Sister Pact - the sequel!!

So, we’ve finished writing the sequel to Sister Pact – working title Sister Napped.

Because Frances gets kidnapped.  By a cult.

As you do.

And Joni has to come to her rescue….

Hijinks ensue….

The book is currently with our fabulous editor Anna and nothing's offical yet but we wanted to post some sneak peeks here to give everyone a little taste of what happens to Joni and Frankie after they leave the Island. Any or all of them may not make the final cut - hell the entire book may be thrown out the window!! - this is just for fun!

Set up - it’s the morning after their arrival in Cairns the previous evening, their first night back in civilisation and on a proper mattress in over a month. Which Nick and Frances have put to very good use.....

Frances woke to the rude shrilling of a telephone the next morning. She cracked open an eyelid, rolled on her side and reached out, groping for the phone in the darkened room.

Nick stirred beside her as Frances tucked her legs up. He dropped a kiss on her shoulder blade and curled himself around her.

“Hello?”

“Frances, this is Bernice Trotter, Endurance Island’s publicist, we met briefly yesterday? Your first interview is in an hour.”

Frances groaned. “What time is it?”

“It’s six am.”

“Six?” Frances groaned again. “I thought I was done with rude awakenings?”

She’d lost count of the number of times she and Joni had been woken in the dead of night or crack of dawn for some form of ritual humiliation. She hoped this media stuff wasn’t just another way to make them look like idiots.

“All the morning shows, want a piece of you. I’m sorry.”

Frances didn’t think Bernice sounded very sorry at all. Yesterday, Bernice had reminded her a little of her father’s secretary, Geraldine Merriweather. On the phone, at half past stupid hour, she sounded exactly like the old harridan.

Polite. Unflappable. Immovable.

Good old Gerri (as her father fondly referred to her) had regarded her boss’s daughter’s with spinster-like suspicion and spoken to them with a frosty, unamused, upper-crust voice. Even as an adult, Gerri spoke to Frances as if she were the Queen and Frances was the toe-sucking party girl.

She could quell rebellion or erase sticky finger prints with one look. Like Mary Poppins’s evil twin.

Even Joni had been terrified of her when they’d been kids. 

Nick skimmed his palm over her hip and Frances squirmed. “But we came second,” she ended lamely, feeling ten years old again.

“Quite. Make up will be along in twenty minutes.”

“Who’s doing the interview?”

“Someone called Mel and Kochie from Sunrise. I believe they’re the Australian equivalent of Richard and Judy.”

Frances was left in no doubt that Bernice found such a thing laughable. That anything Antipodean could be remotely comparable to the stalwarts of British television was an outrageous transgression.

 Nick’s hand drifted lower and Frances eyelids fluttered closed as she lost her place in the conversation.

“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?”

Frances sighed as the imperious voice snapped on a mental chastity belt and tightened it several notches.

“Yes, thank you, Bernice.”

“I’ll see you in the Daintree Room in forty minutes.”

Oh goody, Frances thought as the efficient publicist hung up and she settled back into the curve of Nick’s body. A day with uptight, straitlaced Bernice.

She’d much rather spend the day with easy-going, debauched Nick.

Stay tuned for more snippets from the second book! And if you cant find Sister Pact in your local bookstore please go and ask them to order it in - you'll make our day!

On books and babies...

So, what did you get up to on the weekend?

I walked (crawled, hobbled…?) through a wall of fire to give form to this life that’s spent so long tumbling and wondering inside of me.

Bit like writing a book really. 

Perhaps with a little more swearing and screaming (marginally).

Like writing, there was fear, albeit a sharper and more primal one than the nagging self-doubt that plagues you as your fire up your lap-top. 

In birthing, as the waves of pain crash into you and leave you slick and panting, you feel a different kind of fear. An awful, biting terror.  Nipping at you with practised incisors.  Leaving you terrified of the next assault even as you will it closer to bring the end in sight.

Like writing, there was isolation. 

Forget your lover and your doula.  In birthing, as in writing, there is a moment when your world narrows and you know you are truly alone. The realisation smacks into you, ices your skin and makes your legs shake. 

But it also focuses you.  Woman up.  It’s time to summon all the female parts of you – the witches and medicine women of the ages – and get on with it. Alone.

So.  Some things are the same.

But some things are very different.  The product, most of all. 

Like a book, your baby comes, in the words of Kahlil Gibran, ‘through you but not from you’. 

Like a story, it has been waiting for you to give it form.

But it is the parts that are its very own that make you wonder and delight.

As I held my wet and slippery baby to me, feeling the final pulsing of the cord that joined us, all I could see was the completeness, the perfection of him.

When you finish a story, and you hold it up to the light, mindful of its imperfections, you feel exposed. You wonder who else will see.

As I save a final draft, I feel myself closing a lid, turning a page.

With my baby boy, I hold my breath at his beauty as I fall into him.  I wonder how something so tiny-shiny and complete can have been born from the flaws and uncertainties of me.

