Newsletter - October 2024

Introduction

Welcome to both my new and regular subscribers. This is the twelve-month anniversary of my running writing newsletter, so if you are new, do visit the archive and have a glance through the past year of articles. And if you enjoy what you read, pass it on to a friend.

This edition is a special one where I celebrate the launch of my new novel, The Truth about My Daughter. When you start your writing journey, it is impossible to visualise where it will take you. It is just like having a baby. Before they are born, you cannot imagine the unique person who has been entrusted to you to nurture to adulthood and the joys and heartaches you will experience along the way. September has been a huge month as I introduced my book baby into the world. While this is the focus of my introduction, I have still written plenty of other interesting articles in the rest of my newsletter unrelated to my launch! Make yourself a cuppa, sit back and enjoy the read.

The launch of my debut novel was exhilarating, over-whelming and emotional. I could never have imagined that so many friends, colleagues, writers, and family would give up a Saturday afternoon to spend it celebrating The Truth about My Daughter launch. I was a bundle of nerves leading up to the event but was very fortunate to have local crime writer, Poppy Gee, as my interviewer. She was so calm and reassuring, that everything flowed smoothly once we started. 

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A lot of our best fiction writing happens when we are not thinking about it. The magic begins when we shift our thinking from the logical part of our brain, the neocortex, to the feeling, emotional part of our brain, the limbic system. As someone who loves to write lists, to plan and to feel in control, it was a reminder that I need to freefall when writing, to just let go. While breathing life into the characters who now live between the pages of my book, I had to give them the opportunity to develop and grow and navigate their way past the plot. And now that my characters are out in the world, they are being reshaped and reimagined by every reader who journeys alongside them as the narrative unfolds.

This is at the heart of good fiction. Each reader experiences a book through the prism of their own experience and may see things in there that I, as the author, never considered. As the writer, I too have been changed by the characters and Poppy’s questions allowed me to reflect on that bit of magic in new and fascinating ways.

The day was one of big emotions with so many special moments and wonderful people to share them with. 

My very talented writing group, Brisbane Scribes were all there in the front row, dressed in blue and white. I love these feisty women who are so generous with their time, feedback, wine, and love. I could not imagine writing a book without them beside me.

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Left to Right - Jenny Adams, Jane Connolly, Marnie Bolton, Jo Skinner, Bernie Condren, Tatia Power.

The launch would not have happened without Avid Reader who are so supportive of local authors and made my event special.  

If you missed my Avid Reader launch, it is not too late to book for my Books at Stones event on the 3 October, where I will be interviewed by the fabulous Scribe, Jane Connolly. I look forward to seeing you there.

Books matter. Words matter. Do go and support your local bookshops and writing festivals. Words do change the world.​

I invite you to come along to the inaugural Sunshine Coast Hinterland Writers Festival where I will be on a panel with Carly-Jay Metcalf and Kirsty Iltners discussing Truth. Author Janet Lee will be chairing. There are so many great authors and events to enjoy at this festival. Check out the programme.

Or join me at the Brisbane Writers Convention on 27 October where the theme is connection and I’ll will be speaking about writers needing readers needing writers.

Now I have one more thing to ask. If you enjoyed reading The Truth about My Daughter, please leave a review on Goodreads.

GP Wisdom

I recently had to update my driver’s licence and was able to do this online. When I had completed the questions, there was one final one and it asked if I was happy to become an organ donor. If you haven’t read my last newsletter, I invite you to go to the archive and have a read of my review of Breath, by Carly-Jay Metcalf. 

Or head to my webpage where I have copy of our pandemic anthology, Stories from the Heart which you can download. Head to page 205 and read the story about a young woman on dialysis who receives a kidney transplant during COVID.

If these two remarkable stories of courage and survival don't sway you to leave your organs behind in the event of an untimely death, then I don’t know what will. 

Carly-Jay Metcalfe has been awarded The Courier Mail People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award for her memoir, Breath. It was a beautiful moment to see Carly walk up to receive her award, one so richly deserved. Do yourself a favour and grab a copy of Breath. Here is Joanna Bone, maker of the trophy standing next to Carly-Jay.

As a very junior doctor, only two weeks into my internship, I was asked to discuss organ donation with a family who had just lost their young son. It made an enormous impact on me, and I still think about Simon years later. I had no experience of being the person responsible for making decisions about life and death. I had chosen a small rural hospital, the Northwest Regional Hospital in Burnie, Tasmania where there were four interns who did nearly everything with little supervision. My first rotation was in the emergency department on my own, with a very experienced nurse. The shifts were brutal – ten twelve-hour days followed by two days off then ten twelve-hour nights followed by two days off.

