The announcement is out folks – I’ve signed a book contract with IFWG Publishing Australia to publish my novel, The Wildcard.
Quick, go here to see the full announcement! 😀
I began writing The Wildcard in 2013, while I was studying, working and having babies all at once (so never let anyone tell you there’s no time to write, my friends). I based it on a concept I’d come up with twenty years earlier and had written a 10k short on at the time, but done nothing with since. It’d sat gathering dust on a succession of hard drives until I stumbled over it two decades later.
That original 10k piece, as poorly written and undergraduate as it was, was about a gathering of card players on a city-building rooftop, and what they played for was not money.
Every word in that early piece had to be ditched, of course – my writing was pretty awful when I was 20 years old, so you won’t find any of it in the novel when it’s published. But the concept snagged my attention when I found it again in 2013. Something in it was… interesting. So I started rewriting that rooftop scene, just to see where it would go.
And so The Wildcard was born. 😍🤩
And now it’s going to be published.
You’ll be hearing plenty more about it as the journey to publication goes on, folks, because you can be sure I’ll be banging on about it loud and often. But until then, here’s a hint of what it’s about:
Here's a snippet of The Wildcard!
Jem doesn’t do risk. He doesn’t play games with chance. At least not until his ex-girlfriend shows up on his doorstop in tears and tricks him into signing for an impossible debt. Thrust into an underworld of card players who bet anything they can think of – favours, information, secrets, even coffee – Jem has to figure his way out of a debt he doesn’t understand, in a world where the rules are twisting, complex and never explained. Relying only on a woman who plays life like she plays a game of poker, and drawn to a young man who offers temptations Jem’s not sure he can trust, there is only one thing he is clear on: the consequences of losing in this crowd. Because the last guy to owe a debt like his was just found floating face down in the ocean, and if Jem doesn’t sort this out fast, he could be next.