‘We can give you lots of stories’, Anita said. And Nymagee - a little town, smack-bang in the middle NSW - sure did deliver the goods for a crime writer. There’s a seedy underbelly to the place. Ken, half of the husband-and-wife team who owns the sheep station where we stayed, was held up at the letterbox. A gun under his chin.

It’s been two months since I finished the Camino Frances. I walked about 315kms, broke two poles, got two blisters, slept in lots of bunk beds and came away with three new soul sisters. All of the cliches come to mind: transformative, life-changing, a reset.

So, I finished my manuscript - or at least I thought I had- I wrote a covering letter, blurb and bio for myself and I was ready to ready to press ‘send.’ Then I started pitching. And I realised why published authors - who’ve had a front-row seat to the fraught pitching process - say being an author means making friends with rejection.

I gave no thought to my author brand when I started out on this journey. I was flat-out working out how to write a book back then, without pondering my author brand. So I looked at how other authors who I loved curate their brand.

So, I’d graduated from my Creative Writing course, written the first draft of my manuscript during lockdown and now it was time to find a writing group. After all, writers don’t just write. They hang out with other writers who write. So, it was with great trepidation that I posted on the Australian Writer’s Centre Creative Writing Graduates Facebook group enquiring whether I could join someone’s writing group.

I knew that my debut novel was going to be set in the Riverina district of NSW. But I also knew that it had to be authentic. There was only so much desk research I could do. It wasn’t enough to look at a couple of homesteads on Google Maps and do a bit of googling of plants and animals in the area. I wanted to smell the cut lucerne and the diesel. Feel the lanolin in the crinkly wool.