Show notes
Australian author Kerry McGinnis makes the Australian landscape come alive in suspenseful, best selling rural mysteries that capture the soul and spirit of the Outback.
Hi I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on The Joys of Binge Reading Kerry McGinnis talks about her childhood in the bush with her father and four siblings – years that helped form her deep understanding of nature, and how she got established as a best selling author while working an outback cattle station with her siblings.
This Week’s Giveaway
Our Giveaway this week is historic fiction freebies for August including Sadie’s Vow Book #1 in my Home At Last Series.
HISTORICAL FICTION FREEBIES
Sadie’s Vow, Book #1 in Home At Last INCLUDED
A bunch of top authors have got together and offered a great range of historic fiction – Take your pick.
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Audio Book Sale Offer
AUDIO BOOK SALE
Offers are Audio books Galore sale
ENJOY BOOKS EVERYWHERE PROMO
Poisoned Legacy, Book #1 in Of Gold & Blood INCLUDED
https://books.bookfunnel.com/audioeverywhereaug2023/kgr0xzcoio
ENJOY BOOKS EVERYWHERE AUDIO SALE
And we also have an Audio Book Sale – Enjoy Books Everywhere – with a range of entertaining fiction – including Poisoned Legacy – Book #1 in Of Gold & Blood series – available at special sale prices for a limited time. Links to follow up on these offers in the show notes for this episode on the website at The Joys of Binge Reading .com.
A mention too, that my latest mystery romance Rosie’s Rebellion – #3 in the Home At Last series – is on preorder at a special launch price of .99 cents for two weeks. Order online at your favorite E book store..
And remember – if you enjoy the show. Leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.
Links to things in this episode
The Bombing of Darwin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Darwin
Katherine: https://northernterritory.com/katherine-and-surrounds
Adelaide River: https://northernterritory.com/darwin-and-surrounds/destinations/adelaide-river-town
The Waddi Tree, Kerry McGiness: https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/the-waddi-tree-9781742280141
Kerry’s Two Memoir books: Pieces of Blue: https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Blue-Kerry-McGinnis/dp/0655632727
and Heart Country: https://www.amazon.com.au/Heart-Country-Kerry-McGinnis/dp/0670899216
Siege of Tobruk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tobruk
The Renmark Flood: https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/disaster/flood/display/51616-the-1956-flood#:
Meanjin Quarterly: https://meanjin.com.au/
Charters Towers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charters_Towers
Kerry’s Fantasies:
Far Seeker: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=far+seeker&i=stripbooks-intl-ship&crid=3EFWXC6Q2YS1V
The Burning Mountain; https://www.amazon.com/Burning-Mountain-Far-Seeker-Trilogy/dp/064680667X
The Crow Road: https://www.amazon.com/Crow-Road-Kerry-McGinnis/dp/0646833707/
Kerry’s Favourite Authors
Kate Morton: https://www.katemorton.com/
Robert Galbraith: https://robert-galbraith.com/
Jodie Picoult: https://www.jodipicoult.com/
Reginald Hill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Hill
Robin Hobb: http://www.robinhobb.com/
Linwood Barclay: Lindwoodbarclay.com
Rebecca Yarros: https://www.rebeccayarros.com/
Mary Stewart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stewart_(novelist)
Where to find Kerry McGiness
https://www.penguin.com.au/authors/kerry-mcginnis
Introducing author Kerry McGiness
Australian mystery author Kerry McGiness and Outback stories
Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Kerry. Hello there, Kerry, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Kerry McGinnis: Thank you, Jenny. Thank you for asking me. It’s great to be here.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve made a name for yourself as the author of stories set in remote parts of Australia and their immersive landscapes, and landscape is a very important part of your books.
They’re places where people can be lost or found, and it does seem to me that many of your stories have that theme of people retreating into that area when they’ve suffered loss or hurt and losing themselves and finding themselves.
Is that a theme that fascinates you?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, I think it’s just a convenient one. I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it fascinating me, but you have to build a story out of something and I think that’s a convenient one to use.
It also gives you an opportunity to show character development, which is also very important for a book.
