When friends from a book club decided to write a novel together they never dreamed it’d be picked up by one of the world’s biggest publishers, Penguin Random House.
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Known as Alice Campion, the group aged in their 50’s (Jenny Crocker, Jane Richards, Jane St Vincent Welch and Denise Tart) have just released their second novel The Shifting Light – part of a three-book deal.
The women are now touring the country to talk about group fiction writing and telling others how they did it.
“With the first book … I got this email flash on my screen with good news, and it was from Random House. The publisher who read the manuscript had read it over one weekend and said to me she couldn’t put it down … and couldn’t believe it was written by five women,” Richards said of their first manuscript, The Painted Sky*.
“She may have read it initially by curiosity but she was pleasantly surprised.”
A weekend away to the Blue Mountains left the group inspired to write something, a collaboration quite unheard of in the literary world but seen regularly in writing for film and television.
Initially it was a romance novel they wanted to embark on, a thought possibly provoked by vodka on their girls trip away.
Nearly four years it took to complete the first one, their “fun project”, which evolved into a smoothly written Australiana romance.
Their system involved each of the Campions writing a “scene” before bringing it back to the group to be workshopped.
Then a different Campion would take it home for more work so no one scene was written by just one person.
“We had to up the regime so that we religiously met twice a week,” Denise Tart said of their second novel.
“By now we had developed our systems, the first time round we were just rolling along having a great time. When it all got a bit unweildly we started reeling it in.”
Meet with the authors of "The Painted Sky" - Denise Tart, Jane St Vincent Welch, Jenny Crocker and Jane Richards:
* Open Book Club at Kiama Baptist Church, Friday April 28 from 7pm, FREE
* Nowra Library, Saturday April 29 11am
* Wollongong University, Saturday April 29 2:30pm (Room 19:G020, cost $11).
- * Maddy Oliver also joined the team for novel ‘The Painted Sky’