Friday 3 March 2017

Where Would I Be?

Welcome to the shadowy and not-so-shadowy space behind Sally's books. If you're not familiar with this blog, scroll down to see what it's all about.

Where Would I Be? (Post 62)

Where Would I Be (2003) is a book in the same series as The Snow Cave (Post 54) published under one of my pen names; Nicholas Flynn. I wrote it after visiting Kangaroo Island, just off the coast of South Australia, during a month-long tour of Victoria and South Australia presenting author talks and writing workshops. While on the island, my husband drove us down through a park, I think called Flinders Chase, to visit the Remarkable Rocks. These natural rock formations are remarkable all right, and just as the rockslides in Far North Queensland starred in Boy Down Under (Post 60) so the Remarkable Rocks inspired Where Would I Be? The narrator of this story visits the rocks during a trip with her school. Her younger brother annoys her by showing off, using the rocks as a natural stage, but even his antics don't fully distract her from the uneasy feeling that the rocks are alive. The girl takes photos for her mother (which she says were never developed) while her brother goes on dancing to his Walkman. These two innocuous-seeming incidents just go to show how books date. It never occurred to me that your classic print-film camera would be virtually unused by kids fourteen years after this book was written.

A time shift sees our heroine trapped alone at the Remarkable Rocks, with no idea of when she is or if she can ever go home. As she says, if I hadn't gone to the rocks that day, where would I be? The original text ended there, but my editor wasn't happy with a bleak open ending at this level, so I wrote a hopeful resolution.

I think the theme is an interesting one though. Surely most of us have asked ourselves at some point: "If I hadn't..... where would I be?"

Where Would I Be? is not well known, as it came out at around the time the company that commissioned it was winding down, but there do seem to be some copies available from HERE.

To see pics of the real Remarkable Rocks, click HERE.

About the Blog

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. This preamble will be pasted to the top of each post, so feel free to skip it in future.

The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. 

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