Jenny Wheeler: But the nature of the outback landscape lends itself to people wanting to lose themselves, perhaps more than find themselves. Would you agree with that?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, that is true. And the reason I set all my works in the bush is because I lived in the bush all my life and I don’t know how to write about the cities. That’s why I choose the bush.
I love writing about it and I love the country. The descriptive part of it comes to me very easily.
I can see it in my head as I write because I’ve been over all the areas that I write about because if I haven’t lived there or worked there during my working life, I make a point of visiting them before the book comes out.
An Outback road trip mystery
Jenny Wheeler: Now your latest book, the one we’re particularly focusing on today, is Bloodwood Creek. And it’s a road trip mystery in a way. It’s set in the Northern Territory. And you’ve seemed to gradually move from family stories to more crime mysteries.
Some of the ones you’ve done recently have had an element of crime, but this is really a crime mystery, isn’t it?
Kerry McGinnis: Yes, it’s more about crime and about the family saga things that I was more accustomed to write. But with me anyway, as I have written more books, I have grown more confident and moved away from the things that I started with that I seem to know most about and so I’m chancing my arm a bit here in the crime field.
I take care not to have lots of scientific details or anything like that because my characters are just normal people caught up in these circumstances who wouldn’t necessarily know about DNA and all the rest of it, so I don’t go there.
Jenny Wheeler: But it’s an extremely popular niche and it gives you freshness too, doesn’t it? It helps keep it interesting for you.
Kerry McGinnis: Yes, you can’t write about the same thing over and over again or your readers will soon get tired of it.
Jenny Wheeler: Your character, Emily, is a strong-willed young woman who’s searching for her cousin, Aspen, who’s gone missing. And at the beginning, it just seems that she might have. wandered off with some friends and decided to join a commune or something.
But as the story progresses, Emily gets a stronger and stronger premonition that Aspen is in real danger.
And the criminal element becomes stronger as you go along. That introduces that question about plotting and pants and whether you knew at the beginning that you were going to be writing a heavy criminal element or whether it developed as you went along.
Setting, then character, then story
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, my stories develop as they go along. I start with a locality. I decide whereabouts in the Australian Outback I will set the story. And then I get my first character and give them a problem.
Everybody needs a problem, and a desire to do something about it. And then I just keep going and occasionally if I get stuck a good night’s sleep usually works and I wake up in the morning and think, Oh, we could go there.
I guess I’m definitely a pantser. I usually have a vague glimmering of how the end will be and I work towards that. But the middle is always a mystery even to me.
Jenny Wheeler: And has it always been like that? I know your first two books were actually memoirs, weren’t they? You weren’t doing the fictional thing at the beginning, but has it changed as you’ve gone along?
Kerry McGinnis: The first two books were easy because I was only writing what I remembered. When I say easy, they were comparatively easy as far as making anything up went.
And the other ones the first one after that was, the next one after the autobiographies was The Waddi Tree, and that was a story I’d had in mind for a very long time, so I had the whole of that in my head, but after that, it was just, ‘let’s see where it goes.’
You can always delete it and do the page over again.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. that’s right. This book I’ve read somewhere was inspired by the war cemetery on the Adelaide River. And I wondered if you could tell us how that sparked into a work of fiction.
The beautiful serenity of Adelaide River
Kerry McGinnis: I was traveling before COVID. I used to travel every year, somewhere in Australia, and occasionally overseas, and I went through Katherine. I think I had gone to Darwin for a fortnight’s holiday because I’ve never been to Darwin before. This was a fair while ago.
And while I was there, I was looking around for things to do. And I took a trip down to the Katherine Gorge because that was another thing I hadn’t seen. And on the way back, we stopped at Adelaide River, and I took a walk around the town and it was late when I got there. I couldn’t get into the cemetery, but it was so peaceful and serene.
It was such a beautiful spot and so sad. I went back next morning before we left and I walked amongst the stones and looked at the dates and worked out how young all the people there were, and I thought, I really must get this into a book sometime. And then when the opportunity came with Bloodwood Creek, I thought, ideal, I’ll use that.