Simon was my first death, and you can read about my experience at the end of my newsletter. I wrote this reflection many years after the event, and it is still vivid in my imagination. It was the first time I’d had to confront mortality and discuss the option of organ donation with a grieving family. I had no training, no knowledge about this very important topic and little experience of death. I shudder when I remember that awful night and only hope that my ineptitude did not add to the family’s grief and loss.

Since then, I have had many patients on waiting lists hoping to get the life-changing call that a compatible organ is available. I was working in a rural town when I met Wendy who was a double lung transplant recipient for cystic fibrosis. I only met her a few years after her transplant and managed her medications, vaccinations, and complications. Unfortunately, she experienced many problems and spent a great deal of her life travelling back to Brisbane to hospital where she was often admitted for prolonged periods of time. Her quality of life was poor, but she was fortunate enough to experience several important milestone events because of her transplant. Her sister’s wedding, the birth of her nephew and a longed-for holiday in the Whitsundays. Despite her recurrent illness, shortness of breath and large number of immunosuppressive medications, she was very appreciative of every precious moment with friends and family, and I was privileged to share some of those moments through the photographs that she always brought in to show me.

Another young woman I see regularly is so grateful her mother had a liver transplant after being diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis resulting in liver failure. Her mother has been gifted the opportunity to meet her grandchildren and to play an active role in their lives. Organ donation is not only a gift for the recipient but for their families, friends and loved ones.

After you have finished reading this, I invite you to log on and donate your organs. Heaven knows we need them here, and whatever happens to us in the beyond, I am confident that you won’t be needing the bits and pieces from your physical body. Become a hero and possibly save a life. Become immortal and gift a family precious time with a loved one because your heart is beating in someone’s chest, your lungs are oxygenating their blood, your kidney and liver are maintaining homeostasis when you are just a memory. It is the greatest legacy any of us could leave.    

 I am very proud to carry this card next to my driver’s licence.

Running

Jane Connolly, who will be interviewing me on 3 October at Books at Stones, rang me after attending the Byron Bay Writers Festival. While telling me about all her favourite sessions, Jane read out one of the quotes she had written down, that writing a novel is like running a marathon.

It is absolutely true. Running a marathon is a gruelling, long, and often painful experience. Before taking on this endurance event, there are weeks and preferably months of preparation. Lining up at the start line of a marathon is the end of a long journey and even with the best preparation there is the risk you won’t emerge at the finish line. As we saw at the recent Olympics, eleven of the ninety-one women who started the marathon did not finish -DNF.

We all witnessed the extraordinary finish by Sifan Hassan, who ran in an extraordinary time of 2:22:55 breaking the Olympic record, but equally inspiring was Kinzang Lhamo from Bhutan who finished last in 3:52:59 and walked the final two kilometres with people cheering her along. The crowd gave her a standing ovation even though she finished nearly an hour behind the next runner. Her finish was just as inspiring as she did not quit – DNQ.

When I started writing, I never imagined I could write a novel. I remember attending a workshop where the presenter said that the secret to writing a novel was to finish it. DNQ.

Running just over 42K is a long way and there is no way to do it other than to run every single step. It means getting up early to train, eating well, not drinking too much and often saying no to social events. It requires discipline and passion and a desire to be at the start line and emerge at the finish line a marathoner. It means long tough bits en route where you just want to stop running and swear you will never, ever sign up to run another marathon. When I attended writer, Michelle Upton’s event for her latest release, Emergency Exit Only, at Avid Reader, she describes her own dark moment running a marathon. She wanted to stop running at the 30K mark when another participant turned to her and said, you’ve got this, you can do it, this is what you trained for, and just like that she found the inspiration she needed to push through and keep going.

When you decide to write your novel, treat it like an extreme sport. Set aside writing times that you commit to as if you were training for a marathon, because you are. Some days will be tough and there will be voices whispering, just sleep a bit longer, leave it for today, you’re tired or busy or not good enough, and you will need to push through and write a few more words, knowing that you are nudging towards The End with every word you write. It is a good idea to eat well and look after yourself. Writing is not for the faint-hearted and there will be endless distractions and opportunities to procrastinate. Minimise the temptation to stop before you have a completed first draft by letting the people know what you are doing and how important it is to you.

Enlist help. Find another writer or tell your friend you are writing a book and ask them to keep you accountable. I find it helpful to send my words off to a couple of other scribes as I write, and I read their words in exchange. We give each other gentle feedback and encourage each other’s writing projects at our monthly meet ups.

Check out my writing section in the archive of newsletters. I have included seven pearls of writing wisdom in the first seven months of newsletters to prod you along as you keep writing, one word at a time. You may not be Hassan and blaze your way to the finish and your work may not be the recipient of a prestigious award, although you will never know if you don’t finish writing it. However, you may just be Lhamo with crowds cheering you along as you hobble along the final stretch and cross that finish line.