As I look into those eyes that have somehow been here before, I see the potential and possibility of him.  Arcing off in a thousand different directions. 

All the things I will see, and all the things that will come after me.

My here and now, and my immortality, wrapped together in his soft skin.

It is a strange feeling, to have done so much, worked so hard.  Not to polish a final piece of work, but simply to deliver him to the first page of his own story.

By Ros - I promise my blogs won’t always be about my Mum but…

But today is Mother’s Day.  And more than that, it’s my first Mother’s Day without her. And it hurts.

It goes without saying that every mother is unique.  Each brings her own special blend of love, wisdom and insanity to her clan. But the thing is, my mother really was unique.  Not just as a Mum, but as a person.

In another time, another place, she could have been anything.

Instead, she brought us everything.  She brought us the world.

She had a big worldview.  She wanted us to go, do, travel, taste, explore.

But be good while we were doing it. And don’t forget to call home.

I miss her.

She was compassionate, and just.  In the big things, and the small.

She was a feminist, an activist, a socialist. At a time and in a place when none of that was easy, or expected.

And I miss her.

She was infuriating.  Opinionated. She wouldn’t let it go until you agreed.  Or were too exhausted to keep up the fight.

To my Mum, the words “I’m going to write a letter” did not herald the start of correspondence.  They were a battle cry. 

But she had more passion in her little finger than most people have in their whole bodies, their whole lives through.

She was not moderate, insipid, mediocre. She was alight, alert, alive.  And so smart.

And by God, I miss her.

My Mum was the most fun.  She could talk, laugh and entertain like there was no tomorrow.  She taught me how to make pikelets, cubby houses, friends and stories.

I will never forget her.  How soft her skin was.  How good she smelled, like baby powder and clean cotton. The way she loved us.

Every day, when I look at my babies, I know I want to be like her.  I hear her in my head.  Saying you’re never too big, or too old, to say sorry.  Saying no-one is just a drop in the ocean, every action counts.  Saying she loved me, loved me, loved me.

Thanks for 37 years Mum.  And for the legacy you left.

The best bits my babies will get are the bits that came from you.

Anatomy of a Book Launch by Ali

Have a kick arse book.
Check!

Look fabulous. Check.

Invite lots of fabulous people.

Check.

Have Champagne. Lots of Champagne. Check!

 

Have an important person do the actual important stuff. Check.

Have witty speeches full of amusing anecdotes that don’t go on forever. Check.



Our fabulous agent Clare Forster officiated!



Do a reading that makes people laugh. Check.

 Sign like crazy! Check.

 

 

Thanks to all out fabulous peeps - family and friends - many of whom had travelled great distances  to be with us. We had a blast and we sold out!!!

Anyone been to any good signings lately?

Doing it for themselves...

When you tell people you’re writing a novel with your sister, the first thing people generally ask is: How?

And, because you want to be taken seriously and not sound like a mother-of-four who copes with the insanity of her life through the ingestion of vast amounts of alcohol, you don’t say “by drinking lots of wine together until a plot takes shape.” Cheers.

You talk instead about the careful chapter and character planning – all true.

You touch on the method – each writing one of the main characters in alternating point-of-view chapters – again, true. 

You explain the assiduous editing and re-editing to make sure the story is continuous and there are no major crossed wires.  Like one of the secondary characters being called a totally different name by each of you (glad we picked that one up).

But there is so much more to the how.

There are the late night conversations after you’ve read your sister’s latest chapter and laughed so hard you wet your pants.  (Four kids remember, it doesn’t take much.  Hang on while I squeeze out a few quick rounds of pelvic floor exercises.)

There are the times you take the agreed plot down some wild tangents and totally surprise each other.  Mostly because, somehow, it works.

And there are the beautiful moments when you call your sister up with a crazy new idea and she says: “You know what?  I was thinking exactly that too.”

For me, the best thing about writing a book with my sister was that it was like having a conversation with her.  The tangents.  The funny anecdotes.  Somehow dragging yourselves back to the point.  And putting the world to rights.  Just like women do.

The second thing people ask is: are you mad?  AKA: I would kill my sister if I had to work that closely with her.

Our mother (God rest her pessimistic soul) was a fan of this question.  She feared her beloved daughters would end up at loggerheads.

But what she (and maybe we) didn’t realise when we started this journey is that maybe we were exactly different enough, and exactly alike enough, to make this mad idea work.

Different enough to give our two crazy heroines some spit and spice.

Alike enough to laugh at the same things, want the same things, have the same work ethic.  Be big enough to admit when something wasn’t working.  Be honest enough to say when something mattered and had to stay.

So Mum, wherever you are, you didn’t need to be afraid.  Because all of that – the humour, the work ethic, the honesty – it all came from you.

So here’s to sisters. And to the mothers who make them.  Now that deserves a cheers.