Tim Slee's Blog: How's the Serenity?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTFP658H

"Full-throttle action..." Publishers Weekly BookLife April 2023 Editor's Pick.

It is April 1 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region.

But what pilot would be crazy enough to run the Chinese blockade to deliver it?

AGGRESSOR is the first novel in a new series that looks at the conflict that could spark the next World War, through the eyes of soldiers, sailors, civilians and aviators on all sides. Featuring technologies that are on the drawing board today and could be fielded in the near future, AGGRESSOR is the page turning military technothriller you have been waiting for!

Praise for FX Holden thrillers

"If you've never read FX Holden, strap in and hold on for the ride of your life." Readers' Favorite.
"Tom Clancy fans will be pleased" Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
"A heart-pounding adventure series...FX Holden has definitely become one to watch in the thriller world" Book Excellence

"Readers looking to sink into a war saga rich with differing perspective–and gape at the possibilities of next-gen tech–will enjoy this thriller .... Great for fans of Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis’s 2034: A Novel of the Next World War." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BOOKLIFE review of PAGASA by FX Holden.

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

The winners of the 2021 Readers' Favorite Book Awards were announced today and KOBANI won the prize for Best Political Thriller!

https://readersfavorite.com/book-revi...

"With compelling characters, cleverly written dialogue, and a riveting narrative that freezes your blood at times, Kobani is a blockbuster of a novel."

This is the second win for the Future War series. OKINAWA won the 2019 prize in the same category. And, to top off the series lucky run, GOLAN has been longlisted for the 2021 Pubishers' Weekly BookLife Mystery/Thriller Prize after being awarded 10/10!

Uprising: noun: An act of resistance or rebellion; a revolt. (Oxford English Dictionary)

In my basement I have a lockable wooden 'treasure chest' I bought in Tassie, where I stick all the stuff I don't want to lose as I move from continent to continent. Tickets from my first rock concert (Springsteen), photo of my first teenage love, (Denise), my one and only best and fairest medal etc etc

Stuck to the bottom, is a quote from my favourite Henry Lawson poem. It's a rebel poem.

Do you think, you slaves of a thousand years to poverty, wealth and pride,
You can crush the spirit that has been free in a land that's new and wide?
When you've scattered the last of the farmer bands, and the war for a while is over,
You will hold the land – ay, you'll hold the land – the land that your rifles cover.

I've never been able to find out what inspired Lawson to write this one so perhaps a Lawson scholar out there can enlighten me. He was writing 70 years after the Bathhurst uprising, 50 years after the Eureka rebellion. He could, I suppose, have been harking back to the Castle Hill rebellion of the early 1800s, which was led by convict farm hands. He lived in NZ for a time, and perhaps was inspired by the Maori resistance, but they could hardly be described as 'farmer bands'. I don't know, I just love the cadence but most of all, I love the rebel sentiment.

I'd like to say we have a proud history of rebellion in Australia, but perhaps that's taking it too far. We've had a few notable rebellions, like Castle Hill, Bathurst, Eureka and our fair share of rebellious individuals, such as Ned Kelly, Breaker Morant, Peter Lalor, Dawn Fraser, Wilhelmena Wiley, Edith Cowan, Evelyn Scott, Faith Thomas and Louise Black. It's perhaps not as long a list as we'd like to think.

What we do have though is an ethos of questioning authority - we do not blindly respect doctors, politicians, or even police officers, just because of their title or the stripes on their shoulders. They have to earn our respect, and they do that with actions and opinions that can pass the 'fair go' test. And where they don't, they are brought to heel.

I think we can safely call the recent vote on marriage equality an example of this. Politicians hamstrung by party factional politics unable to make an obvious decision and pass an obvious law, with people power taking over and forcing it upon a paralysed parliament. The current push by a few Independent politicians to force obviously needed humanitarian changes to our refugee policies are another.

