The Spark that lit the Fire Part 2
My novel In Plain Sight follows the journey of Penny Matheson, who lives in Geelong and was first met in Finding Marco, as she finds the courage and motivation to delve into her own troubled past to discover more about her parents. At the time of the first book, Penny is living in Geelong, but In Plain Sight her horizons expand. Marco’s story in Geelong gave her the inspiration. As for me, I had to find the key that could unlock the story of her mother and provide a connecting link to the police procedural story that would underpin Penny’s journey into her past and also provide some parallel solutions.
Strangely enough, the spark was landscape driven, rather than character or plot driven. And it came from my passion for swimming in the sea. On an unrelated visit to Geelong, Pete and I walked along the semicircular wooden jetty that encloses a large stretch of water on the edge of Corio Bay. This is the Eastern Beach Baths, an early 20th century structure that has provided Geelong residents with a safe space to swim for nearly a hundred years. I mentally compared it to my own swimming space at Mount Martha, where I can swim in Port Phillip Bay without impediment, and how that frees my mind into a meditative state. On that same visit, we passed a sign on a gravel road indicating that a quarry was 2 kms away.
Later in the same weekend, we were at our holiday house at Mount Martha. I was devastated to see that in the adjoining street the huge piece of bushland that had housed several old-time beach shacks had been flattened, all the trees, the bush understorey and the old buildings had been removed to make way for a new development.
It doesn’t sound much to build on, but the spark was further ignited by two other things: articles I had recently read about the long-term effects of severe trauma; and a lunch we had at MoVida opposite Fed Square, where I enjoyed some of the most delicious tapas I’ve ever eaten. These two events flicked the ignition switch for me, and I suddenly had the outlines of a story, two stories in fact, that would work together for Penny to reach a satisfying conclusion on both a professional and personal level.