Jenny Wheeler: So those were Second World War graves, were they?
Kerry McGinnis: Yes, and the dead from the (World War II – 1942) bombing in Darwin, the Post Office, so there were civilians there as well, but mostly they were soldiers, airmen, and naval people.
Jenny Wheeler: Both Aspen and Emily are strong characters in different ways. And I also gather from what I’ve read that the inspiration for them came from strong women that you knew in your own early days. Could you expand for us a little on that?
Kerry McGinnis: All my female characters, unless I want them to be real wimps, are based on the women I knew growing up in the bush, the wives and sisters and mothers sometimes of the people that lived on the stations.
And back then it was no easy task to be a woman on a station in an all male dominated area, and to be left alone, sometimes for weeks at a time with just the kids, or if you didn’t have any kids, just yourself and the Aboriginal women at the station.
And the resilience of Outback station women
Because the men were always away mustering or grading or doing something and you had to be a fairly resilient sort of person to handle whatever came along and to not just give into the loneliness because it was a very lonely life for them. They might get to town once or twice a year and they would get to have other women’s company on rare occasions, like the annual race meeting or the annual camp draft or something like that.
There was no ducking out for coffee or picking up a phone because there were no phones to talk to your friends and their mail was usually once a week or once a fortnight. So, it was a very lonely place for a woman to be.
I just used a template, if you like, of the women that I remember meeting as a child.
Jenny Wheeler: We’re talking about your childhood quite a bit. So perhaps we might right now at this point ask you a little bit about that extraordinary childhood.
You have featured in those two memoirs that we mentioned Pieces of Blue and Heart Country were those memoirs. Tell us a little bit about what did happen in your childhood and how you were raised.
Kerry McGinnis: My mother died when I was six and my father was responsible for five children, one of them at that time 12 months old. It wasn’t an easy time for him.
He was a Second World War veteran. He’d been in Tobruk and he’d suffered badly during the war which resulted in depression and injuries as well, so he wasn’t at all what you’d call healthy. These days you’d say he had mental problems, but
He was badly shell shocked, as they used to call it after the war, and he was a nervous wreck for years after that. But he battled along in town with us for a while.
He had a career. He was a fitter and turner. And we were in Renmark when the big flood came in 56. And everything was flooded in the town and he decided to get out.
So we went to Sydney, God knows why and he got a job there in Nuffield Engineering, and then one day he was just fed up, I think it was a very bad traffic jam, we got caught in, and we were driving somewhere and he said, I’ve had this, we’ve got to get out.
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Father said ‘What about we go bush?’
He said, what about we go back to the bush? He was asking us, I was, what, I was 12 and I’m the second eldest in the family, and we all agreed this was a good idea, because we loved traveling, we’d been traveling all our lives, really, he never stayed anywhere very long.
So that’s what we did, we went back to the bush, and eventually the next year, actually, that was the year the Sputnik came over, so that would be 57, and the next year we were in Alice Springs, and he bought a four-wheeled trailer and 12 horses, 11 or 12 horses.
And we got the trailer towed out of town, and to a place with a yard and started breaking in the horses. And then we had a wagon and our transport and off we went. So that was the beginning of it. We were all thrilled. We didn’t have to go to school.
So that was a big thing, although I came to regret it really greatly afterwards. He taught us bush skills and how to ride and work horses. And we just kept traveling and moving until we finally were old enough to work when I was 14, and then we started contracting on stations and a little after that we took up droving.
Jenny Wheeler: In those couple of years, how did he actually feed you?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh in those days on the stations, you could always get work because he would take on whatever job, go to a station, and he was camp cook once, another time he cooked at the station, he was horse breaking, he was a a bore man looking after bore, he was a pumper, whatever they wanted done he could do it.
Men of his generation raised in the bush, they had a tremendous amount of skills, he was a farrier and a welder.
He could do anything with horses and he was a very good cattleman. So if nothing else, he could work in a stock camp.
