bonus chapter: in conversation with nicole crowe

for our August bonus chapter we had the pleasure of chatting to Australian author Nicole Crowe (@nicolecrowewrites) about her debut novel The Washup.

We spoke about Australian humour, the mysteries of Magnetic Island, the mythic hotness of Young Richard Gere and the long, winding road to publication.

Find Nicole on instagram and purchase your copy of The Washup from your local independent bookstore. 

about The Washup:

After her parents’ death in a car crash two years ago, Eve is back in the tumbledown family house on Magnetic Island, surrounded by nosy neighbours, an over-friendly possum and a cast of eccentric locals.

All Eve has left is her sister Tilly – not that she’s seen much of her lately, between Tilly’s history of disastrous relationships and her tendency to drink too much. And when Eve is introduced to her new boyfriend Matt, a sky-diving instructor and dead ringer for a young Richard Gere, she senses trouble.

Shortly after, a skydive goes wrong and Eve is left with a mountain of unanswered questions. Matt is the prime suspect as far as she is concerned, but proving it is another matter …  especially after the cops rule it an accident. It doesn’t help when Eve’s ill-advised sleepover with Shane, the local cop, goes catastrophically wrong.

In trying to solve one mystery, Eve will uncover a far deeper secret hidden in the rocky outcrops of Magnetic Island – and put her own life on the line.

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Transcript

Bridget 0:01

Hello and welcome to a Talk Lit Get Hit bonus chapter. The little book chats in between the big ones. We'll talk about reading authors and have discussions with people who, like us, can't shut up about books. We might get sidetracked and talk about literally anything else, but this is a bonus chapter we wrote just for you.

Laura 0:20

For our bonus chapter this month, we have the great pleasure of interviewing Australian author Nicole Crow, who has been kind enough to join us and chat with us about her debut novel, The Wash Up. Nicole, hello, hello.

Nicole 0:32

Hello, thanks for having me.

Laura 0:33

Thank you so much for being here. It's such a pleasure to have you on Talklet get hit for what is actually our first ever interview with an author.

Nicole 0:41

Woo!

Laura 0:43

So, firstly, congratulations on your soon-to-be published debut novel. That's really, really exciting.

Nicole 0:49

Thank you. Yes, yes. It's um it's exciting and terrifying at the same time. So I'm working through the terrifying phase. Um yeah, so like I said, this is my first foray into the world of uh book podcasting. So it's all very exciting and new. So um, yeah, I'm really happy to jump in with both feet. Yay!

Laura 1:10

Well, I don't know if we're here to sort of assuage your fears, but we thought we might start by putting you on the spot and asking you a little bit about yourself. So, at the risk of sounding like the worst job interview ever, could you tell us a little bit about who you are? You know, what do you like to do in your spare time? What the heck is going on with the snake living in your backyard? We want to know it all.

Nicole 1:31

Right, yeah. So I live in Townsville, which is either far north Queensland or North Queensland, depending on where you want to stop counting. Um and yeah, so I grew up on Magnetic Island. So the book is the wash-up is set on Magnetic Island and in Townsville, because you know that old adage, write what you know. So I guess it's true. And yeah, so I grew up on uh it's bordering a national park on Magnetic Island um with my artist parents. Um and the island is only about probably 1,500 people. So it's uh it's kind of like a suburb of Townsville. You can get there and back, or you can get there on the on a fair, there's a commuter ferry. It takes about 20 minutes from the mainland, it's about eight kilometers off Townsville. And yeah, it's a pretty wild place. There's the full spectrum of humanity is present on that island. There's the hippies and the Darros and the Druggies and the professional workers and the environmentalists and the government workers and um everything and everyone in between. So um it's it's kind of a microcosm of, I guess, a bigger city, uh like a bigger, a bigger village or city or whatever you want to call it. Um, but you being from a really small sort of cut-off community like that, you really kind of know everyone's business all the time. And sometimes, you know, that's uh at a detriment to your to your life and your social life, etc. But um, yeah, no, it's it's a crazy place. It's 70% national park, and it is absolutely crawling with koalas. It's uh so I thought, well, what what better place to set a book than um the place that I know intimately and also the place that uh is kind of pretty pretty mental. So that was the kind of the starting point for the wash-up.

Bridget 3:12

I read this book in a bit of a frenzy last week. I stayed up all night reading. Um I was very unfocused the next day at work. But for our listeners who haven't already read or heard of the wash up, could you give us a spoiler-free rundown of the book?