Keep going, one step, one word at a time. Don’t be a DNF. Become a DNQ however long it takes, however tough it feels.

Writing

If you are a writer, you will no doubt be familiar with the concept of plotting or pantsing. The plotter is the writer who spends time planning out their book before sitting down and writing it. The Pantser is someone who just sits down and free-writes with no idea where the story is going or where it will end. At nearly every book event I have attended the writer(s) are asked about their writing process and I am always fascinated at who plots and who flies by the seat of their pants.

Michelle Upton, award-winning writer of Terms of Inheritance and Emergency Exit Only, is a meticulous planner and had folders of information about the characters, their clothes, the settings and a scene by scene outline by the time she started writing Emergency Exit Only. Prolific speculative fiction author, Kylie Fennell, also describes herself as an obsessive planner. As she writes and creates whole worlds with unique customs, language, and detailed maps of each country, it is essential she is consistent for the entire series, and it is difficult to imagine doing that without a plan in place.

Surprisingly, several crime authors, including the best-selling Benjamin Stevenson are pantsers. At Avid Readers Penguin Noir event, Stevenson confided to his audience that he begins with an idea for an utterly improbable murder and then lets the story evolve as he writes, without a clear idea where it will end.

Most of us are plantsers, sitting somewhere between plotting and pantsing. I start with an idea and jot out a rough arc for the story, but once I start writing, the characters take on a life of their own and things rarely go as planned. I am unable to start writing without a plan and unable to stick to a plan once I start to write.

I recently read a fascinating piece by multi award-winning author Elif Shafak, who wrote about this duality using the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysis to illustrate that creatives have long been torn between structure and the playful freefall of leaning into an idea. In Shafak’s words, Dionysis is the god of theatre, music, poetry, creativity, and madness. He represents wild excess and unbridled joy. Donna Tart in her famous dark academia novel, The Secret History draws on the dark side of this god to illustrate the narcissism that grips her characters in their death spiral into violence and immorality.

This stands in sharp contrast to Apollo who represents harmony, order, balance, and logic. Two opposites, two extremes, both beckoning. While philosopher Niezsche believed that creative forms belong either to Apollo or Dionysis, I think most of us hover between rationality and restraint and the excesses of following our hearts and passions.

Every creative pursuit requires an idea and as we explore that idea, it is important to lean into Dionysian creativity and to brainstorm possibilities without structure or form to limit and contain where it might go. Once that idea takes shape, you will need to follow Apollonian principals at some stage to scaffold your idea and give it a shape. Some of you may not do that until you have completed a shitty first draft and others may build that scaffolding before you begin to write. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. What matters is having words on the page that can be edited, deleted and rewritten. A process is just that. It is a journey. Mostly it is fun but there are bound to be hiccups on the way. Delays, detours, and disasters. Some of us holiday without a map or plan and others book a tour where each day is prearranged. Many of us plan some bits of the holiday, like the accommodation, but allow the days to unfold once we arrive.

Just like the best planned holiday, your evolving book will surprise you in both positive and negative ways. We all know what happens to the best laid plans. As creatives we need to be open to employing at least some Apollonian strategy and then be prepared to follow the lure of Dionysian intuition and passion. To raise a glass and say cheers as we follow our imaginations to find the unexpected, the surprising and the alluring.

Book Reviews

Out of the Box – by Madonna King and Rebecca Sparrow

What if your brain finds it impossible to apply Apollonian strategy and is a constant tangled chaos demanding impulsive responses to every aspect of your life? While we can all do with a bit of Dionysian creativity and passion, there are aspects of our lives that require order and planning and the ability to stay focused on projects that are dull but necessary. When your executive functions are ruled by your impulses at school, at work and at home, it can make for a dysfunctional and challenging life.

As a GP working in a large Brisbane practice, I see an increasing number of children and adults presenting with symptoms suggesting neurodivergence with the expectation that I will be able to provide the resources to secure a diagnosis and management. Despite new Australian evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for ADHD launched on October 5, 2022, the pathways for diagnosis, support and long-term management of ADHD and autism remain opaque and costly to access with resources woefully inadequate. I know I am not the only health professional frustrated by the lack of accessible information for patients and their families. I was fortunate to read an advanced reader copy of an exciting new book that fills this gap.

King and Sparrow’s book, Out of the Box is a welcome and user-friendly guide that puts a human face on neurodivergence. They have interviewed families, educators, children, teens, and medical staff to discuss the difficulties that accompany a diagnosis of autism and/or ADHD providing unique and helpful insights into the challenges of navigating life when, ‘… the world isn’t made for people like me.’