Catching up on missed education
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. So then how did you manage to get that education that enabled you to become a writer in later life? Were there important mentors for you that came along
Kerry McGinnis: When we bought the station in 62, I think it was. And then we sold it and bought another one in 66 where we stayed for 40 years. And it was while we were there, we didn’t have a mail service, because it was a very remote place. But it was while we were there that I decided, because I was getting nowhere with my writing.
I couldn’t spell and my English was appalling. But I kept, writing stuff and sending it off, hopefully, to magazines. And not getting anywhere, and I decided I had better get some education. I wrote to the Secondary Correspondence School in Brisbane, and enrolled with them in English and some other subject.
What was it? I think it was ancient history. Don’t ask me why. It just seemed the only thing that I could possibly do because all the others looked too intimidating on the sheet they sent me.
I’ve got high distinction for the English and on the strength of that I wrote to the Queensland University and asked would they like to let me do distance education with them, so I got my arts degree that way.
Jenny Wheeler: And how old were you when you started that course?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, I was in my twenties. I remember it took me I think it took me eight years from the time I started with the secondary subjects until I got my degree because I was working full time and as I say, we didn’t have a mail service.
We used to get our mail once a month, we would drive over to the next property, which happened to be an aboriginal mission and we’d pick it up there once a month and send it out once a month.
Getting assignments in on time was always a big problem.
Jenny Wheeler: And you mentioned that you’d been writing already. Was this something that was just inside you that you wanted to do right from the beginning? When did you first start writing or do you remember not a time when you didn’t write?
Story telling a way of life around the fire
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, I started when I was nine years old.
Jenny Wheeler: Did you?
Kerry McGinnis: Yes, I used to write for the Piccaninnies Pages and the old Women’s Own magazine, which was around in the 50s.
Jenny Wheeler: And what sorts of things did you write then?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, little poems and little stories and anagrams and things like that. I was always a very good reader and because I’d had rheumatic fever when I was nine and wasn’t allowed to play sport I read tremendously. I always had my nose in the book and they had this little thing was the on the Piccaninnies Pages where you wrote a little story made up entirely out of the titles of books you’d read. That was a doddle for me because I’d read hundreds of them.
Jenny Wheeler: And where did you get those books when you were in the country?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh no, we were living in town at this time. We didn’t actually leave. This was before the 56th flood. We didn’t actually leave till after the flood. Because I was born in 45.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s very interesting because going back to your books one reviewer said “anything McGinness writes begs to be read aloud around a campfire.” And it seems to me that the storytelling aspect of writing was also very important to you. And I wondered if you’d had stories read to you when you were younger or how you’d actually, got into that storytelling thing.
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, I think that we probably did. All my family has always read. We probably did have stories read to us when we were kids, but I don’t remember. I barely remember my mother at all. And for the rest of it there was nothing like the bush to encourage storytelling because the only entertainment of an evening in yarning.
You sit around the fire and tell stories or you play cards. And I was never any good at cards because I’m hopeless at maths.
Father was a very keen card player and he was always losing his temper with me because I couldn’t add up quickly enough. We used to talk and, you’d get a few old blokes together and listen to them and it was just fascinating.
Kery McGinness: I wrote with words instead of paint
The things they’d seen, the things they’d done, the places they’d been and I suppose I that probably spurred me on a bit too.
Jenny Wheeler: There seems to be a strong element of that rural storytelling in the Australian culture. Generally, you think about the glamorization of Ned Kelly and Banjo Patterson’s Man from Snowy River. There’s a strong thread of rural storytelling. Do you identify as being part of that? Do you see that as a river that flows onto your banks?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, I don’t know. I can recognize that it’s there. But it’s part of the Australian vote for the underdog, isn’t it? And the anti-government type of thing that’s part of the Australian character, not always admirable, but it’s there.
And I suppose there might be a little bit of it, but It makes a good story if the little guy wins in the end anyway, so I suppose any writer could use that.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. reviewers have also commented about, of course, your landscapes, how wonderful you are at rendering landscapes and comparing it to a painterly eye. Did you ever see it that way yourself? Were you ever drawn to art as well or painting?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh yes, I did. When I was a kid, I really liked watercolors, and I used to paint scenery, but as I got older, apart from the fact I didn’t have paints, I don’t know, when we were in the bush, we couldn’t get that sort of stuff.
