An Interview with Meryl Brown Tobin, Author of Broome Enigma

Author Meryl Brown Tobin is joining us today for an interview. Read on for the inside scoop on the inspiration behind her latest romantic suspense novel, Broome Enigma.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Title: Broome Enigma

Author: Meryl Brown Tobin

Genre: Romantic Suspense

BLURB:

On a working holiday in Australia’s cosmopolitan Outback town of Broome in 1986, Jodie, a young book designer and artist is open to romance and adventure.

At the holiday village where she is staying, she meets Joe, a young man who works there. Despite the strong attraction between them, the many unknowns about his earlier life keep them apart. To try to uncover his mysterious past, they travel to Perth and back to Broome and are drawn into not only bizarre but also dangerous situations.

Is Joe the person she thinks he is, or is he some alter ego? Can Jodie and Joe stop their relationship from developing until they have answers and know if he is free to love her?

INTERVIEW:

Welcome! What was the inspiration behind your latest release?

Various visits to Broome, an exotic Outback town in Western Australia and seeing a young man with film star good looks but a ‘damped down’ personality at a holiday village doing cleaning and groundsman’s duties. He didn’t seem to ‘fit’ his job. I played the ‘What If?’ game until I came up with the some of the plot for ‘Broome Enigma’.

Where do you get your ideas?

From life––from my experiences and those of others, from the people I meet, reading, TV, observations.

Do ideas for plot or characters appear first?

It varies. In the case of ‘Broome Enigma’, Broome was such an intriguing place to set a novel, I kept it in my head for a setting. Then, when I saw the young man who seemed so out of place working in a caravan park, I had one of my main characters. A second person at the park, the man who managed the park and pretended to be unaware of the gross overcrowding there, became the inspiration for an unpleasant minor character.

Years ago I had an elderly dentist who mentioned that during WW2 he had been stationed at Broome. This opened up a whole new area of Australian history to me that I researched and used in the novel.

Experiences also helped. For instance, when my husband and I visited China, we visited the Underground City in Beijing. That experience has never left me and gave me ideas for expanding the plot in ‘Broome Enigma’.

Have you ever traveled when researching information for a book?

Yes, whenever we travelled in the past, I took field notes which I used for my travel articles which I then used in my travel book ‘Exploring Outback Australia’ and in my fiction writing, including ‘Broome Enigma’. I did not specifically travel for ‘Broome Enigma’ as I already knew the areas I was writing about, although I did add to that knowledge through research.

When I was writing a travel book, ‘Exploring Outback Australia’, I found there were a few gaps I needed to fill and photos my husband, my photographer, needed to take. We planned a trip specifically to cover the areas we had missed.

When did you begin writing?

When I was about eight, I used to belong to two children’s clubs attached to newspapers and I used to contribute material. When I was eleven a short story journal published a short piece on a trip to a wildlife sanctuary. In secondary school I contributed lots of material to our school newspaper and, when in Year 11, I ended up as its Assistant Editor.

How many hours do you dedicate each day towards writing?

Maybe eight hours a day. I write when I don’t have to do something else or think I should be giving something else priority. Most days I write most of the day with breaks for formal and informal exercise, housework, various appointments and family, friend and community catch-ups.

What has been your biggest challenge?

Setting up my own publishing house. A publishing house had contracted to publish my picture storybook ‘LEFTY’ but it was taken over and the new owner did not wish to publish my book. As compensation, I was given the art work the first publisher had organized. After publishing ‘LEFTY’, I subsequently published several more of my own books and one by a group I belonged to. However, as it took so much of my creative writing time, after some years I closed my publishing house down.

What does literary success mean to you?

Once it meant getting everything I wrote published and receiving fitting payment for it. While I got some return on my writing, especially on my educational puzzles and also my travel articles, it would not have been enough to give up my day job.

I now have a big body of work to show for the years I have spent writing. I am content in myself that I have produced something worthwhile for the huge amount of time, effort and creativity I invested in it. Getting my first novel ‘Broome Enigma’ published is icing on the cake.

What writing tips or marketing advice would you like to share?

Write what you know and what you think you could do. For instance, one night when I was bringing up my young children, I was doing a crossword puzzle and decided I could make up one as good as the one I was doing and did so. It started a career of writing crosswords and educational puzzles. So far, this has provided my biggest income from writing.
Joining writing groups, attending workshops and doing courses, especially my Diploma of Arts (Writing & Editing) at a tertiary institute, gave my creative writing a great push upwards. I would strongly recommend those serious about their writing to do the same.
The Wild Rose Press Editor, Val Mathews, gave me another great push with her enthusiastic support and for referring me to two excellent books, ‘A Writer’s Guide: Active Setting: How to Enhance Your Fiction with More Descriptive, Dynamic Settings’ by Mary Buckham and ‘Understanding Show, Don’t Tell (And Really Getting It): Learn how to find––and fix––told prose in your writing’ by Janice Hardy.

Which authors inspire you?

Many, but the two mentioned above are two of them ––Mary Buckham and Janice Hardy. Others are Australian writers, Richard Flanagan author of ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’, for which he won The Man Booker Prize 2014, Chrissie Michaels who writes Australian historical fiction for teenagers and Bruce Pascoe, who wrote a brilliant book, ‘Dark Emu’ and Stan Grant who wrote ‘Talking to My Country’.

What project are you currently working on?

I am working on several completed novels that I want to rework in the style that appeals to The Wild Rose Press editors, that is, the style described in Buckham and Hardy’s books, a style I now prefer for my novels and short stories.

AUTHOR BIO:

Meryl Brown Tobin is an Australian writer and a former secondary teacher of Humanities subjects. She writes short and long fiction for adults and children, non-fiction, especially on travel and the environment, poetry and educational and other puzzles.

She has had 21 books published. These include puzzle/activity books, black-line masters books of educational puzzles, work books for primary students, a travel book, a children’s picture storybook, a poetry collection and a haiku collection with four other poets. In total, nearly 300,000 copies of her first four puzzle books were sold in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

Hundreds of her poems and puzzles, scores of her short stories and travel and other articles, and some cartoons have appeared in more than 150 magazines, newspapers and anthologies in Australia and elsewhere, including the US. ‘Broome Enigma’ is her debut novel and more novels are in the pipeline.