Nicole 3:26

Oh, that's so hard. This is this you'll have to forgive me. Again, this is since this is my first formal interview. I haven't done a lot of practice with giving a sort of off-the-cuff um synopsis of it because it is hard to break down a 300-page book into like a few-minute soundbite. The elevator pitch. Yeah, yeah. So the central character is Eve, and so it's a sort of a murder mystery kind of um story, narrative. Um, so Eve is a central character, she's about 30, and she's recovering from the death two years prior of her parents in a car crash on the highway. So she's wallowing in grief. She's a primary school teacher, she's real sweary, she drinks too much, her life is kind of in disarray. She's living back in her old rundown house on Magnetic Island, just kind of wallowing in grief. And then a terrible um skydive accident occurs, and so she's thrown into this kind of new situation of was it an accident? That's upended my life again. I haven't even recovered from my parents. So she's a hot mess, and so she has some like unusual coping mechanisms. Um, so yeah, the whole book is like basically her trying to figure out how this crash happened, who's to blame, was it an accident, was it um deliberate, while also ruining most of her life and social connections in the meantime. So the most interesting characters I find are the ones who are kind of hopeless. They're not like the standard detective whose job it is to solve mysteries. I really like the normal person thrown into this ridiculous environment. Basically, I did really enjoy tormenting her. That's my that's my status strict. So I threw everything I had at her, every sort of trial, every tribulation, every ridiculous, self-imposed, bad scenario that I could think of, I threw at Eve. And so yeah, it was a really it was really fun to write.

Bridget 5:20

I mean, that's like our favorite books. We love reading books about sad girls where things are just happening and they're just trying to get through it.

Nicole 5:28

Yeah, just trying to weather the storm. Yeah. Thank you, thank you. I'm so glad that you guys enjoyed it. I'm really like, that blows my mind. Thank you so much. I'm really glad. I mean, it was fun to write. I just hope that all the readers enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Bridget 5:41

I think it felt really like familiar to us. We're both 30. I mean, Laura's 31, she's older, but I'm a teacher as well. Felt very familiar.

Nicole 5:52

Oh, good. Excellent, excellent, thank you.

Laura 5:54

Let's talk about the uh tandem skydiving because uh I until I read this, I wouldn't say I mean it's definitely something that I've found terrifying, but it's not necessarily something I would think of as a a juicy hook for a crime novel. I I read that it was your brother and his former career as a tandem skydive master, I think the word was, that inspired the wash-up. But could you please tell us a little bit more about what it was that sort of drew you into the world of tandem skydiving? And maybe what was the research process like how many times did you have to jump?

Nicole 6:29

Oh yeah, so my brother spent, I don't know, 10 or 12 more years. Uh that was his job. He was a professional tandem master. So he worked on he's worked around the country doing that job. It's very seasonal, so they do move around a lot in that sort of profession. And they're all wild, wild bastards. So there's loads of drinking, they're all adrenaline junkies. My brother is probably the most, I mean, he's not he's he's sort of on the edge of adrenaline junkie, but some of the people that he worked with were like next level insane. So I again because I had fears with him because he was I would go and visit him and all of his friends were skydivers. That was his that was what he did on Friday night, hung out and got drunk for skydivers. So um, I got involved in some very strange conversations and I heard some very, very strange stories from all of them. Um and so I thought, well, this seems like a like a crazy excellent premise for you know a sort of a murder mystery kind of story. And I remember I was having beers with him and his boss. This was in Queensland a few years ago, and he's there's a dog in the book. It's I called it camo, like for kamikaze. And this dog is based on my brother's former boss's dog. So I saw this dog, it was a little Jack Russell, and it was hiding under the table at the pub, and it was shivering and shaking. And I was like, What's wrong with the dog? And my brother was like, Oh well, it's been in a couple of plane crashes, and um the boss takes it skydiving, so I think it's probably got some serious PTSD. And he did, he strapped his dog to his chest and would jump out of a plane. That poor dog. Yeah, yeah. So my brother's boss was also the pilot of the plane a lot of the time. And my brother said, Oh, and the dog does a lot of skydiving, which you know probably doesn't want to do. Also, it's been in a couple of plane crashes because the boss has crashed a couple of planes, and then the boss piped up and said, Oh, only one of those crashes was my fault. So, just stuff like that, you know. Just I I I heard so many stories and I hung out with so many skydives that I was like, You guys are insane, you have to be in a book. So, yeah, so the dog is taken directly from life. Um, and I'm sure my brother's former boss would be really happy that his dog was featuring in a book. It seems like an honor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I never heard of anybody skydiving with a dog before. And so my brother's partner also used to work on the phones, like at in the sort of receptionary for a skydiving company. And she said that people would ring up, like you know, tourists and people who wanted to do a like a jump. Um, people would ring up and go, Oh, can I skydive with my cat? And they were like, We can't do cats. Cats are like, a cat's gonna scratch the shit out of you if you jump out of it at a plane at altitude. And people would ring up with these insane outlandish requests and yeah, have to get knocked back. I'm like, who in their right mind would call up a skydiving outfit and say, Can I jump with my cat?

