​Weeks of rehearsal are coming to an end and in ten days’ time I step on stage before an audience at the Hopgood Theatre in Margaret Edson’s Wit playing a minor role as an oncology professor. Excited. Nervous. Keen. The cast are amazing, especially Liz Bentley who plays the lead role and Harry Dewar’s directing is smart and powerful. If you are in Adelaide, consider coming along to a show. Tickets can be purchased through Country Arts SA at: https://www.countryarts.org.au/events/wit-margaret-edson/
 
My new science fiction novel, Mika, is ready to publish. I’ve ordered a proof today to check that it will be up to standard before release. Here’s the blurb for the novel – see if it piques your interest:
 
Mika Katic, Eternal Beauty’s sensational model and marketing commodity, has style and looks imitated worldwide by everyone who wants to be fashionable, but Mika leads a double life as ‘Whisper’, an assassin commissioned to bring down leaders and purveyors of corporate greed. As a global model and efficient killer, Mika’s careers and life are destined to be wild and brief, especially when she is pitted against a determined and ruthless enemy.
  
An operative for Corporate Security Services, Harry Best is assigned to protect a secret multi-corporation project in cybernetics that will transform sport, but he faces one major obstacle: Whisper, the assassin employed by International Freedom, a terrorist organisation determined to disrupt corporate advances.
  
Jamal Bol wants to be the best he can be, only he plays for a mediocre basketball team destined for relegation into obscurity – until a recruit, a powerful, aloof and skilled individual, joins the club. But with the recruit comes an enigmatic puzzle and a sinister threat that Jamal struggles to reconcile when corporate ambition and greed collide with corporation resistance. 
 
If the proof is good, the plan remains to publish the book next month. It’s a big departure from anything I’ve written before and it is definitely an adult reader story with gratuitous sex and violence. The cover has been revised yet again (fifth iteration) to reflect aspects of the content.
 
On a side note, I started reading Julian Barnes’ novel, Departures, and in the opening paragraphs I was surprised to find a spelling/typo error. I know it happens because, despite all the editing care taken, I still find minor errors in final copies of my work after they are published which is frustrating, but it reminds me of the Japanese practice of Kintsugi which is the art of repairing broken ceramics using gold and lacquer and the Persian practice of leaving a deliberate flaw in rugs to represent that humanity is not perfect in what we do – only God or Allah is perfect. Perfection in error-free writing is an admirable and desirable goal, but it is incredibly difficult to achieve even when multiple professional eyes edit a text. It won’t stop me reading Barnes’ story.

‘Mad March’ is a common expression in Adelaide because of festivals and car races and various events across the city, but March was also ‘mad’ for us because of our own events that included a book launch, hamstring recovery, involvement in the State election as an early voter electoral officer, rehearsal for a play, radio interviews, a funeral, mentoring writers, preparing a workshop for April, a short holiday to Singapore and a 71st birthday.
 
On the writing front, Richard Miles’ historical account of the South Australia Police Mounted Cadre, Mounted, which we published under Millswood Books in November last year, was launched by the State Governor at the Gepps Cross Police Operations Centre on March 11. That sees the culmination of several years’ research and writing to bring the book into being and the event was a great success. Congratulations to Richard for the outstanding work.
 
I’m currently running a final edit across a new Science Fiction novel, Mika, which we plan to release in May. A draft front cover is included in this post. I’m also concurrently continuing to develop a new fantasy trilogy. Two books are written and I’m halfway through the third.
 
Coming up in a week on April 11th at the Estonian House, 200 Jeffcott St, North Adelaide from 11am-4pm is the Indie Verse Author event. The event showcases more than thirty of Adelaide’s independently-publishing authors including Portia Stanton-Noble, Trent Moullae, M H Salter, Jordan Hawkey, Dr Samantha Baddams, Serena Knights, Lilly Barrett and Neil Mackenzie to name a handful. I am running a 90 minute workshop in the afternoon focussing on how to self-publish as part of the activities.
 
And to scratch a personal itch, I will be back on stage in the beginning of May at the Hopgood Theatre playing an oncology professor in the play, Wit, directed by Harry Dewar. More of that in the April blog.

​Happy Easter.