Writing wrongs
Author and model Tara Moss is on her way to Tassie
Cradoc author LJ Owen is a painstaking plotter, both of crime novels and now her first crime writing festival. With four novels published and five more sketched out and ready to write, this year Owen turned her attention to planning the inaugural Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival, which launches in the Huon Valley next week.
Inspired by Agatha Christie, the Cygnet-based festival’s overarching theme this year is Murder She Wrote, a celebration of crime and mystery fiction written by women. The five-day event, beginning on Thursday, includes several program strands and two spin-off days at the conclusion.
The Murder She Wrote program features a series of panel discussions, with special guests including author and model Tara Moss, actor Marta Dusseldorp and writers Jack Heath, Shamini Flint, Meg Keneally, Kerry Greenwood, Angela Meyer and others. The Tassie panellists include Tansy Rayner Roberts, Joanna Baker, David Owen and LJ Owen herself.
Topics will cover how perfectly sensible people turn to a life of crime writing, how to describe the feeling of being shot and how to take characters from page to screen.
Professional development opportunities will include masterclasses led by panellists and the chance to pitch directly to publishers on site.
Friday’s Hall of Writers, a gathering of 40 authors and publishers, is part of a free program that includes the official festival opening by Tasmanian Governor Kate Warner. One aim of the free program is to inspire the love of reading, a literacy initiative supported by agencies such as 26 Ten and Libraries Tasmania to help new readers find their ‘gateway book’.
And then there are the parties! Kicking off on Thursday with a children’s halloween party with book costume parade, and Noir at the Bar, a jazz and spoken word event on Friday night. A murder mystery costume party, Curse of the Sphinx, will be held on the Saturday night at the small town’s Carmel Hall.
Owen is also using the festival opportunity to launch her fourth book, The Great Divide, following a panel discussion starting at 2pm on Saturday.
Right now, she is flying in full festival prep mode.
“We have a whole team of people doing a crafting workshop at Peregrine school to create the sets for the murder mystery and halloween parties. This just makes my heart sing,” she says of the community involvement.
Two wind-up days on the Monday and Tuesday will focuson food, wine and books as a way of spreading the love and visitors’ cash more widely in the community. These Trail of Writers’ Tears day offer feasts, cooking and bookbinding classes as some of the attractions. “We have a lot of businesses who still aren’t seeing pick-up from last summer’s bushfires,” Owen says.
The festival director and author, known to all as “LJ”, moved to Tasmania two and a half years ago, after spending much of her career in Canberra in project management. She has a PhD in biological anthropology, a masters in librarianship and qualifications in archaeology and genetics.
She also speaks several languages. With those credentials, the world is her oyster, so why spend her days parked at a desk in chilly southern Tassie writing genre fiction?
“Turning to writing was very deliberate,” she says. “I wanted to find a genre that would carry all my interests and weave tales around those things. Because of my background in forensic anthropology and because I just love [US crime writer] Kathy Reichs’ work, I made a very conscious decision to go with crime and mystery fiction.”
After four books and many conversations with other authors she knows where she sits on the ‘plotter or pantser’ scale, the latter referring to writers who ‘fly by the seat of their pants’.
“Figuring that out is really important,” she says. “People generally fall into one of those two camps. I am an extreme plotter. I have tried ‘pantsing’, but it just doesn’t work for me.
“I plot the structure of every novel completely first, agreeing on the structure of every scene with the publisher before I write it, so nothing is wasted. It’s as efficient a process as we can make it. And it means I get to play with characters and how they behave in situations rather than worrying about what is going to happen next.
“For my Dr Pimms series of nine books, three of which have been published so far, everything was spreadsheeted out before I even started writing the first one. I hope the readers can’t guess, but I know what happens at the end of book nine.”
The Dr Pimms series protagonist is an archaeologist librarian who solves ancient mysteries around the globe while enjoying lots of cups of tea and good food.
First appearing on crowd-funding site Kickstarter.com, it was picked up by a publisher five days in, and it’s rolled on from there. Now there is an online interactive game in development.
While that series is at the “cosy” end of the crime-writing spectrum, The Great Divide is certainly not. It’s darker, even gruesome.
When the body of an elderly woman who ran a children’s home is found by a child whose family are camping near the fictional Tasmanian town of Dunton, it is just the first horrible discovery. Newly arrived city detective Jake Hunter, who has transferred to Tassie from Melbourne for a much-needed emotional breather, is assigned to find the killer and he finds much more in the process. Investigations reveal a historical web of murder, torture and sexual abuse that threaten to tip into the present at any moment.
“I was speaking to the experiences of some children, particularly in some rural communities who are born into those communities and deemed in some way to be less worthy than [others], and the compounding impacts that even passing glancing social attitudes can have on a child growing up,” says Owen.
She says it is a stand-alone novel, rather than a new series debut, but her publisher has other ideas, she laughs, and is already asking for a follow-up.
The Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival begins on Thursday, October 31, and runs to
Sunday, November 3, with satellite events on November 4-5.
Events will be held in a cluster of buildings at central Cygnet.
For more information on the festival including a full program, link to ticket sales and discounted accommodation, visit terroraustralisfestival.com
LJM Owen’s The Great Divide,
Echo Publishing, $29.99 will be launched at the festival, with a general release on November 4