Update on Horror Fiction Novel

Hi there everyone, I hope you are all keeping well during our continued, fucked times. Today I felt like giving a little info/update on my current project which is a horror fiction novel based in outback Western Australia. This year I had a bit of a think about how to progress with my writing, and how to better focus on single projects at a time. So what I ended up deciding to do is to write at least one book during the year of 2021 to send to publishers. At first I chose to put together a book of WA landscape based, activist poetry, for UWA's Dorothy Hewett Award, but submissions do not open until later in the year and I already have quite a few suitable poems. Also poetry can get a little tiresome when what I'd really like to do is also tell stories, so in my research I came across another competition by Fremantle Press, The Fogarty Literary Award. Now this discovery felt like a great opportunity to challenge myself, by trying to write a fiction novel in such a short amount of time. Currently I am about to be approximately 20% of the way through writing the story, and the next month will be the true test of commitment and whether or not it will be finished in time for the competition. If not then I will surely continue writing it later on in the year, and send it off to publishers when it is done anyhow but having a deadline is quite exciting and very motivating.

At the moment the story is titled "Dandaragan" but this will surely change as that is just the main geographic whereabouts of the tale. It tells the story of a young boy and his older brother who are tortured in the outback of Western Australia by a summer camp guide. The main bulk of the narrative is very descriptive and slow moving, and quite spiritual. The boy escapes his confinement and is lost in the outback of Western Australia for days upon days, with little survival skills, food or water to be found. It is a story about his emotional and very physical journey of life and death. As a 12 year old his mind cannot comprehend the traumas that he has undergone, and that he will continue to undergo, so it is told to you through a narrator who follows the boy's destiny.

Here is a little snippet for today if you are interested, thank you for reading.

A large and fast moving spider scurries across the darkening sand some distance away from the boy, as a decent sized brown snake glides out of a clump of whitish-grey rocks. It hisses with its forked tongue, licking at the hot evening air as it lifts its head up from the ground to look down at the spider who moves across its view. The boy is now climbing the hill, leaving behind him snapped twigs and long tracks, his body is useless but he makes do, forcing himself along like a creature not yet evolved to cross such terrain. The spider stops, perhaps sensing the danger of the looming predator, it is a funny thing to see it moving so furiously, for it to then suddenly come to a complete halt. A black cloud plume lifts up against the gorgeous red sky from behind the hill, and the boy’s sense of smell comes back once again. He is halfway up the dune now and the foxes who followed him until the base of it have turned around and run away in the opposite direction, all making noises like animals sounding their high-pitched, howling alarm to the wild. The brown snake dances over its eight-legged prey, moving side to side with its faint black stripes like a tiger shark in the water. Its rhythm is hypnotic, but its head stays ever so still, never moving from its perfect alignment with the stunned spider on the ground there in front of it. The sun is close to disappearing and the sky is getting darker. The boy sees nothing but a burning centre of white, which is at its brightest when he is facing the direction of the sun, but it is fading into a dull matte grey as night begins to take over, so he knows that he must hurry. He makes use of the small trees along the way, pulling himself up by their splintered little trunks, and then kicking them with his legs once they are behind him. The glossy brown snake is even faster than it is alluring, the moon has risen from the opposite horizon and it reflects off of the scales of the pretty thing, it dances steadily, shifting until it is directly above the spider. The snake strikes straight down at the arachnid with the precision of a gunshot, wrapping its jaw around the hairy abdomen of it, and devouring the beast whole, as its venom drips from the sides of its mouth like a salivating dog. The boy finally makes it to the top of the hill, he slithers around some large rocks like a horrible human canoe, but the setting sun is nowhere to be found. What is left of the red sky is shaded by a thick mist of black, followed by ten thousand burning bushes and trees, as far as can be seen. An ocean of flames crackling like slapping waves. The boy sees only the white in view, now brighter than ever. It is glorious.