But… I would sketch a bit, and then when I got some paints and started again, I was really disappointed because I could never reproduce what I could see and so I gave it up and I thought if I can’t paint, I will do it with words.
And I suppose that’s why, because I see it as if I was looking at a picture and, but I haven’t the skill to make the picture live. I have to use words instead.
Jenny Wheeler: How did you find a publisher? Did you find a publisher and they encouraged you to do the memoirs or did you do the memoirs and then look for a publisher?
Lyrical personal memoirs a beginniing
Kerry McGinnis: I dreamt of writing a book, but I was mostly into short stories and competitions and I had a selection of short stories that later became Pieces of Blue. And one of them I was so pleased with that I dared to enter it into the Meanjin contest.
And much to my surprise, I won. And it drew the attention of a a woman in Melbourne, and she contacted me and asked me, did I have any more like that? And I said, yes, I had quite a few of them. So, she asked me to send them along and I did.
And it was she who took them to Penguin. They agreed that if there were some linking stories. linking sections written to make it into a flowing story, rather than just a series of short stories.
Because as she kindly pointed out, no unheard-of writer with no history behind it ever gets a short stories published.
She said ‘They do that once you become successful.’ I thought, oh, pardon me, . But anyway, that was how it started. And then, that was going to be it for me., I was just going to be that one book and then I was going to go back and write short stories and articles for magazines and things, and she said, what about to sequel?
You’re only 16 or 18 or whatever you are at the end of the book. She said, what about the rest of it? So, I wrote the second one. They took that, and then I thought maybe I could do a fiction one too, so then I started on the Waddi Tree.
Jenny Wheeler: Just explain for people who aren’t familiar with it, what the Meanjin contest is.
Kerry McGinnis: Oh Meanjin is, as I understand it Australia’s foremost literary magazine, so it’s a very prestigious magazine to have your work appear in, and they had quite a healthy prize back in those days too, so I was very thrilled about it.
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Tough times at the Top End
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. You mentioned that you were working full time. What kinds of jobs were you doing while you were writing these books?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, there were three of us with a station to run, and we only had the three of us. And during the 70s – which was the time of the first beef crisis, when you couldn’t sell your cattle. And there was a meat beef mountain somewhere in the world that they were trying to get rid of, and nobody was buying Australian cattle anymore.
And it was a very bad time that coincided with some nasty tropical cyclones in the north. and because it was all open range, no fences or anything. It was just getting towards the end of the 70s that the American government said we will not buy any more Australian cattle until they’ve all been tested for TB and brucellosis.
So we had to on top of all our other problems, we had to put up a boundary fence, an internal fence, and we had to test every beast on the property, and we could only sell them under a green tail tag, which meant that they had to go and get tested. To a designated meat works. They were sold at a set price.
I don’t know who set the price, the government or somebody set the price and that was it, take it or leave it. If you didn’t, you couldn’t sell at all. It was very hard times and we were all, three of us, my brother and sister and I were working flat out all the time just to keep the place running and, to get by.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned before we started on the recording that you also did journalism work for an American magazine sometime in those years. Tell us about that. You mentioned that the Americans were fascinated by your lifestyle there in the Outback.
Kerry McGinnis: Yes. I think that we were where they were a hundred or so years ago as far in the stock industry, because they didn’t have the big country anymore. I don’t know when their country was first fenced over there, but the Gulf Country, the Kimberley, and the Top End and the Territory was the last in Australia to be boundary fenced and to get dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
It was a very expensive time and I think that it was something completely new. to the Americans to read about what their country probably was like, 100 or more years before. Anyone that was interested in America in cattle and horses found it interesting. And they didn’t have scrubbers, they didn’t have dogs for pulling down cattle.
A country like no other
They didn’t have the wild horses or anything like that like we had over here and particularly they didn’t have the space. Ours was not a particularly huge property, but we had 900 square miles and our neighbor had 3000. And you just don’t get areas of land like that anywhere else in the world, really,
Jenny Wheeler: How many cattle did you have on 900 square miles?