Bridget 9:19

It was just too good not to use. Sometimes even if you like touch a cat the wrong way, it'll sort of scratch you. So Yeah.

Nicole 9:26

Why would you want to fall out of the it's like I can't remember the speed that you fall out of the sky, but it's really fast. And I did do skydiving once because my brother told me when he was still working in the industry because COVID ruined that industry, so he sort of quit when COVID showed up and retrained um as in a different area. So for years he was telling me that he wanted to take me for a skydive, and one year he bought it me at like a skydive. He said, I'll pay for your skydive for your birthday. And I was like, I really don't want to skydive, I'm not interested. That sounds horrifying. So I put it off and put it off, and then my mom, my like 70-year-old mom, did a skydive attached to the front of my brother. So after she did that, I was like, Well shit, I can't get upstaged by my mum. So now I have to do it. So I did it, and it was terrifying, and I screamed the whole way down. Like by the time I landed, I was completely hoarse because I'd screamed my lungs, lungs to pieces. Um, but I did it, but only so that I didn't get one-uped by my mum. Totally fair.

Bridget 10:27

So you've already mentioned growing up on Magnetic Island in North Queensland, and we have read that you said that the beauty and strangeness of the land was another major source of inspiration. I think that when we were reading, we really got a sense of that. We just before we went on Google Maps and we had a look at Magnetic Island and went for a little walk around the island, and it was exactly as we pictured while we were reading it. Oh, good. The island was like a character in its own right. Could you tell us a little bit about the process of trying to get something that you know so well onto the page?

Nicole 10:57

Well, that was kind of hard because yeah, if you do know a place really well, it's kind of hard to put it into words in a way that other people can see it. I don't know if that makes sense. But it is, it's quite a it's quite a strange place. And the thing is, like, uh when I was a kid growing up there, I didn't really think much of it because it was just where I lived. And then as I got older and traveled and lived elsewhere, um, I sort of came to realize that it was a bit funky and odd and the landscape was very different to most of well, probably the the rest of the country completely, really, because it's yeah, so it's a it's an island full of enormous granite boulders. Some of them are like 10 stories tall. Wow. Yeah, it is a strange, it's kind of an unusual landscape. So it's basically from the water, once you get close enough to the island to see the shoreline, it looks like somebody just threw a bunch of giant boulders down and there's some pine trees sticking up amongst them. And it sort of reaches a peak in the center that's a mount, technically a mountain, so it's quite tall. The vast majority of it is completely uninhabited and probably uninhabitable because it doesn't have any standing water because it's granite. So that when it rains, the water, granite's really porous, so that it doesn't hold water. So all of the water is pumped from from the mainland in under in the undersea um pipes. So yeah, so there are there are beautiful sections of beaches, which is regular sand, but behind the beaches it's just enormous boulders. And you can people go, I mean, there was a an incident last year or the year before. It was all over the um, I think at least the national media, there was a tourist who sort of just disappeared. He went for a walk, and there was months and months of um SAS and cops and fire, every every single emergency services worker was on the ferry every morning from the mainland to the island to basically tramp all of the areas that they could access in this one particular bay, which is where it was suspected that he kind of went missing. Um and he hasn't been found, and I suspect that he never will because my my suspicion is that because there was some talk of maybe he was intoxicated because they found his clothes on a boulder and just didn't find him. So I suspect that he was a bit intoxicated, went for a wander up into the bush, and probably fell between some giant boulders and is still lodged there.

Laura 13:20

Gosh, that's so eerie.

Nicole 13:22

Yeah, it really is. And the thing is that if if that happened, which I I I mean, it's been a couple of years now and no one's heard anything else, um, yeah, he will almost definitely never be found. Unless the entire island gets developed and someone will find him in 500 years when they're trying to build a housing estate. But otherwise, that's it. It's just he fell between it's like a crevice, except boulders and warm instead of icy.

Bridget 13:47

I think there's so many parts of Australia that are just so well suited for this sort of like thriller crime, like horror setting.

Nicole 13:55

Yeah.

Bridget 13:55

It's like everything's so spooky if you look at it in the right light.

Nicole 13:59

Absolutely. And magnetic color lends itself really well, I think, to the crime genre because it is such an unusual kind of environment and landscape.

