Let’s just say July has been an amazing month on many life levels, involving three family birthdays and associated eats and drinks, a rebuild and relaunch of my website (almost finished), conversion of the Andrakis novels into hardback editions, adding books to new distribution sites Books.by and D2D, entering new novels in the 2026 Aurealis Awards (and crossing fingers), researching historical records for a new project that began in July, being included in the new Police Museum project design, participating as a guest on a panel during Climate Change Week, dressing up in cowboy attire for the El Rancho Winter Reds event and culminating in a relaxing and fun night with volleyball pals. And all the usual home and outside activities with family and friends slotted in between the events.

Currently I am mentoring five writers with their various projects and I think sometimes I get more from the sessions together because of the brainstorming to solve potential plots, situations and character traits. I certainly enjoy the interaction. For this reason, I’ve launched the Millswood Books writing services on the rebuilt website, offering a variety of services from casual project chats, through feedback, mentoring and editing services, to helping individuals publish their work online. No idea if I’ll pick up work from this but I’ve put it out there and will advertise the services more formally later this year when everything is settled business-wise.

I was going to publish A Day in His Life in July, but I’ve held it back for two reasons: one is simply all the activities that took place in July; the other is I feel the novella needs a little more detail around a couple of issues affecting the central character. The cover is designed and the interior layout done. The additional material might add a couple of hundred words.

I launched into a new project that is an historical account of an immigrant arriving in Australia in the 1860s and whose broader life is central to what is a potential suicide/murder mystery from 1888. The story is based on a combination factual historical evidence and information, my family folklore, and creative speculation, and it is proving intriguing to write.

What started the project was stumbling across a Trove record from the Police Gazette in 1888 that recorded the coroner’s suicide decision over the death of my great-great grandmother. As a child, I remember being told that my great-great grandmother died from throat cancer and so I always held a quiet fear that maybe generationally throat cancer would be a risk I might face, but when I began unearthing genealogy details ten years ago I found the gazette recorded that “The deceased, Susan Shillitoe, was found dead in a well with her throat cut,” and that the coroner and jury, the following day, brought in the verdict that “(she) committed suicide by cutting her own throat while in a fit of temporary insanity.” Somehow, my great-great grandmother sat on the edge of a well, cut her own throat with the infamous cut-throat razors of the time, and fell neatly backwards into the well.

Fascinated by the tale, I dug deeper into records and family history and found three more interesting newspaper and gazette articles, and pieced together, with the help of a member of another family, an interesting puzzle of immigrations from England, two marriages, an intense land dispute, public confrontations and court orders, legal resolutions and disinheritance, and deaths that form the backbone of a tale worth generating. And at the beginning of July, that information became the spark for the current project.

That was July. I hope you are well and enjoying life.