Kerry McGinnis: Not a great number. I think we’ve got up to five and a half thousand probably at our best. But it’s very poor country. You have to understand the country up in the north is very mineral deficient and it’s very tough country for anything to live in, including stock.
It does better now that they’ve got Brahmins there. But back then in the 70s, it was all Shorthorns, and they’re British breeds, so you can understand they’re not really suited to the tropics.
Jenny Wheeler: Your dad’s life sounds like it was in a way rather sad. Did it end better? Did he have a good end
Kerry McGinnis: He grew old and he died in Charters Towers in a home because he was no longer able to get the medical help that he needed out on the station. He couldn’t stay on the station. He had to go somewhere where he could get medical help and assistance.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes.
Kerry McGinnis: But he lived to be 85, which, considering the life he’d had, wasn’t so bad, really.
Jenny Wheeler: He must have had some good years when you were all on that farm together.
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, yes, yeah. And they’re not farms, Jenny, there’s stations.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, sorry. Station.
Kerry McGinnis: There’s a big difference between a farm and a station.
The ‘secret’ of Kerry McGinness’s career
Jenny Wheeler: I accept your rebuke very much! But turning away from specifically talking about the books. If there’s one thing as quotes the secret of your success in your writing career, what would it be?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, I think persistence. I meet a lot of people, all writers do, and they say; Oh yes, I’m going to write a book one day.
And you say to them, So what have you written so far?
Oh nothing. I’m waiting for the kids to grow up. I’m waiting for us to retire. I’m waiting for whatever.
And I always think if you don’t start today, you are never going to write a book.
Because you can talk about it, you can dream about it, but you don’t actually get a book out of doing that.
You have to sit down and work at it every day. So I think persistence is the main thing.
Of course, it helps to have a plot and it’s a great advantage to have a bit of talent, but neither of those things will do you any good unless you’ve got the persistence to actually do it.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And even now, do you still have a routine? What would a typical writing day look like for you?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, I write every day except Sunday. I wrote this morning. I went to see my doctor. I came home. I wrote, had a cup of tea. Did some work around the house. Practised on my music a bit. And then had my lunch and then came and did this. But every day, without fail, I write except on a Sunday.
Jenny Wheeler: And do you use a laptop?
Kerry McGinnis: No, I’ve a desktop Mac.
Kerry McGinness is an life long book lover
Jenny Wheeler: And when you said practice your music, what music do you play?
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, in my old age, I’m learning to play the harp.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, beautiful. So, we always like to ask our guests about their reading tastes. This is very much a podcast for people who are keen readers. We might even say voracious readers. What do you like to read? And are you, or have you ever been a binge reader as such?
Kerry McGinnis: I suppose so. I collect books. I have a huge collection of books and I like to get everything that my favourite author of the moment has ever written. I’ve got shelves and shelves of things like Kate Morton and Robert Galbraith and Jodie Picoult and, oh, it goes on and on. Reginald Hill, Linwood Barclay. Robin Hobb. I love Robin Hobb’s books. And I’ve recently discovered Rebecca Yarros. I used to be very fond of Mary Stewart, but the wretched woman went and died on me when she was in her 80s, so that was a bit unfortunate.
I always feel a good writer should be given an extra 20 years, as long as she agrees to keep writing,
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s wonderful.
Kerry McGinnis: There’s so many disappointed people when she stops. Yes, I read everything. I read poetry. I love Shakespeare’s sonnets. I read his plays, but I cannot be happy unless I’ve got a book waiting to be read and one that I am currently reading.
I read all the time. It’s very anti social, but I live alone and I can read during my meals and in the evening and, instead of watching TV and stuff like that, I tend to read.
In the Penguin nest for her whole career
Jenny Wheeler: And you still read paper books not digitally.
Kerry McGinnis: Oh no, give me a book I can hold any day. I spend a part of every day on the computer. I don’t need any more screen time.
Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time, if there was one thing about your creative career that you’d change, what would it be?
There may not be anything. It’s just, if anything came to mind. Yeah.