Laura 14:06

Yeah, this outside hostile force working against people. Yeah. You also have this really brilliant knack of capturing the essence of Australian humour and spirit without making it seem sort of gimmicky. And I think something we've found in Australian novels that we've read is that there's this really great undercurrent of things never being that serious. Uh so we're wondering how you balance that kind of Larrakanism, I guess, alongside such heavy topics.

Nicole 14:35

Oh, well, my I get bored easily. So my uh my impulse when I'm writing is to just load it up with jokes. So there was uh plenty of instances where my publisher was like, that's a bit far. Maybe cut that, maybe cut that. They're dead, Nicole. Yeah, yeah. There was a lot of guidance from every from the community around me that, you know, publishing and and early readers and that kind of crew saying, eh, that's probably a bit much. Oh, you've taken it a bit far. So I did have to cut a lot out to make it to, you know, to uh amplify some of the sections of pathos. I did need a lot of help with that fine line balancing, you know, pathos and humour. Because it was bit a bit outlandish in at places, and it's still quite outlandish. Um, some of the scenes I was like, oh, somebody's gonna make me cut this scene. But uh, some of the stuff that actually they let through I was surprised by. So yeah, it was a bit of give and take.

Bridget 15:30

There were so many parts where I was like actively laughing out loud because I just thought it was so funny.

Nicole 15:35

Well, thank you. Thank you. That's really lovely because you never know.

Laura 15:38

Also, so many parts where I thought, oh, I know that person, or I can picture that, you know, like even the beat up Ford Falcon or the Forex singlet or uh even just I think quite early on there was a mention to John Grisham novels, which John Grisham isn't an Australian author, I don't think, but boy, do you see a lot of John Grisham novels at Bookfest, you know, Lifeline Bookfest at the op shop on your granddad's bookshelves. Yeah.

Nicole 16:03

Yeah, yeah. John Grisham is a powerhouse.

Laura 16:06

Yeah.

Bridget 16:07

Perfectly captured.

Nicole 16:09

Thank you.

Bridget 16:10

This is a good segue, actually. So if we could detour for a second to talk a little bit about Australian fiction, we would love to know who were some of your favourite Australian authors and if there were any that particularly inspired you during the writing process.

Nicole 16:24

Oh, well, my go-to um has always been lit fiction, oddly enough. When I was in my 20s, I was pretty obsessed with Peter Carey in particular. Loved him. Read all of his stuff. I was pretty into Tim Winton as well. So I'm like kind of one of those dirty people who were like, oh, I read too much white man literature when I was when I was getting started. Um yeah, yeah, and you know, you you read you read these, you know, so-called sort of great authors that have been put on a pedestal and you go, I want to write, so if I want to write, then obviously I have to write like this because this is what the reading public wants, this is what publishers want to publish. So I spent a long time trying to emulate, you know, the great white males of Australian Lit. And then they didn't work out very well. I wrote some really shitty lit fiction, unpublishable monsters, Frankenstein monsters but not good ones. Um and then and then I went, oh, that's that's not working. You have to, and then I was like, well, you know, you're supposed to write what you know. So I mean, I have this ridiculous childhood on Magnetic Island with these boulders and all of that chaos. So I thought I should I should write that instead. And then finally it started to work out because then you know I it my work had a lot more authenticity than just trying to emulate the authors that I thought I had to emulate. But yeah, I do love I do love a bit of Jane Harper though, too. Obviously, yeah, she's my bag. But yeah, most of most of I kind of read lit fiction, which I mean I feel like I'm betraying my kind a bit, but yeah, that's kind of my go-to lit fiction.

Laura 17:56

We love a bit of lit fiction too.

Nicole 17:58

Yeah. I like crime though, particularly because like you do work with a formula, but everything, everything that you write, even lit fiction has a formula, it still needs a plot, right? Um, even if it's a little bit buried, it's still got a plot in there somewhere. But I feel like crime fiction is such a broad church that you can have your weird stuff and your straight crime and your horror, and you can it just it's so um all-encompassing that you can pick like there's so many subgenres within crime, so that you can sort of make your own mark on that genre as well, which I think is really, really nice. And I found it quite liberating. I found it much more liberating than lip fiction because lip fiction felt like you know every sentence has to be beautiful, but I feel like within genre you have a bit more scope to have a bit more fun.

Laura 18:42

Yeah, you're just looking for something juicy and something engaging.

Nicole 18:45

Yeah, and if there's some beautiful sentences in there as well, then that's bonus, right? But that's just the icing on the cake. I feel like it's more freeing working within genre as opposed to sort of the more highbrow kind of genre, which I was never very good at.

