Lie, which technically takes place in the same universe but given it’s a teen coming of age dramedy, it includes no major cameos from or references to my various psychopaths and antiheroes.
 
I do maintain a pretty detailed timeline of what takes place when. Chronologically, the order of the most pertinent stories written so far goes: The Pact, The Consequence, The Hunted, The Inheritance, The Hitchhiker, The Caretaker, The Lodger, High-Rise.
 
I don’t want to create the perception that everything I write for adults will further this continuity. For example, I’m currently working on a new crime novel idea that will, like True Colour, take place in the Maggieverse but have no bearing on ongoing storylines and feature no familiar characters. But keeping everything under the same narrative umbrella means I have an increasingly rich arsenal of characters and storylines to draw on when it comes to anything new I begin to develop. That’s not to say I always will, but it’s good to know I can.
 
Again, and I can’t stress this enough, there is no grand plan. It doesn’t really matter what order you consume the stories in, if you read one or three or skip a couple that aren’t for you. There’s no homework required here. Just some links that, if you like my stuff, might be fun. 

WARNING: Contains giant spoilers for Andromache Between Worlds

When it came to writing this blog (similar to one I did for Caretaker last year), I realised that despite being ostensibly a kid’s book, Andromache Between Worlds packs in a lot to discuss. In writing about The Caretaker’s spoilers, it was fairly easy to just move through the main points, but Andromache’s secrets are a little more layered, not least in how they connect strongly to a previous work of mine.
 
So to tackle the big moments, reveals and themes of Andromache Between Worlds, I’m going to break this down into several sections. Starting with the spoiler that, depending on how far back you read my work, will be either the book’s biggest talking point or totally irrelevant. And that, of course, is:
 
The Boone Shepard Connection
 
I’ve never exactly hidden this, but here I can properly delve into the fact that Andromache Between Worlds is, to a not insignificant degree, a sequel to the Boone Shepard Trilogy. By which I mean the main character, Andromache Peters, is the daughter of Boone Shepard, who is of course the long-lost father she spends the book trying to track down.
 
If you don’t know the Boone books then you might be reading this thinking ‘hang on, when the hell was that mentioned?’ Which was kind of the point. Early in the writing process, Boone Shepard and Promethia Peters being the famous parents Andromache has grown up in the shadow of was explicit, but it was decided that linking this book so directly to the old ones could be dangerous, in that it might create the impression that you have to have read the Boone series to read this one.
 
While much of what happened in the Boone books is either directly referenced or has a huge bearing on what happens in Andromache, her parents are never once named, only ever referred to as Mum and Dad. This was to ensure that anyone unfamiliar with the other books wouldn’t be tripped up thinking they’d accidently come in halfway through an ongoing story, while those who do know the Boone books will pick up on the ample references.
 
But even though I used the term before, I don’t think of Andromache as a sequel. Technically it is; the events of this book can’t happen without those of the previous ones, but it’s not a Boone Shepard novel – it’s an Andromache Peters one. It had to be its own thing, never reliant on the tone or events or minutiae of the Boone series.
 
If I’m being honest, early on a lot of the appeal in this book was a chance to return to the Booniverse. I’ve written before about how much those characters and stories meant to me and how sad it was to say goodbye at the end of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice. Revisiting Boone and Promethia and Oscar and Vincent (we’ll get to him) but through the eyes of other characters felt like a great way to see old friends again without undoing the way I concluded their story.
 
Andromache’s earliest genesis was back when I was writing the Boone books. The concept, that years later Boone would be trapped in a parallel universe and his daughter would have to find him, was fully formed as early as 2014. There was never a version of this book that wasn’t connected to Boone, but there were versions that were far more reliant on him.
 
But as I got to know the new characters, they became increasingly dominant, giving this book a style and voice and intention all its own. I wouldn’t call Andromache a ‘torch-passing’ story because I don’t think that’s what happens here. If there is a torch, then Andromache did not need to be given it – she picked it up and ran with it all by herself.
 
Which feels like a good place to talk about:
 
The Central Trio
 
Early on I knew that Andromache would need sidekicks, but didn’t have a clear picture of who they would be. That picture only really emerged as I started to write, and once I found my central trio I fell as in love with them as I have any character I’ve written.
 
I’ll start with Andromache herself. At times, I’ve worried that she might be a somewhat boring protagonist. Her closest comparison among my ‘heroes’, fittingly enough, is Boone Shepard but while they’re both relatively straightforward good guys, Boone has a haplessness and exasperation and depth of pain that Andromache doesn’t. By contrast, I worried that she was a little too good, a little too much of a hero without enough moral ambiguity or quirks.
 
