Issue #2 Last time I promised three things: where I actually sit down and write, an update on the Dark Voices word count, and an elevator pitch if I could get it under a minute. Turns out I can manage all three, so let's get into it.

I'm a morning writer, the earlier the better. Most days that means watching the sun come up with a cup of tea before anything else gets a look in. When I'm out and about it's coffee instead, a bottle of water, and a library, because it turns out I have five library haunts and I genuinely can't pick a favourite.

The regular one is the Barossa Council Library at Nuriootpa, for my weekly Shut Up and Write session. It's a great drive out there, all vineyards and converted cellar door farm sheds, and I get to watch the seasons change on the way, leaf budding, harvest, the leaves turning colour, pruning, and somewhere in the middle of all that, bright yellow canola fields. Other days I'll sit in the Gawler Library's Reading Room, surrounded by oil paintings and shelves of early South Australian history. Sometimes it's the newly built Salisbury Library hub, at a round table looking out over Salisbury's earliest graveyard, which is a strange thing to write next to but somehow works. And when I head south on the train there are two more: the Barr Smith Wing at Adelaide University, small and ornate, with bookshelves holding what are, in some cases, the only copies of a subject in the country (though most of the reference material's quite old), and upstairs in the Adelaide Library’s Mortlock Wing, which is dark and moody with views that are honestly breathtaking, complete contrast to the light and airy Barr Smith. Hard to say which of those two I like more.

The thing about libraries, though, is that they're full of people, and every one of them means a drive or a long train trip. Some days I want silence and nobody around, with my reference books close by, and that's when I write from home. It takes more discipline off-grid, because there's always something else pulling at your attention: appliances that can only go on once the batteries are charged, firewood to cut in winter, water to conserve in summer. Starlink has fixed the internet at least, it's no longer hit and miss or slow as a snail, and most days you'll find me moving the chlorinated water off the septic around to whichever fruit trees need it most.

This isn't new for me, by the way. Back in 2004, when I first started writing, I finished a fantasy series sitting in a snow-covered forest in Canada in the middle of winter, out in the arid Flinders Ranges just north of here on the edge of the Great Southern Desert, under ancient gum trees, in American forests near Virginia, at Avebury in the south of England, and in a few sandy places I honestly can't name anymore. Funnily enough, that first book, The Bloodstone of Isalde, might be coming out very soon. More on that next time.

Now, Dark Voices. Draft 0 is sitting at 66,000 words, and the cover's designed (I'll reveal it once I've got a release date to go with it). Here's where I'm at on the pitch, under a minute as promised:

An abandoned farmhouse north of Two Rivers. Ritualistic symbols. Detective Inspector John Bagshaw knows he's hunting a predator unlike any he's faced. Bagshaw relies on the cutting-edge cyber unit and its star analyst, Sergeant Greyson Loft, who is suffering from terrifying blackouts. With the winter solstice approaching, Bagshaw must rely on a man losing his mind to save a child from losing her life.

Next time: more on The Bloodstone of Isalde, another update on Dark Voices, and why writing short stories is worth doing even once novels are where you actually want to end up, it teaches you things a longer manuscript won't.

More soon…

David

PS: If you are curious about what I write then go to my recently updated web page. Thanks to some great support from fellow writer Ken Lyons, it’s now live. Check it out, and tell me what http://www.davidkernot.com feels like now for you.