Laura 18:57

Well, speaking of highbrow, um, we have to come clean. We did do a little bit of online stalking of yourself and we came across your thesis, which was incredibly impressive. Which one oh my goodness, we came across the narrative possibilities of humor in regional family memoir, I think.

Nicole 19:20

Okay, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Laura 19:21

Which we thought was very appropriate. Yeah.

Nicole 19:23

Oh, well th yes, thank you. Oh gosh, you found that. That's just did you actually were you able to download it or did you just see the kind of the abstract?

Bridget 19:32

I could only read the abstract, I think, or the part where you spoke about going to the conference when you were presenting about Benjamin Law, but then I couldn't access any more.

Nicole 19:40

So Oh, okay, because like I'm I'm really not I'm really not happy with that thesis. But I mean, you're never really happy with Yeah, because I I did so that was a PhD that I did a few years ago, and I did a memoir. It was based on my childhood growing up on the island. Um and yeah, when I was shopping it around to publishers, and it was it was a humorous memoir, and it was a series of like a collection of like blinked short stories. And when I was shopping it around to agents and publishers, they all said, Oh yeah, it's great, we love the island, your voice is great, blah, blah, blah. But it's not in the right shape. It's gotta have that that like three act structure shape. And so I spent a couple of years banging my head against that wall trying to rework it. And um that didn't um didn't really, I couldn't I couldn't figure out how to how to put it into the shape that it was that it needed to be in. So it's in my bottom drawer. Maybe if I have a couple of crime novels out, then maybe um somebody will want me to drag that out of the bottom drawer and publish it. But uh, but yeah, I haven't I haven't looked at that in a few years. And uh yeah, I don't exactly know how available it is online.

Bridget 20:47

So we didn't make it too far. The part that I read, I enjoyed.

Nicole 20:52

What's the surprise? It's uh it's the beast from the bus that's um that's emerged again. But that's cool. That was a fun thing to write too.

Laura 20:59

Yeah, well, that's what I was wondering. Like, you know, and I have never written a novel and I've never written a thesis. I just can't imagine the process of undertaking either of those tasks. So what apart from probably I imagine a thesis being quite unfun at times, how was the writing process different for those things?

Nicole 21:18

Well, so the thesis that I wrote is a creative writing thesis. So for those types of PhD theses, you um you basically write the m the majority of a novel or a piece of nonfiction or whatever whatever your project is, and then you also have to submit along with that an accompanying, they call it an exegesis, it's basically a long critical essay discussing some component of um of your craft or a kind of a lit analysis of similar works. Or I mean it's all very variable what you can do with a creative writing thesis. But I mean, I I it I kind of enjoyed the process of that, particularly because I got a scholarship, so I got like a living allowance for a few years, which is a bonus if you want. Do a big creative project, somebody's paying your rent for you, which is important. But there are a lot of hoops that you have to jump through within a university context as well. And there's lots of like conferences that you have to go to and meetings that you have to have and milestones that you have to reach and lit reviews and all sorts of stuff. So it it it it can at times, it was at times, I felt quite restricted in what I kind of could do. Because you also have supervisors that are there to help you and guide you, which is really important and necessary, but you don't have the same amount of complete freedom that you do when you're just doing your own project off your own back, which can be a uh you know a positive and a negative, because if you do have supervisors saying, You told me last week you'd give me 5,000 words, and if you don't give them the 5,000 words, you have to tell them that you haven't done the 5,000 words, which is good to keep you on track. But if you're writing a novel and nobody's waiting to read it or waiting for you to meet re meet meet a milestone, then you can, you know, not write that 5,000 words. So it's nice to have people on your team to go, oi, get your butt into gear, do it. Because it is hard. Like writing is really, really hard. Any create any of the arts, you know, project is really hard because you're essentially kind of aligning your room, stabbing away at your keyboard, hoping that it's good, but you kind of don't really know. So it is nice to do a master's or a PhD in creative writing because you have people around you who are paid to read your stuff and paid to help you to the best of their ability, um, which is uh really, really useful. And it's a good, it's good training experience as well, just so that you can figure out how you do brit your teeth and organize your day so that you do write a thousand words a day and get a full draft in a decent amount of time rather than just spend ten years kind of floating around in the dark and not producing very much and just disappearing into a puddle of self-loathing. Because that's it, that's an easy thing to do, right? As a creative, it's an easy, it's an easy to um to fall into that trap. So it's nice to have people around you going, no, no, keep going, keep going, keep going. Yeah.

