The Town of X

Sometime ago I went on a rather fraught family holiday with my ex-husband and our four year old daughter. We loaded up his campervan and explored the NSW East Coast, stopping at various national parks, beaches and camping sites. On the way home we spent the night at Crowdy Bay, a rather lovely bay with a stumpy lighthouse looking over the ocean.

Anyway, by this point in the holiday I’d finally managed to relax and started enjoying things like the number of seconds between waves, the sound of seagulls hovering overhead, and the way clouds look during a thunderstorm. And perhaps I was starting to get bored too, because when we pulled into Crowdy Bay, a pretty, innocuous place, I started imagining all kinds of strange nautical scenarios. These included a deluded notion that at midnight, all the ghosts of drowned seaman would walk across the water of the bay, and that the local fishermen practiced pagan beliefs and would occasionally throw human sacrifices into the sea. 

Months later and I was looking for inspiration for the Newcastle Short Story competition, and decided to turn these musings into a story. In the end it wasn’t a very good story, and didn’t get anywhere in the competition. But I re-read it recently and decided that I quite liked the central premise, that pagan beliefs could continue unabated in remote coastal villages, and wrote it again with a Tasmanian setting. 

Crossing the Bass Strait seemed to make the narrative much stronger and somehow more believable. Although originally titled ‘Crowdy Bay Night’, I decided to keep the location vague and sinister by re-naming the story ‘The Town of X’. I guess I got a kick out of the notion that people would try and guess which southern Tasmanian village it was supposed to be.

I’ve just sent it off to another competition, so I’ll blog if it gets anywhere and maintain stoney silence if not. Rather optimistically, I’m hoping to kick off a new form of Australian writing that I’ve tagged ‘coastal horror’. It just seems that coastal style, which has become so ubiquitous in interior design, advertising imagery and even clothing, is ripe for gothic re-interpretation. There are only so many scrubbed pieces of white timber, wicker chairs and navy jumpers a girl can take…

In other writing news, a large publisher has shown very, very, very (to the power of ten) vague interest in my 1001 nights manuscript (I’ve blogged about it here and here). Of course, being your typical creative, I’ve already mentally cast the movie, spent the royalty cheque and designed the dust jacket. Stay tuned…