It wasn’t until I listened to the audiobook, read by Ayesha Gibson, that I fully understood how much I like Andromache. And it’s precisely because of the things I worried might be weaknesses in how she was written. Andromache starts the book as a lonely, isolated, unintentional trouble-magnet. She can get nothing right. She can’t make friends. She resents and idolises her parents at the same time. She starts her adventures more or less by mistake and in the first half of the book spends more time running away and fretting than doing much of any worth.
 
But just past the halfway point, when she’s confronted with a seemingly perfect alternate version of herself who is in truth anything but, Andromache comes into her own. Meeting Lady Black terrifies Andromache because it seems to indicate that had things gone differently, she could easily have become a villain. But it’s also this meeting that forces her to step up and decide exactly who she wants to be. Andromache overturns Lady Black’s tyranny through her own ingenuity and it’s this quick-thinking cleverness that propels her through the rest of the book and ultimately saves her father.
 
Andromache is insecure and a little self-involved. She’s also an unambiguous hero who struggles and fails and screws up but wins because of her own brilliance. And while in some ways that might make her seem a little vanilla and traditional, in further books there’ll be plenty of time to muddy those waters.
 
I lucked out with Rylee. I started writing her with very little idea of who she was, but she proved to be one of those characters who just writes themselves and from her first snappy lines to Andromache I was immediately clear on who this person is. Irreverent, dismissive, very intelligent, lacking any kind of filter but wise in an easy, unassuming way that the other characters need.
 
Tobias is a slightly more complex proposition. He starts the brooding and judgemental, but gradually reveals someone more lost and sad, someone who doesn’t so much provide a counterpoint to Andromache’s pain as a reflection of it. I’ve wondered occasionally if he’s not distinct enough from the other two, if he combines Andromache’s inner turmoil with Rylee’s science abilities, but I think that’s a fairly surface level reading. As Tobias points out, the demons he grapples with are very different to Andromache’s and his knowledge of science comes from a place not of passion, but almost desperation. Probably more than the other two, Tobias offers the most potential to explore further in books to come but I liked the contrast he provided; the way he argues incessantly with Rylee but relates to Andromache on a deeper level of mutual understanding.
 
Maybe the most important thing for me is that the three of them together feels right. The bond is there and the way they bounce off each other is fun and warm and provides a strong foundation to further adventures.
 
And speaking of adventures…
 
The Worlds
 
A book called Andromache Between Worlds doesn’t get very far without cool worlds. Outside of the deeper themes about facing your own darkness and grappling with the flaws of your parents and the lies you’ve been told, the big selling point of this novel is ‘dangerous adventures in other universes’.
 
But delivering on this was a bit trickier than just saying ‘what totally mad alternate realities can I come up with?’ The worlds have to be different from each other while also tonally suiting what the characters, particularly Andromache, are dealing with. But more than anything else, they have to be interesting.
 
Apart from Andromache’s own world, which is already a bit more heightened than our own, there are four parallel universes that appear in the book. The first, a world of sea monsters and pirates and a land rendered uninhabitable by natural disasters, is more of a table setter than anything else. Still, I had to have at least a vague idea in my head of its mythology; how it came about, what the key conflicts are and so on. But really, the strangeness of castle-sized warships attacked by giant crabs just felt like a visually distinct and exciting way to introduce the parallel universe concept.
 
The second world, predictably, is my favourite; a version of the Wild West that happens to be overrun by dinosaurs. But apart from allowing me the chance to have pistol duels between cowboys interrupted by rampaging T-rexes, this is also the world where Andromache encounters a beyond impressive version of her mother who seems to be a lot happier without a child. The ‘coolness’ of the world and its parallel Promethia becomes the worst thing Andromache can see; a subtextual suggestion that her deepest fear, that her mother never wanted her, might be true. Of course it isn’t, but there was something fun about wrapping such a grim suggestion up in maybe the craziest of all these other realities.
 
The third world was maybe the trickiest balancing act. Unlike the others, this doesn’t offer an alternate history or flight of fantasy, but rather a status quo that pertains directly to Andromache’s family history and the shared mythology of the Boone novels. Namely, what if at the end of The Silhouette and the Sacrifice, arch villain Vincent Black had won?
 
To work on its own terms the world still had to be drastically different from the one our heroes know. So we have cities built upwards rather than outwards, spiralling into the sky and traversed by orbs dangling from a network of wires. A seeming utopia that, in reality, is anything but.
 
Given how dark and ambiguous the middle section of the book is, I wanted the final world to be a contrast but not to lose the gravity of the situation. A version of reality where Ancient Egypt never fell but instead took over the planet, split the difference perfectly for me. It provided a chance for fun visuals and concepts, but the figure of an antagonistic Pharoah desperate to prove himself as worthy of his ancestors also spoke to the themes of the book and provided a clear ‘villain’ for Andromache to defeat at the end via her own cleverness and, of course, the help of her friends.
 
