NOTES :
This project has been evolving from about 2001, and started as a few fairly old but re-discovered short stories and some scraps that together looked like a novel.
I had a mountain of fun writing it, but got to the end and realised it was 158k words, when the commercial target should've been about 100-110k. But they say the secret to success is in what you leave out (or something like that) - edit edit EDIT!!! - so I culled it down, cried over every chunk I cut. As you do. But made it so much better. Not sure what I'll do with the leftovers. Do a stew out of the good bits probably.
I had a mountain of fun writing it, but got to the end and realised it was 158k words, when the commercial target should've been about 100-110k. But they say the secret to success is in what you leave out (or something like that) - edit edit EDIT!!! - so I culled it down, cried over every chunk I cut. As you do. But made it so much better. Not sure what I'll do with the leftovers. Do a stew out of the good bits probably.
Oddly enough, it was only when I started to play around with this MS that I realised what an amazing source the Post War Reconstruction period was, AND how under-explored it is in modern Aus literature, a sort of "lost" decade that's absolutely chockers with every ingredient that makes a good story - love, violence, stress, winning, losing, pain, madness, joy, rebirth, death, the overcoming of unbelievable obstacles, all set in a twilight zone between the end of one Era and the beginning of another - the entire bag of beans.
THE BLURB :
The lost decade between 1945 and 1955 – between the death of Glenn Miller and the birth of Rock’n’Roll – was filled with returned war-damaged men, newly-independent women, and a welter of kids caught between the two. It was a period of manic reconstruction, when working-class families would do anything for a house of their own, usually in one of the new paddock suburbs, and in a world undergoing enormous transition.
This is the story not only one of those
families, but of one of those frontier suburbs and the lives of the people it
contains.
Allan and Dorothy Pryor are a pair of
small-town, country-bred teens, both natural loners, and each with impossible
aspirations. The meet, get pregnant, marry, give up on their separate dreams
and move to the city, buckle down to the slog of raising kids, but soon drift
apart, both using World War II as an escape.
After the war, and as much more mature people, now with
three pre-war daughters and a mid-war son, they get back together and take up a block in a new suburb at the margins and set about building a
house in the face of crippling shortages.
Tackling this new age with them is an assortment of
inter-acting families and characters – a blunt old farmer and his wife, who
lost their only son at Buna; a war-broken American single father raising a
headstrong girl and her crippled twin brother in a shed; a sixty-year-old
man helping his deserted daughter-in-law raise ten kids in a railway carriage; Dorothy’s estranged half-brother; and a
cynical young ex-gunner who falls for one of Allan and Dorothy’s too-young
daughters.
Together this mis-matched collection of battlers struggle to re-build their damaged lives, their relationships, and their families, while turning a tract of farm paddocks into a neighbourhood.
DIRECT LINKS TO THE SALES SHELF......
Together this mis-matched collection of battlers struggle to re-build their damaged lives, their relationships, and their families, while turning a tract of farm paddocks into a neighbourhood.
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DIRECT LINKS TO THE SALES SHELF......
To The Sales Shelf - (Kindle e-book)
To The Sales Shelf - (Kobo e-book)
To The Sales Shelf - (Abe Books paperback)