Homecountry

Homecountry

It's 1987 and Peter Clancy, hard drinking Melbourne Truth journalist, returns to his home town to settle his mother's estate. But Peter's two-day visit quickly stretches out as he is unwillingly drawn into the sinister secrets of this outback Queensland town.

His childhood friend, Dave Tindall, is now a police constable in town. With Sam Saturday, an erstwhile Aboriginal stockman on the former cattle station, Dave convinces Peter to help prove the suicides of his father and business partner were actually murders.

Peter's quest for evidence will stir up more than he bargained for- including his own shameful past. Will he succumb to despair and bolt, or will he expose the towns' sins and claim his own redemption?

Homecountry is a suspenseful thriller from writer TW Lawless, with wide appeal to crime fiction readers.

Author Inspiration:
Homecountry is an idea that I've carried around in my head for twenty years. I've always wanted to write a thriller, set in North Queensland which I regard as an overlooked literary environment. I love the characters, I love the grittiness and I love the themes. But I'm already working on the next project. That's what writers do. There's no time to sit on your hands when a great idea is developing in your head. It'll take you over anyway.


Born and raised in North Queensland, T W Lawless currently lives in Melbourne. He has studied creative writing, film making and screen writing.


Homecountry
Campanile Publishing
Author: T W Lawless
ISBN: 9780646584690
RRP: $24.95
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Doing it together - The pros and cons when your partner is also an author�

I can think of a lot of pros to having your wife share the same love of writing but are there any cons? I'll let you know later.

Our relationship is firmly based on both being writers. I feel sometimes that is what brought us together. We had written for a long time before we met but circumstances and life had got in the way. Once we settled into our first house we were away. Our earliest projects were writing screenplays which we aimed at pitching in Hollywood. The screenplays were written in close conjunction with each other. Both of us had different ingredients we could add to the mix. Kay's was characterisation and storyline and mine was humour and dialogue. We were passionate about our ideas and that was reflected in the final product. The screenplays were very good. I think we got very close, as one of our very commercial , American oriented scripts was requested by two producers. We were so excited that we were dizzy. Unfortunately it didn't happen but that's Hollywood. If we had been living in Hollywood and were part of the network I believe we would have gotten that script over the line. I jokingly say that it's because we couldn't find the American paper fasteners that they like. But we are not done with that side of our writing. No way.

Why did we start writing books? We can thank our respective health issues at the time for been the catalyst for sitting down at a laptop day after day for months on end to produce a final product. I think writing is a great therapy for diverting your mind, exercising your mind and also pushing it. You can produce an imaginary world inhabited by characters that you can bend in all different directions. The best part is the eureka moments where something falls into your mind that wasn't even planned. I love that part. I'd tried writing books previous to meeting Kay and had put them aside believing that writing a book was beyond my level of skill and discipline. When I watched Kay produce her first book, The Lornesleigh Legacy, done in a "back to the wall" situation I knew then that I could do it. It was the eureka moment for me.

What are the pros of been a writing partnership? I think the main one is the encouragement and advice we are able to give each other. We understand what the other is going through when one says they have a writer's block or the story has become tangled or they can't get the result they want on that day. If one of us wasn't a writer or thought the other was wasting their time, I think it would be very difficult to produce a book you were happy with. Even though we write in different genres we are sounding boards for each other's works. It's invaluable when your partner can look at a situation and give it a different twist. That's not only with writing but the business end of writing. For example, I wanted a sinister country road with a corpse lying on it for the cover of Homecountry. Kay said that was too obvious. She was right of course.

Yes, what are the cons of writing with your wife? We each have our own studies so we don't disturb each other. That's one of the first lessons you learn when you write with another writer in the house. A warning for the uninitiated. Don't disturb a writer when they're in the zone.