But the Pharoah was never going to be the real big bad. Nor was Lady Black or the pack of marauding raptors. No, for a story that dealt so heavily with the legacy Andromache carries, I needed a threat who, in many ways, encapsulates the very worst of that legacy.
 
Vincent Black
 
Okay, so here’s a confession. I think the final twist in Andromache Between Worlds might be my best yet. And that twist, of course, is the reveal that kindly scientist Cavanaugh Rogers, seemingly determined to help Andromache bring her father home, is none other than Vincent Black, her father’s greatest enemy. The entire plot of the book has been a ruse for Vincent to find and destroy his nemesis.
 
In the context of this novel, Vincent Black is mainly presented as a shadowy bogeyman, spoken about in tones of hushed fear as the megalomaniac that Andromache’s parents became famous for defeating. Vincent hangs over the book but never actually appears – until he does.
 
But of course Andromache belongs to a larger continuity and so does Vincent. It’s no secret or surprise that The Silhouette and the Sacrifice, published print on demand with a limited budget, was the least read of the three Boone Shepard novels, but those who did check it out have met Vincent before. Vincent was always intended to be the man bad guy of the Boone books (check out the first one again if you don’t believe me; he’s very explicitly set up) but what I always liked about him was that he isn’t some genius who has been pulling the strings all along, but rather the result of Boone’s actions throughout the series. He is not the architect of all Boone’s pain – Boone is, inadvertently, the architect of Vincent’s.
 
If the Boone books were about learning from the mistakes of the past, then Vincent Black was the consequence of those mistakes, the catalyst for the final lesson. And unlike the other, more overtly evil villains in those books, Vincent was wounded and human; ruthless and dangerous and unstable but convinced that he, in fact, is the hero of the story.
 
I think this conviction carries over to Andromache. Vincent appears disguised throughout the book, but it’s only in the final scenes that he is fully revealed and where we properly see just how broken and obsessed he is, how deeply tragic despite everything he’s done. Andromache defeats him by using his own schemes against him, and when she very almost consigns him to the same fate he had planned for her father, it’s Tobias, a longtime victim of Vincent’s deceptions and manipulations, who stops her, keeping him on the board for future books.
 
In some ways, Andromache Between Worlds is the story of a girl learning the full scope of who her parents were, the good and the bad, and having to ultimately decide what she believes about them. And for a lot of the book she is led towards bleak revelations, often by Vincent or those loyal to him. In the end, it was only appropriate that she face her parents’ ultimate foe and in doing so come to understand that her mother and father might be imperfect, but there are far worse things to be.
 
What happens next?
 
When I originally developed the idea for Andromache Between Worlds it was supposed to be a trilogy. Each main world was going to be the setting for one book, with Andromache’s ultimate rescue of her father the ending. Condensing it all to one book was not only a practical decision (better to tell the whole story than risk setting up sequels that might never happen), but a storytelling one – by packing so much into one relatively slim volume, there was no way this book could ever drag or linger in one place too long.
 
The problem, however, is that it hasn’t left many obvious places to take another book, unlike other novels of mine. The first Boone ended on a gigantic cliffhanger. The Hunted left obvious loose ends to be picked up in future books. Even an ostensible standalone like The Caretaker has enough ambiguity at the conclusion to continue the story if I’m ever inclined to.
 
But Andromache is somewhat final, to the point where some reviews have commented on it. The villain is defeated. Andromache saves her father, reconnects with her mother, comes to terms with her parents’ past, and finds real friends. The story is done.
 
But.
 
A lack of an obvious next step doesn’t mean there’s no next step. Infinite parallel universes mean infinite new directions Andromache’s story can take. And while the first book ends with Andromache choosing not to keep adventuring, it would not take much to change that.
 
I have a vaguely outlined theory that among the different types of follow ups a story can have, a ‘true’ sequel is one that finds a surprising angle for continuation in a seemingly complete previous instalment. For example, Before Sunrise ends with our two lovers promising to connect again at the same place in six months. The sequel, Before Sunset, reveals that they did not, but when they meet again nine years later their mutual attraction has gone nowhere. The problem is that now they both have adult lives and responsibilities they didn’t have at 23. Further to this, Psycho ends with Norman Bates seemingly consumed by insanity and locked away in an asylum. Psycho II takes the unexpected route of having a genuinely cured Norman released into society twenty years later, only for that society to refuse to believe in his rehabilitation – a bitter and tragic irony that drives him right back to insanity.
 
By not taking the most apparent path forward, these sequels avoid both repetition and episodic, Marvel-esque storytelling where everything is just a blatant set up for the next instalment, resolution be damned.
 
As such, we will quickly learn that there have been hitherto unseen complications to Andromache Peters rescuing her father, complications that will force our central trio into a whole new adventure. I’ve got a fairly clear outline for the second book and a somewhat vaguer one for the third.
 
Beyond that, who knows? But I hope to find out.