Janali Jones

Oh, at the time it was just such an amazing thing to be given this opportunity, because I'd, you know, recently graduated from a Masters in Creative Writing, and to have that kind of recognition from, you know, such a great award was a real confidence booster for me.

Yeah, that was the manuscript that I submitted for the award and then I edited it as part of the State Library of Queensland program of editors and then edited it with the publisher as well.

So, yeah, got a really good treatment through the award and it came out.

I think it came out really well.

So basically the protagonist is a 17-year-old girl whose father is a GP and he becomes a whistleblower when he finds out that his boss is involved in this drug ring.

And they come after him, these criminals, because he's set to give evidence in a trial and they end up killing him.

So Kea, the protagonist, and her mother flee to the Blue Mountains in hiding to get away from them.

I think it definitely is now.

When I started writing it, I didn't have YA in mind.

But my publisher said, oh, well, you know, a lot of these themes, you know, coming of age, the protagonist being a teenager, that sort of thing really fits the YA market.

So I sort of just trusted that they knew what they were talking about and they knew the audiences.

And so, you know, we did shape it a little bit more towards that market and that's how it came out.

Yes and no.

I've got a couple up my sleeve.

I did a residency in – not a residency, a retreat, I should say, in January where I was working on a fantasy set in Northern Territory.

But for the near future, I think I'm just going to be focusing on my impending –

arrival, my baby, which is due any day now, but I'm definitely going to get back into it soon, hopefully.

I recently read a book by Lisa Unger, which was called In the Blood.

And it was about a trans character.

But I think more than that, the focus of the book was this idea of someone who was descended from two different serial killers.