Kerry McGinnis: No, I really can’t think of anything. I just blunder along from this to that book after book. And as long as I can keep writing them, I’m quite happy about it. I don’t spend much time. I want to save. Once they’re published, I’m sort of all focused on the next one. so sometimes I even have to go back and read a book if I know I’m going to be interviewed about a thing and think I’d better find out what it’s about, because I’ll have forgotten, not forgotten the book, but forgotten the details, the characters names and things like that.
Jenny Wheeler: And how long does it take you to write one? What’s your publishing schedule like?
Kerry McGinnis: I do one every year at the moment. And while in the height of the COVID, I did two because, the library was closed. That was a disaster. The gym was closed. That wasn’t far behind it. The my local book group wasn’t meeting anymore. I couldn’t see friends. So I wrote two books to make up for it, just something to do.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve been faithful to Penguin all through your career?
Kerry McGinnis: That’s true. They took me on. So, it seems just, proper that I stick with them.
Jenny Wheeler: And it’s a prestigious mark to have even today, isn’t it?
Kerry McGinnis: Yes, everybody knows Penguin, even if they are now Penguin Random House, but everybody knows the little bird in the orange cover.
Writing is a daily habit for Kerry McGinnis
Jenny Wheeler: So how far ahead would you write Bloodwood Creek? I guess you finished that 12 months ago, did you, or eight months ago anyway?
Kerry McGinnis: Yes, I have since finished another one, which is now with Penguin, and I’ve started on a third, which is up to chapter six.
Jenny Wheeler: And I know it’s a kind of hackneyed question, but people love to know. We know about Adelaide, the Adelaide Creeks River Cemetery, but where do you get your ideas from? Have you got a notebook there of ideas still ready to work on?
Kerry McGinnis: No, not really. They just seem to come. As I say, I get the setting and the people and think of a problem and some way of resolving it and it just seems to flow from that. I know, I was told once by an editor that I should sit down and make a plan and write it all out in chapters, what’s going to happen next and how this will work and how that’ll work.
And I thought about it and I thought, no, that’s not me, I can’t do that. And admittedly, the way I write, if I change my mind, it means a lot of rewriting, but that’s all right, because I do it as I go. If I’ve decided that she’s not going to live here, she’s going to live there, or something like that, I just go back at that point and change it all the way through.
And it’s also another way of editing as you go and picking up mistakes. That saves you doing it at the end when you’re in a, might be in a hurry and might miss them because you’re just worn out from reading all these words over and over again. I like to do it as I go.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Yeah. What’s next for Kerry as author? What have you got on your desk over the next 12 months?
Kerry McGinnis: I will finish this one that I’m working on now. And then I have two more one was a kid’s book that I wrote years ago. And never went anywhere with, so it needs rewriting. And another one is an idea for a fantasy novel that’s just an idea at the moment. That I’ll, one of these days I’ll finish.
I keep thinking, I thought I’d do it this year, but then I got this other idea for the book that I’m writing on now. And I thought, oh I’ll just wait. I’ve got an arrangement with the Almighty that I can’t die until I finish all the plans I’ve made. Or at least… I hope I’ve got that arrangement with him.
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Seeking new directions
Jenny Wheeler: As far as you’re concerned, you have.
Kerry McGinnis: Yeah.
Jenny Wheeler: The fantasy novel is that also set in rural Australia.
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, no. No, I wrote a trilogy. Mainly during the during the COVID lockdowns. And it’s an imaginary country and with all the fantasy things. It’s saving the throne, saving the country, defeating the enemy. doing away with all the baddies. And it ran into three books but Penguin wasn’t interested in them because they said it’s not the sort of genre you write and I suppose having invested so much in my books.
They don’t want me to switch horses in midstream, so I sent the first one to England, and the other two I published myself. I had self published friends who had a desktop publishing thing, and they did it. So this would follow on from there. It’s not part of the trilogy, but if it ever gets done, it’s going to be set in the same country.
Jenny Wheeler: And did you write that under your name? Kerry
Kerry McGinnis: Yep. Yeah, no point. Trying to hide who you are. I wrote it. I’ll stand by it.