Taking Tom Murray Home is a story about a family of battlers and a segment of society (in this case, farming families) whose treatment fails the 'fair go' test. And they don't just sit there and take it, they fight back, sparking a broader uprising.

When I was building up the character of Dawn Murray, the hero of the story, I did consider whether the hero should be Dawn, or her husband (the roles could easily have been reversed, with Dawn dying in a fire and her widowed husband leading the protest). But when I look at the truly revolutionary leaders of societies today, I see women, not men:

- Female crossbench senators leading the debate on refugee policy change in Australia
- A female American student, Emma Gonzalez, leading the campaign for gun control
- A 15 year old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, leading a global student climate action movement
- A French single mother of two children, Ingrid Lavavasseur, at the head of the Yellow Vest protest movement in France
- Malala Yousafzai, a 21 year old Pakistani girl, winning a nobel prize for her stand on equal rights in education and
- Young dairy farmer Casey Treloar breaking the internet and breaking down doors in Canberra with her heartfelt story about walking off her farm in South Australia for the last time.

Sorry guys, but you/we are busier defending the world of yesterday (fossil fuels, closed borders, and 'traditional' values including patriachy), than shaping the world of the future. The next true revolution(s) will not be led by men.

So it was only natural for me that the hero in Taking Tom Murray Home had to be Dawn Murray, and she would embody that no BS, quiet resolve, and determination to see a 'fair go' that lies just under the skin of all Australian rebels.

Rise ye! Rise ye!

For fans of Tom Clancy comes OKINAWA, the new thriller from FX Holden now available in ebook and paperback! From the author of bestselling technothriller, BERING STRAIT.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081GYKHMJ (Ebook)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/170... (Pback)



"A compelling amalgamation of sci-fi, military, political, and historical thriller." Publishers Weekly BookLife.

In 1942 US Fighting Tigers squadron commander John Chen comes face to face with his enemy, Japanese pilot, Tadao Kato. Ninety years later, in 2033, their great grandchildren are serving on the same side as part of Operation Red Dove, the first joint naval exercises between China and Japan to mark the signing of a new Sino-Japanese mutual defense treaty.

China is determined to forge a new empire in the East with Japan by its side. Its determination is about to be put to the test.

IN SHANGHAI, the cyber warfare personnel of Advanced Persistent Threat Team 23 are about to fire the first shot in a new global war.

ON OKINAWA, Defense Research Projects Agency drone pilot, 'Bunny' O'Hare prepares for the last field trial of the US Navy's next undersea stealth platform.

AND IN HER PRIVATE RESIDENCE inside Tokyo's Akasaka Palace, Princess Mitsuko Naishinno prepares to fulfil her dying father's wish, and wrest back control of Japan from a government which has sold her country's soul to China.

OKINAWA by FX Holden is a fast paced, action packed look at a near future where the next arms race will take place in cyberspace, where wars will be fought in secret above and below the seas, and the alliances of today will be upended by new geopolitical realities.

(FX Holden is an alter-ego of TJ Slee! Books sold under the FX Holden pen name are sold to raise money for charity)

In Denmark I live in a cul de sac where the age of the 20 or so residents ranges from nine weeks (we have two babies in the street) to ninety years (we have two nonagenarians!). When people are on holiday, we watch each other's houses, water each other's plants, empty each other's mailboxes. Twice a year, for Easter and late summer, we get together for street parties. When my wife and I had to go away recently for a few days and leave our teenage son on his own, we knew that if anything happened he could knock on any of the neighbours' doors for help and he'd get it.

If you're reading this and thinking, 'would never happen here', then try organising a street party and see what happens, then decide.

We are herd animals. We thrive in hives. We flock together in families, in football clubs, on media we call social for exactly that reason. Why?

A clear reason is the age-old adage that we stand stronger together. Like arctic penguins huddled against a killer storm, we can be picked off if we stand alone, but we can get through almost anything together.

