Posted on Authors, Book talk, Celebrations, Craft, Creative work, Guest posts, New books

Story behind the story 3: And Then authors on their contribution

Today in the And Then series we’re hearing from Alan Baxter (story in Vol 1),  Narrelle M. Harris, (story in Vol 1) and Michael Pryor (story in Vol 2)

alan-by-nicole-web-crop-smallGolden Fortune Dragon Jade, Alan Baxter

My story was a chance to finally write something in the style of the wuxia and kung fu epics I’ve always loved so much. And being a kung fu instructor, with the majority of my life embedded in that culture and all it entails, it seemed I ought to write something related. The two protagonists are cousins, he a Shaolin monk, her an accomplished geomancer. The Shaolin monk, Yong Fa, is named after my teacher in a subtle homage to him, and the character shares some of my teacher’s irreverence and cheekiness, but is otherwise an entirely made up person. The geomancer, Zi Yi, is altogether more serious and focussed, but an accomplished mage in her own right. Together their skills are complimentary and that’s just as well when they realise the scale of their task, the distance they have to go to track down their missing jade dragon, and the kind of unforgiving country they’ll be led to. It was a hell of a lot of fun to write and I hope people have a lot of fun reading it too.

narrelle-m-harris-midVirgin Soil, Narrelle M Harris
The germ of my story came from an old building in Fitzroy, and the name, Moran and Cato, high above the streets. They were once a well known grocery chain. The building now houses the excellent Naked for Satan bar. I just liked the juxtaposition of the names, and the characters grew from there. Cato – clearly a man/rat shapeshifter. Moran, clearly a magically inclined offsider. But they were murky. Not necessarily good guys, though not necessarily bad guys. The grey guys, really. That’s how the story grew – I wanted them to do be doing dark magic but not for dark reasons. I also love writing stories set in Melbourne, whatever the era, and I’d been researching the 19th Century goldrush and Melbourne for another story, so that was a logical extension of where to set their adventure, especially since the goldrush was such a time of contrasting fortunes and full blooded adventure on its own.
(Note: You can also read an excerpt from the story here)

pryor2-lo-resCross Purposes, Michael Pryor

I’d been doing some unrelated research on the 1930s, and got side-tracked into reading about Errol Flynn. I started imagining what this rambunctious, charismatic ne’er do well would have got up to if he’d stayed in Australia. Adventures, I suspect, of the slightly rakish kind, all with that charming grin as his final defence. When the opportunity to contribute to ‘And Then’ came up, with a few tweaks, I had a character based on Flynn ready to go. Add to that a timely visit to Cooktown in Far North Queensland, an introduction to the Railway That Goes Nowhere, and the elements for a rip-roaring tale started to fall into place.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s