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just that they do say that Penguin’s quite right, that you get a following of people who like certain sorts of books and they often don’t follow an author across if they do something radically different. And fantasy is definitely a acquired taste. You either love it or don’t.
Kerry McGinnis: And there’s millions of fantasy books out there, just millions of them.
Jenny Wheeler: but let us know what they’re called in case people are interested in following them up.
The fantasy trilogy
Kerry McGinnis: Oh, the first one is called Far Seeker
Jenny Wheeler: Far seeker. F a r?
Kerry McGinnis: S EE K E R.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes.
Kerry McGinnis: And the next one is called The Burning Mountain,
Jenny Wheeler: Yep.
Kerry McGinnis: and the last one is called The Crow Road.
Jenny Wheeler: And so you self-published two of them. What happened to the first?
Kerry McGinnis: The first one I sent off to oh, I can’t think what they’re called now. In England
Jenny Wheeler: Something like Sourcebooks or one of those?
Kerry McGinnis: in the UK. Yeah, I can’t remember which one it was. Which was a mistake because I found out that they the British publishers don’t freight their books around the world. If you go to an American publisher, apparently they do some of them anyway.
Which means, you have to get it off the internet if you’re in Australia. You won’t find it in Australia.
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah. No, but people are used to buying on the internet these
Kerry McGinnis: That’s true. These days it doesn’t matter so much, but it would have been a big blow back before the internet, because the only way you would have got it was to know somebody in Britain or to go there yourself.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right.
Kerry McGinnis: And that seems a long way, even for me, to go for a book.
Where to find Kerry – probably not online
Jenny Wheeler: Now Kerry do you enjoy interacting with your readers and where can they find you Online?
Kerry McGinnis: I actually can’t, because I don’t do much online stuff. I’m absolutely useless with a computer, except for… Writing on it and getting emails when you saw how much trouble I had getting on to a zoom meeting. So no, I’m afraid I don’t have a blog page or anything like that, but they can always write to me if they want to.
People used to before the internet came into being.
Jenny Wheeler: And do you do book tours these days?
Kerry McGinnis: I’ve cut down on them. The publishing houses have cut down on them drastically. But I do interviews and things like that and I had a book launch in the library for Bloodwood Creek and the local library, that sort of thing. Talk on the ABC Book Hour and things like that.
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah. Look, that’s lovely. And you can always be contacted through your publisher too, if they, if you’re really keen to get hold of you.
Kerry McGinnis: That’s absolutely correct,
Jenny Wheeler: Look, it’s been wonderful talking. Thank you. You’ve had a remarkable life and I think it’s fantastic the way that you’ve continued on how many books have you got published now, 12 or 13 or?
Kerry McGinnis: I think I’ve got, I think I might have 15. I’m not quite sure with Penguin and the other three that the fantasy ones.
Titles that inspire images in the mind
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah. Actually, I don’t think I was including the memoirs in that. So yeah, that’s a remarkable achievement and I love the names. the names tell you exactly what you can expect from the story. Croc Country, The Roadhouse, Mallee Sky, Out of Alice, Wild Horse Creek. They just summon up images, even the titles do. So has the next one coming got a title yet?
Kerry McGinnis: No, not yet. The title that I had on it, the publisher didn’t like much, every so often they title a book. Fair enough, they’ve got to sell it. the book, the cover and the title has to say, pick me up and read me. And I’m not particularly good at titles. I leave it to them.
Jenny Wheeler: Great. Look, thank you so much for your time today, Kerry. It’s been a pleasure to talk.
Kerry McGinnis: Thank you, Jenny. It’s been lovely to meet you.
If you enjoyed Kerry you might also enjoy…
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LISTEN TO ADRIAN HYLAND
Next Week on Binge Reading – Romantic Suspense at its Best
Sharon Sala one of the most successful romantic suspense and contemporary sweet romance authors writing today, with over 100 books published, a rollcall of awards and a legion of fans who follow her every book. She discusses her latest suspense series, secrets and Shadows and the importance of her Native American heritage..
That’s next week on Binge Reading.
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That’s it for today. See you next time, and Happy Reading!