In Taking Tom Murray Home, a family is thrown off its farm, and the community rallies around them. It doesn't always take a tragedy for this sense of community to emerge, but tragedies bring the herd together like nothing else: bushfires, floods, storms, funerals.

And the way we do it in Australia is just so very Australian. It's done quietly. Without fanfare. It's almost assumed. We pitch in. We dig deep. We turn up. We don't expect praise. We just get it done because we always have, and that's who we are. If you think I'm romanticising, and the world just isn't like that anymore, I can point you to a hundred different proofs that it is, but I really like this one:

http://rightnow.org.au/opinion-3/aust...

Another, more personal example, will always stick in my mind. As a journalist covering the Ash Wednesday bushfires I wrote a story called 'the hero of Yarrabee road'. It was about a guy who braved flame and fire to help evacuate people who had been trapped on Yarabee road in the Adelaide Hills by the speed of the blaze, and in the process completely trashed the classic Holden ute they were restoring, getting their neighbours to safety when they could have just made a run for it themselves.

But they wouldn't let me use their real names, and they never got a medal, because in typical Australian fashion they said, 'anyone would have done the same.'

Tom Murray's widow could have driven her horse and carriage and coffin to Melbourne on her own and might have had the same impact. But I couldn't for a minute imagine a scenario where she would have decided to do that, and others would not have joined in. Most of the people who join her in the novel are older (you might have noticed that), partly because they have the time, but also because they've lived through enough to know that alone with your kids and a coffin on a highway is not a place you want to be. Surrounded by friends, neighbours and fellow travellers is.

I know this is no radical new thought, but to me it's one of the best parts of human nature (or animal nature?) and something I definitely wanted to show in Taking Tom Murray Home.

Uprising: noun: An act of resistance or rebellion; a revolt. (Oxford English Dictionary)

In my basement I have a lockable wooden 'treasure chest' I bought in Tassie, where I stick all the stuff I don't want to lose as I move from continent to continent. Tickets from my first rock concert (Springsteen), photo of my first teenage love, (Denise), my one and only best and fairest medal etc etc

Stuck to the bottom, is a quote from my favourite Henry Lawson poem. It's a rebel poem.

-Do you think, you slaves of a thousand years to poverty, wealth and pride,
-You can crush the spirit that has been free in a land that's new and wide?
-When you've scattered the last of the farmer bands, and the war for a while is over,
-You will hold the land – ay, you'll hold the land – the land that your rifles cover.

I've never been able to find out what inspired Lawson to write this one so perhaps a Lawson scholar out there can enlighten me. He was writing 70 years after the Bathhurst uprising, 50 years after the Eureka rebellion. He could, I suppose, have been harking back to the Castle Hill rebellion of the early 1800s, which was led by convict farm hands. He lived in NZ for a time, and perhaps was inspired by the Maori resistance, but they could hardly be described as 'farmer bands'. I don't know, I just love the cadence but most of all, I love the rebel sentiment.

I'd like to say we have a proud history of rebellion in Australia, but perhaps that's taking it too far. We've had a few notable rebellions, like Castle Hill, Bathurst, Eureka and our fair share of rebellious individuals, such as Ned Kelly, Breaker Morant, Peter Lalor, Dawn Fraser, Wilhelmena Wiley, Edith Cowan, Evelyn Scott, Faith Thomas and Louise Black. It's perhaps not as long a list as we'd like to think.

What we do have though is an ethos of questioning authority - we do not blindly respect doctors, politicians, or even police officers, just because of their title or the stripes on their shoulders. They have to earn our respect, and they do that with actions and opinions that can pass the 'fair go' test. And where they don't, they are brought to heel.

I think we can safely call the recent vote on marriage equality an example of this. Politicians hamstrung by party factional politics unable to make an obvious decision and pass an obvious law, with people power taking over and forcing it upon a paralysed parliament. The current push by a few Independent politicians to force obviously needed humanitarian changes to our refugee policies are another.

