The secret to a family, a farm and a novel a year.
They say that you should write about what you know. So it’s quite comforting to look out of Australian “rural fiction” writer Fleur McDonald’s window and not see high rise buildings. Or any other houses for that matter.
Instead, a rural scene is the backdrop: her 8,000 acre farm in the southeast corner of Western Australia. It has certainly provided plenty of inspiration for her novels to date, debuting with the extremely successful Red Dust back in 2009. Her fifth novel, Crimson Dawn, was published earlier this year, and we did the sums and worked out that’s around one new book every 12 months.
So what’s her secret? How does she balance a family and a farm with knocking out a new novel every calendar year?