It is great to be back on the Uranie, sailing with Rose and Jose, seeing remote and exotic places, facing the threats of pirates and cannibals, learning about ships and the ever present dangers of storms, disease and starvation.

I am always amazed at how real a story becomes when you are working on these later stages of the book. The characters follow me around. Even when I am not in my office sitting at my desk, they are always with me. Sometimes they talk to me, whisper things in my ear or shout ‘That’s not how it goes!’ Then, just when I need them to help me with a difficult section, they are nowhere to be found. Luckily for me they do come back and by then I have either solved the problem myself or shelved it and moved on. That’s the good thing about re-drafting. You can always put an idea or a scene aside and come back to it later. By then you have dealt with a whole lot of other problems and this one seems really easy to deal with. It’s just a matter of putting in the time and the concentration.

Speaking of which, I had better get back to it.

The sailing ship Uranie anchored off Timor in 1818

This week I opened up my ‘ideas box’. I looked at all the scribbled notes, newspaper cuttings and bits and pieces I had been throwing in there, saving them up for times like this when one project is away with the editor and I am beginning to think about what I might do next. I found a lot of things I hadn’t thought about for ages. Some I put straight back in the box. Others I put aside to look at and puzzle over some more. But for some reason two of them, placed in the box at very different times, seemed suddenly to fit together.

One is a newspaper report from March 1st 1995 when Cyclone Bobby crossed the coast at Onslow, in the north-west, and travelled all the way through the outback of Western Australia. It dumped so much water that the inland lakes overflowed and flood waters rushed down towards the Southern Ocean. These floods cut both the Indian-Pacific railway line and the Eyre Highway. For almost a week Western Australia virtually fell off the map. No road or rail traffic could get through in either direction. And it was a long drive back to Norseman in the west, or Balladonia in the east. Over a hundred vehicles of all shapes, sizes and descriptions were stranded on either side of the flooded section of Highway. You can imagine how many people that would have involved. Very few of them were prepared for camping in their vehicles, but there are lots of stories about how they got together to pool resources and help each other, sharing food, bedding and shelter from the continuing rain.

The other cutting is from Tuesday September 27th 1983 and tells of a treacherous waterhole in which a young Aboriginal woman drowned herself after her lover was killed by her angry husband. The husband’s family then put a curse on the waterhole so that she could never rest in peace. But this was not the end of the story. Fourteen young men, all visitors to the area, have been drowned in the waterhole since 1959. The locals believe that the restless spirit of the young woman is looking for male company.

I haven’t worked out the details yet, but somehow these people on the Nullarbor, stranded with time on their hands, go exploring and discover this waterhole …

At the moment the first draft of a story linking these two very separate events seems to be taking shape quite well. Who knows if it will ever turn into a novel? But It is fun to explore the possibilities.

This cyclist, dwarfed by the road train, is trying to cross the flooded section of the Eyre Highway.

The first stage of the editing process for To See the Worldis almost complete, which means that the manuscript will come back to me with the editor’s comments. I will respond and the next phase of the process, collaboration between the editor and me, will begin. I find this one of the most enjoyable and interesting parts of developing a manuscript for publication. The hard work of finding a shape for the story has been done and the fine tuning can begin. This means going back into the text and teasing out every last scrap of meaning from the words, making sure that the rhythm is right, checking the dialogue to see that every utterance that a character makes on the page is true to that character’s age, education level, personality and life experience. Often I find that characters reveal things about themselves during this process that I wasn’t aware of before and the whole book becomes more alive as a result.

Elaine Forrestal acting as editor during one of her workshps

It is a time-consuming process, but absolutely essential to producing a book that is credible, interesting and emotionally satisfying to read.

I can’t wait to get started.