The book begins with a helpful glossary of terms and highlights the need to move away from viewing autism through the medical model of disability to one that is strength-based and reminds us of the famous quote by Dr Stephen Shore, ‘If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.’ From this helpful introduction, the book explores each stage of life from early childhood to primary school, high school and beyond and doesn’t shy away from difficult topics like dating and life after school.

At the end of each chapter, helpful tips are summarised making it easy to go back and find information about important topics like seeking a diagnosis or making friends. The final section includes a succinct and easy to follow summary about the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) and there is an excellent list of resources and organisations that I know I will be referring to often.

This is an essential resource for medical staff, psychologists, educators, families, and anyone who wants to understand the nuts of bolts of what it means to live with a neurodivergent brain.

And if you happen to be in Brisbane on 29 October and want to come along to the launch of Out of the Box, you can book here. It promises to be a great night featuring music and stories from local teens.

A Piece of My Writing​

Most doctors remember the first time they lose a patient. For me it was very early in my career, two weeks after starting my internship. By choosing a small rural hospital, I was suddenly on the frontline in an emergency department with further help a phone call away. It is an event that has lingered in my memory, and one I often reflect on decades later.

The thing about starting out is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Unfortunately, medicine, like every profession is learning on the job. Your university degree prepares you with head knowledge and you do get some hands-on experience, but it is supervised, and the final responsibility does not rest with you until you graduate and find yourself making decisions alone.

On my first overnight shift, I came face to face with mortality. And immortality.

Immortality

I still remember my first death. I was a newly minted, inexperienced doctor with reckless confidence in the ability of cutting-edge medical care to preserve life. Death, or more to the point, dying had the taint of failure and was always shrouded with hope by offering the reassuring possibility of one more life-prolonging intervention.

            I was an intern at a small rural hospital, and for the first time had to make my own decisions with no comforting hierarchy of hovering and more senior doctors to cocoon me from the consequences. My survival depended on protocols, intuition, and instinct. The fateful night was the first of ten shifts in a row, with me the only doctor at the tiny emergency department, rostered on with an experienced older nurse, Lyn.

            My shift started at ten. I arrived straight after dinner with friends, wearing a stylish woollen dress purchased with my first pay packet and totally unsuited to a shift in the emergency department.

            The phone call came just before midnight. Distraught parents whose son had attempted suicide by hanging. They arrived fifteen minutes later. Simon was brought in not breathing.

            My heart raced while my brain caught up. I floundered inside the wilderness of uncertainty and disbelief. Emotion bubbled to the surface, clouding those protocols I could recite in my sleep. Simon was my age, his body robust and healthy, undamaged by the ravages of age or disease. My head took over. I plunged from being into doing and activated Code Blue.

            Adrenaline surging, I secured the airway while Lyn cut off his shirt and hooked him up to monitors. 

            My first live resuscitation.

            He was the youngest of four boys and had just completed a science degree with honours.

            Lyn got IV access. A nurse inflated his lungs between my chest compressions while the defibrillator was activated.

            I sweated into wool.

            After we shocked him, the monitor came alive with a heartbeat.

            Reinforcements arrived, and I was relived of my post.

            Simon was moved to a high-dependency bed, his family huddled in a tiny annexe clutching paper cups of International Roast.

            I learnt that our efforts resulted in brainstem function only, Simon’s higher centres deprived of oxygen too long. It was impossible to believe that the young man lying peaceful with monitors tracing his heartbeat and respirations would never regain consciousness. I was asked to speak to the family about organ donation.

            It was early morning, still dark, his parents wide eyed and hopeful. I blundered into their grief, the bearer of devastating news.

            I cried. They hugged me. We held each other up.

            Upstairs, Simon appeared to be sleeping, his skin pink and perfused.

            His heart pumped. Oxygen was distributed to those vital lifegiving organs inside a young man no longer with us.

            I discovered that wide, grey, inexplicable twilight zone between life and death.

            How much brain is lost before the vital force making us human is gone? Before our irises float empty in their orbits?

            The organ donation team was flown in, and an operating theatre set up. A macabre surgery that laid Simon to rest. A second departure.

            Back then, there was no debrief, just business as usual.

            Lyn, long since retired, keeps in touch.

            ‘I lost him,’ I confessed, the horror of my inexperience still vivid.

            She shrugged. ‘He was already lost when he arrived.’

            I still imagine his heart beating, his kidneys filtering blood, his lungs rising and falling, his essence making life possible for others.

            Was he lost or does Simon live on, his brief time extended with his cells revitalised, renewed, and immortalised?

            I’ll never know.