News & Blog by YA Erskine
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
As a would be writer, there is more advice out in cyber space regarding how to handle rejection, than possibly any other topic you want to google. Well, apart from Harry Potter and Twilight of course. That said, it’s great to know you can soothe your screaming, ripping, suicide-prone self by reading stories of rejection from the very greatest of the literati. It doesn’t make it any more pleasant...
Over the past few weeks I’ve given a few interviews in relation to The Brotherhood and one of the most prominent questions I receive is ‘which characters and events in the book are real / true?’ Well, at the risk of being sued, here goes. In my first post I told you how the first manuscript I wrote was autobiographical. By the time I got around to The Brotherhood, I’d found that it was actually...
Even though I had the question that would underpin the novel, I wasn’t sure how to begin. Third person, first person, nothing seemed to provide me with the appropriate platform to express multiple, deep seated viewpoints. I burned with the need to show how this murder would affect everyone around the victim. After much sitting and staring out the window and many long hot showers (the two places...
In late 2006 I finally resigned from policing. It was the best decision I’d ever made in my life and I regret not doing it years earlier. Not only did I walk away from policing, I also took the first important step away from the blackness (later to be diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder) that haunted me. After a stint in Melbourne, my husband’s work took us to Canberra and it was there...
I began writing in 2003 because I was pissed off. I’d been policing for eight years. I hated the job itself. I hated the red tape. I hated the crooks. I hated the way the public hated me, abused me, assaulted me – without knowing anything about me. Most of all, I hated the so-called justice system that let the guilty walk out of court giving you the finger while the innocent walked away faithless...
