What a week. Kylie released her new album (which may be one of her bests!), America voted for Biden, it’s NAIDOC Week. I’m also super excited to say my upcoming book, The Boy from the Mish, has a cover!

Boy from the Mish - final front cover, high-res.jpg

I love it. I love it I love it I love it. The artwork of Jackson and Tomas is from an Aboriginal artist named Hafleg and he’s absolutely nailed my vision for the two characters. I’ll be honest, I had a very abstract image of Jackson and Tomas’s faces in my mind, but what he’s put on the cover is amazing. I really can’t get over the slight smiles on their faces. To me, their smiles say: ‘you’re gonna like this book – you’ll be smiling when you finish’. I would like to think that’s the case!

I finished the first draft of this book in January 2018, and wow – it’s finally starting to feel real. I’ve had some truly amazing and humbling feedback and endorsements for The Boy from the Mish already, and at times it’s been really hard to know how to handle them, or how to comprehend them. I guess I’ll take the same approach I took when I began writing that first draft: I’ll just make it up as I go along.

It’s only like three months until publication, and I finally feel like I’m ready to talk about this book and the characters and the story and what it all means to me. It didn’t really hit me that people are going to read this book until I saw this fantastic cover. People I don’t know are going to read this book and get to know Jackson and Tomas, their fears, their hopes… and by getting to know the characters, readers will be getting to know me too. It scared the hell out of me at first to think about it that way, but I think I’m ready for this book to be out in the world. I’m ready for my story about an Aboriginal boy’s journey to accepting who he is to get in the hands of readers.

For now, I’ll get back to working on my next YA project and listening to Kylie Minogue’s ‘Disco’ on repeat. And I’ll be counting down the days until February 2021!

Gary