Laura 24:01

So we feel that even doing this, I think I you know, even just any small comment we get about enjoying an episode or a new follower, anything small like that is so motivating. But when we go through ebbs and flows where those things aren't really coming in, it's like, what is this all for?

Nicole 24:21

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you invest a lot of time and energy. So you want you kind of need some sort of reward, like if it's subscribers or if it's money or like accolades or whatever. You just need it doesn't have to be much as well. Like we have a really low bar, you know? Like it's so low. So occasionally somebody might go, Oh, I read that thing that you wrote, or I saw that thing that you did. And it's so motivating, it's so buoying, because um sometimes those comments are few and far between. So when they do come, you're like, Oh yes. And so it just gives you that extra push, you know, to to go that extra step and to keep going.

Bridget 24:56

Something that we're always quite interested in is the process from that first seed of an idea to actually seeing the book appear on the shelf in bookstores. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey to publication?

Nicole 25:08

Oh, it was long, very long, very slow, very slow. So, first of all, I pitched my memoir. It was kind of a last ditch effort. I was like, oh, I don't know what to do with this thing. And um, so I it was like November a couple of years ago. So I just pitched it to every publisher and agent who had their submissions open in November, which is not many, right? Um, most of them were winding down for Christmas. So I just sent it to half a dozen publishers and agents. I didn't even Google them first. I didn't even know if they were like predatory publishers. I was like, fuck it. I sent it off to everybody that I could think of, and then kind of, you know, Christmas happened and I forgot about it. And then a couple of months, like January or February the following year, I got a reply out of nowhere from some literary agent who I'd never heard of, and he said, Oh, I like your pitch, I'll read the rest of it. And I was like, Oh shit. So I Googled him and I was like, Oh, this guy's a big deal, oh god. So I sent him my full memoir manuscript and he read it and he was like, Yeah, love the island, love your voice, everything's great, but it doesn't fit the narrative arc. And I was like, Oh, well, I already know that. And as he was trying to get me off, I felt like he was trying to get me off the phone. He'll probably say otherwise. While I was banging my head against the wall of the memoir, I was also writing this crime novel. So while he was saying, Oh, I don't know if I can sell this because memoirs hard and no one knows who you are and it doesn't have like the big hook that publishers like, I was like, wait, before you go, I have a prime novel. You want to read the prime novel? And he went, Oh, I guess so. So I sent him as but I was like, it wasn't finished. So I was like, shit, give me a month. I need to finish it. So I madly finished it, and then I sent it to him and he read it, and he was like, Oh, this is this is all right, this isn't too bad. Uh, it needs a little bit of you know editing and stuff. So he worked with me for oh, probably like six months, a couple of drafts, editing it, getting it, getting the tone right, taking some of the jokes out, you know. Um and then yeah, and then he started shopping it around, and a few publishers said no. That process always takes ages, but you can only really send it to them one at a time, one publisher at a time, because they don't like it if you send it out to every single publisher at the same time. They don't like competing. So, yeah, probably half a dozen of them said no, and then um he was just in the room with Pantera, who eventually picked it up, talking about a different client that he had, brought my name up in this meeting that was had nothing to do with me, and said, Oh, by the way, I've got this manuscript. And the editor there, or the publisher there was like, Oh, okay, I'll have a look at that. And then they they bought it. So it was it was a long and winding kind of journey. And yeah, the thing that I was originally pitching wasn't the thing that actually got picked up. So it's a very fickle, unpredictable, confusing kind of landscape, the publishing sphere I've learned over the years. But yeah, so eventually it got there, it took years, but um eventually it landed in good hands. So it's all very exciting.

Laura 28:17

That is very exciting. Worth the wait. We agree, definitely. Oh if we could take this to a bit of a sillier place. I really have to compliment you on your point of reference for Matt. Young Richard Gere, sensational. What an amazing choice. What a honey. I've been Googling. I mean, I had, you know, Pretty Woman and some of those earlier movies as reference, but oh, nothing to the Google images results.

Nicole 28:45

I know, right? I know. In love here. Honestly, Richard Gere and Harrison Ford. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Harrison Ford and like Star Wars. Oh, oh yeah, Star Wars. I mean, that that never gets old. That's just timeless, timeless.

Laura 29:00

Yeah. I've been seeing a lot of Gregory Peck Thirst sort of compilations on my social media lately, which has been a really, really nice treat.

Nicole 29:10

Yeah, yeah. Bring bring back all those old photos too. Black and white, too good. Yeah, honestly, if if Richard Gere or and or Harrison Ford, I mean, they're like 70 something now. If they were like, hey, do you wanna do you wanna like marry me? I'd be like, Yeah, sure.

