And congratulations Marlish!

One of our Book Length Project Group network members, Marlish Glorie has just published her new book, Sea Dog hotel. It is available as an e-book. Congratulations Marlish! I took the opportunity to ask the author all about her new baby:

Could you tell me a little bit about your background as a writer?        

I came late to writing in that I came late to reading. For me, reading and writing are inexorably linked, but there’s a hierarchy.  Reading comes first.  But before I go any further, I’d like to mention that from early childhood I did have a love of pretending and of storytelling.  It’s just that once I had the necessary skills as a writer, I took the pretending to a whole new level.

 My introduction to the world of books came at around the age of twelve.  When Mum got a car and was able to drive us kids to Bentley library.  Suddenly a whole new world opened up, and I was held enthralled by all the different worlds I could escape into.  I read anything and everything from James Bond by Ian Fleming  to Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.   I wanted to be like all these great writers…but that would take several other careers and many decades of reading and writing plays, before I even had the skills and confidence to try and write a novel.

My first novel ended up in the proverbial bottom drawer. With my second novel The Bookshop on JacarandaStreet I was fortune in that Fremantle Press published it in 2009.

Your new book is called the Sea Dog Hotel. What can you tell us about it?

It’s a book I’m proud of.  Whether or not it’s any good, I don’t know. And it’s not for me to judge, I’ll let others do that.  I’m proud of it because it deals with issues close to my heart, like mental illness, the West Australian wheat-belt and happiness.

I tend to brew on different issues, then marry them into what I hope is a seamless narrative. Fictionalising mental illness is extremely difficult, if you’re being honest, i.e.  writing about it, as it is, not playing it for laughs or gimmickry.   There are already enough misconceptions about mental illness without it being portrayed badly in Art. 

How did you come to write this particular book?

  I started writing it in 2006 after visiting, in the middle of winter, a speck of a town in the wheat belt.  It was bleak and freezing cold. And I remember thinking there’s a story here. Simple as that.  Something sparked within me, the austere landscape, the people, seemingly not much happening. Perfect ! — a blank canvas for me to fill.

The all-important question - where can we get hold of the book?

You can download a copy of Sea Dog Hotel from Amazon eBooks for $7.99
 
And what next for Marlish Glorie?

 

Trying to market and sell Sea Dog Hotel  which is no easy thing when you’ve gone down the road of self-publishing!  And working on my next book.