I’m happy to report that I’m thoroughly enjoying work on my sixth novel. This week felt like a watershed; at 25,000 words in, key characters are starting to feel like old friends, and I’m eighty percent sure of the plot (I just wrote the ending, as I usually do at this stage).

My readers will know that I branched into short stories a couple of years ago. With a growing list of competition credits and enough stories to feed the comp mill for a year or two, I felt it was time to tackle another novel. In addition, the No Boundaries writing group I founded last year (under the auspices of the wonderful WritingNSW) gave me the feedback forum I needed. Indeed my five published novels were all written with the support of Sarah Bourne’s Write On! group at WritingNSW’s gracious headquarters in Callan Park, Sydney over about nine years.

The new novel began as a technical exercise. I’m used to the current model of telling a story through a limited number – perhaps four of five – points of view, using close third person and sometimes first person narration. If you’ve been to a writing group you might be used to the POV Nazi: “I think you might have a bit of head hopping there”. OK, I’ve been perpetrator and accuser myself.

But I’ve often wondered why so few novels use omniscient point of view these days, and I was determined to have a go at it. As it happened, I’d been thinking a lot about Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, which uses omniscient narrator and a large cast of characters. It seemed almost indecent to inhabit so many heads! My urge was strengthened by memories of the 1965 movie of Ship of Fools, which I swooned over as a lovesick teenager. I read the book again, watched the movie again, and the creative juices flowed.

Apart from a voyage from Athens to Alexandria in 1973 in a clapped-out steamer, my nautical experience has been modern cruise ships. These cocktail palaces present endless plot opportunities: Jam several thousand strangers on a floating hotel, give them an unlimited drinks package, wait for inhibitions to fly away. It’s a fiction writer’s paradise! Check out my cruise ship short story Your Own Luck in my anthology.

So my novel is a contemporary Australian thriller, laced with dark humour. The core impetus is the setting: A small luxury cruise ship en route from Dubai to Sydney loses contact with the outside world: What are the stakes for the passengers untethered from their electronic lives? Why has the ship gone dark? And how does order break down among ostensibly civilised people? The answers to these questions will become clear maybe a year from now! Along the way, some tall poppies will be cut down, some good guys will turn out to be bad guys, and I’ll be pondering whether revenge is all it’s cracked up to be.

Yours nautically,

Stuart