Bridget 29:26

Yeah.

Nicole 29:26

I mean, they can still get it.

Bridget 29:28

I think like Harrison Ford, I sometimes watch his interviews and I'm like, doesn't seem to get any worse with age. He seems to get better. Yeah, so he really does. Yeah. And I like his like grumpy persona as well.

Nicole 29:40

I know. We should all who's his I think his wife, I think he's married to Callista Flockhart. We'll have to hatch a plan to bump her off.

Bridget 29:46

Yeah, okay. Sounds good. You've got the intel with the crime novel.

Laura 29:50

Yeah. How can we get away with it? Pumping up Callista Flockt. What about the um other characters? Did you have anyone in particular in mind when you were writing any of him?

Nicole 30:02

Oh, yeah. Honestly, I think I think you see you see these author interviews, and they're like, oh no, it's all 100% fiction and it's none of me in it. It's not based on anybody real. Those guys are either lying or they need some lessons in self-awareness. Like, I feel like you can't create a really good character in any form. Even the side characters, the the best ones are always based on somebody that you know and love or hate or whoever. So yeah, they're all kind of based on somebody. Sometimes it might just be like somebody that I had a five-minute conversation with in a coffee shop. But yeah, there's always the seed of a character idea in interactions with people around me.

Laura 30:41

Thank you for confirming what I've long suspected.

Nicole 30:44

Oh, good. Yes. No, well, I mean, you know, authors, authors are all storytellers, aren't they? So they're all full of shit. Yeah. You can't believe you can't believe anything that comes out of their mouths.

Bridget 30:54

They're all well, we're coming to the end of the interview, but we were wondering what do you hope that readers will get out of the story?

Nicole 31:04

Oh, I hope that they have a a wild ride and uh learn a little bit more about Magnetic Island. Um, and learn a little bit more about North Queensland, because I've discovered over the years that lots of people from down south come up here and they think that you can't drink the water. They think that you're gonna get eaten by a crocodile or a shark or murdered by a jellyfish. And like those things exist, but they're not our biggest problems. We have problems far bigger than murdering Bob Sunday and Bobcatter and all of the crazy political stuff that goes on up here. So that all that stuff is very fun and interesting, but there are also other more fun and interesting stories sort of below the surface as well. So yeah, I just I mean, just to bring a little bit of awareness of the, you know, the and stories, like really interesting. We're not just a bunch of yokels up here, like we have regular lives, and our stories are just as engaging as and interesting as um any of the stories that come out of the metropolitan centers. So I hope that that's um a takeaway as well for readers.

Bridget 32:07

I think us down in Southeast Queensland, we like to think we're like, you know, real Queenslanders, but when people sort of step out of the Brisbane bubble, then there's lots of things to be learnt and lots of nice things to be seen as well. A slice of humble pie.

Nicole 32:21

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I spent I spent years living in Brisbane too. And the Brisbane bubble is really fun and it's really easy and comfortable to sort of get sucked in. And the thing about going north is that it's such a long way. So a lot of people, unless you really have a good reason to get up here, like your family or you're going to a wedding or something like that, a lot of people don't make it this way far north, um, which is why you know a lot of people down south think that you can't drink the water, right? So um we have all the same services as everybody else has, and I have to keep explaining that to people when I go down south.

Laura 32:54

How will Nicole get on the interview?

Nicole 32:56

Does she have internet? Yeah, yeah. We have we have power and we have the in the interweed. Um we have we have coffee, we have ground coffee. Like it's probably not as well. Amazing. Probably coffee farms as well. It's probably great growing conditions. Yes, uh on the on the the northern table lands, they there's a couple of coffee plantations. So yeah, so we we do all we do all right up here where we stay. Yeah, come visit, see some koalas.

Bridget 33:24

Yeah, we never see any around here. They're all the all the trees are cut down, so we can't see any.

Nicole 33:28

So exactly. Magnetic island. I'm pretty sure I mean I I may be wrong, but Magnetic Island has one of the largest like per square meter populations of koalas in the entire country. The koalas are just kind of everywhere, to the point that they're a little bit annoying. So um the forts walk that features in the wash-up, that that walk is basically you're guaranteed to see a koala in the wild. Amazing. Sounds like the place to be. Yeah, you can't get away from them. They're like rats.

Bridget 33:58

I also really want to drive the barbie jeeps around, so that's a big draw card for me. Yeah.

