I am very very pleased to announce that my collaborative novel with Jodi Cleghorn, Post Marked: Piper’s Reach, has been accepted for publication by Vine Leaves Press.
This is how Jessica Bell, publisher of Vine Leaves, spoke about it, “They have co-written one of the most touching contemporary love stories I’ve ever read.” And it’s more than that; a darkness lies beneath the story of Jude and Ella-Louise.
It has been a long long journey from the first letter handwritten in January 2012 to now, and there’s still some time to wait. The scheduled publication is slated for July, 2019.
I am totally wrapped and chuffed and excited about seeing our novel in print and can’t wait to share it with you. Stay tuned as the year progresses and I’ll keep you up to date.
This is how we pitched it:
“Post Marked: Piper’s Reach” is set on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, and follows the correspondences of Ella-Louise Wilson, a former narcotics undercover officer who left Piper’s Reach twenty years earlier to make a life for herself beyond the legacy of her mother’s heroin addiction and her high school best friend Jude Smith, a late-thirties marine biologist still living in his home town of Piper’s Reach with his wife and young family.
Consisting of 57 letters (originally hand-written and physically posted over 15 months), Post Marked: Piper’s Reach initially ran as a web serial from April 2012 to June 2013, gathering a diverse and engaged readership united by the yearning ache of the central theme of ‘the one left behind’. It explores the rekindling of old friendships, adolescent nostalgia, reconciliation of the past with the future, the guilt of wanting what you can’t have, the disparity of who you think someone is and who they actually are, and the consequences of a second chance.
Both Adam and Jodi were avid letter writers in their youth and the project evolved as a way of rekindling an intimate and forgotten mode of communication.
The novel is supported by several short stories, a chapbook of vignettes, and an extensive mix tape soundtrack.
If you’re keen you can read the chapbook HERE, and the first letter HERE.
Right now I’m working on a novella that is connected to the world of Piper’s Reach so keep an eye out for that too.
I’m doing my happy dance and getting stuck back into writing.
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