Nicole 34:04

Oh yeah, they're fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they're fun. And the roads, the roads on the island are hectic because a lot of them are sort of uh like it's it's quite mountainous, so a lot of a lot of the roads are really windy and lots of hairpin turns, and it's just a sheer drop into the water. So um, you know, but it is it is quite dramatic. The landscape and the roads are quite dramatic too. So um, so yeah, come up, have a crack, you'll love it. When's the best time of year to come?

Bridget 34:36

Like what what's the what's the peak of the month?

Nicole 34:39

Basically now, August. Okay. Um but winter, basically winter, because the weather is nice because in summer it is just so hot, you just want to die. It's like 35 degrees, 90% humidity every day for like three months. Yeah, and if you're lucky, you'll get a bit of a break, which is which is a monsoonal downpour. But yeah, June, June to June to September. Basically, it doesn't rain too much. The weather is lovely for everybody coming up from down south because it's about 26, 28 degrees in the daytime. Um, pretty consistent. And and because uh winter is not stinger season, so you can swim wherever you want. In the summer, the lifeguards put out these big square stinger nets, which are like a protective zone, so you swim inside them and the stingers can't get you. Um, but they pull them in in the winter, so you can swim on any beach that you want to, you don't have to worry about stingers, and there aren't so many mosquitoes, and there's not rain, and the weather is quite nice. So, yes, definitely winter. Sounds great.

Laura 35:33

Lock it in, Laura. Yeah, we're going next year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I know at the time of recording your book hasn't been released quite yet. Uh, and I know we've talked about the memoir, but is there anything else uh new that you're working on that you're allowed to share with us, or are you just focusing on getting through now?

Nicole 35:52

Uh yeah, so I'm working, I'm about halfway through the next one. It's kind of based heavily on one of my former workplaces. Um so the real trick is gonna be to not get sued if someone publishes it. But uh that's a publisher's problem, not mine. Well, it's kind of it's gonna be kind of like a a bit of a bit of a revenge, a revenge novel, you know. You know that old saying, like, don't piss off the writers because they'll get they'll get you'll get your come up in. Yeah, so that's kind of my plan. I find revenge really motivating. Us two.

Bridget 36:25

There's just so much like fodder with workplaces.

Nicole 36:28

Oh, totally. All the mental stuff that goes on at workplaces is just out of control, especially now. The bureaucracy's gone mad. I think it's wonderful fodder for any writer. So, yeah, so that's about halfway done, and it's all very it's it's it's really good and it's coming out really fast because yeah, I'm so motivated by revenge. Number one writing tip seek revenge. I hope it's good and I hope readers like it if a publisher wants to pick it up. I hope that it's relatable and I'm sure it will be for anybody who's worked in a white collar job.

Bridget 36:58

Where can we find you online? Where would you like people to find you, follow you, stalk you like we did?

Nicole 37:03

I set myself up at Author Instagram a couple weeks ago, and um I tried to follow 950 accounts in about an hour. It totally, it totally shed itself and um sort of started glitching, and I had to restart my phone and I had to uninstall and reinstall the Instagram app like four times. Um, and I think it's kind of kicked me out. So I'm gonna have to do another author Instagram account like tomorrow. So I'll I'll keep you posted because I sent them an email and said and said, I'm not a bot. Can I have my account back? And I haven't heard anything because like that's to be expected. So um yeah, I think I'm gonna have to start a new account and just like not follow 950 accounts. I was just I was just trying to be efficient and it backfired.

Bridget 37:47

Knock it all out in one go, yeah.

Nicole 37:49

Totally fine. So fail. Never mind.

Laura 37:53

Well, when you know, we'll put it in the show notes of this episode so that everyone can see where to find you.

Nicole 37:58

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I will. I'll sort it out.

Bridget 38:01

Is there a place for people to buy your books that gets you the most money?

Nicole 38:06

Oh, I guess independent bookshops. They're always the best ones. Support independent, support the family business. Fantastic. Yeah, I think any what whatever, I think it's available, gonna be available in all of the major indies. So get down to your nearest indie and grab yourself a copy and a copy for all your friends and family.

Bridget 38:23

Christmas is slowly creeping up. It's a great Christmas book.

Laura 38:27

Requested at your local library, make them buy a copy. Thank you so much. Awesome. Yeah, thank you. It's been such a pleasure.

Nicole 38:33

Thank you. Oh, likewise, thank you so much. Bye. Bye.

Bridget 38:37

Nicole's book, The Wash Up, is out today, so head out to your local independent bookstore to pick up your copy. For our next episode, we are grabbing our passports and covering Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Prey Love. Have your say on what we read next by keeping an eye on the link in our show notes and on our socials. Make sure you subscribe to the show, and if you want to be on the same page as us, follow us at talklist.gethit on Instagram and TikTok.