Taking Tom Murray Home is a story about a family of battlers and a segment of society (in this case, farming families) whose treatment fails the 'fair go' test. And they don't just sit there and take it, they fight back, sparking a broader uprising.

When I was building up the character of Dawn Murray, the hero of the story, I did consider whether the hero should be Dawn, or her husband (the roles could easily have been reversed, with Dawn dying in a fire and her widowed husband leading the protest). But when I look at the truly revolutionary leaders of societies today, I see women, not men:

- Female crossbench senators leading the debate on refugee policy change in Australia
- A female American student, Emma Gonzalez, leading the campaign for gun control
- A Swedish teen, Greta Thunberg, leading a global student climate action movement
- A French single mother of two children, Ingrid Lavavasseur, at the head of the Yellow Vest protest movement in France
- Malala Yousafzai, a 21 year old Pakistani girl, winning a nobel prize for her stand on equal rights in education and
- Young dairy farmer Casey Treloar breaking the internet and breaking down doors in Canberra with her heartfelt story about walking off her farm in South Australia for the last time.

I was struggling to find a contemporary male rebel until swimmer Mack Horton refused to take the podium at an international swim meet. But generally, sorry blokes, you/we are busier defending the world of yesterday (fossil fuels, closed borders, and 'traditional' values including patriachy), than shaping the world of the future.

The next true revolution(s) will not be led by men.

So it was only natural for me that the hero in Taking Tom Murray Home had to be Dawn Murray, and she would embody that no BS, quiet resolve, and determination to see a 'fair go' that lies just under the skin of all Australian rebels.

Rise ye! Rise ye!

All of my earlier experimental work has had one consistent thread running through it - not consciously, but as it emerged, I found I couldn't ignore it. And it came out again in Tom Murray.

PAIN.

Physical, emotional. How we experience it. How it effects and shapes us. What it takes to help us through it. I had an earlier manuscript win a US Publishers Weekly fiction prize, and the central figure in that sci-fi novel was a young man who had been emotionally 'cauterised' - had his ability to feel emotion cut off as punishment for a crime. I wrote a three book crime/thriller series about a woman who had been abused by her father. I wrote a historical adventure about a Viking woman who turned the pain of public humiliation into a badge of honor.

In Tom Murray, the narrator is a child who, because of a medical condition, analgesia, can literally not feel physical pain. Can't sweat, can't cry. And if you can't show you are in pain, whether physical or emotional, how do you deal with it? The narrator deals with this one way, his twin sister in a very different way.

Where does this consistent interest in the theme of pain come from?

Actually I didn't need to delve deep into my pysche to understand it. The answer is in an x-ray I have in a box in my basement.

In 1991 I was at a party in Kings Cross. It was a lovely summer night, so I was sitting in a window sill. It was a couple of floors up and I was drinking margaritas. Unfortunately, I made an unplanned exit from the party, backwards, out of that window. An awning below saved me from landing directly face first on the bitumen below, but I exploded my left ankle and broke my left leg, nose and a wrist. I lived.

The doctors at St Vincents in Sydney did a fantastic job putting my ankle and leg back together but it the cartilage was so badly damaged, that the ankle joint is basically just bone grinding on bone.

So pain has been a constant companion for the last couple of decades. I chew painkillers like candy and on the worst days I either use a stick or walk as little as possible.

But the pain has taught me a lot, that I think also applies to emotional pain but I'm willing to be corrected on this. It's always there, and always will be, but I try not to think about it and there are entire days when I don't. Life goes on around it.

I want understanding, like when I'm with someone and they want to run for a bus or from the rain, and I can't. When I can spend one day digging dirt in the garden, but not two.

On the bad days, I get out my stick not only for the support, but also to flag to the world around me - guy in pain here. Give me a freaking break today, world.

But I don't want sympathy. On bad days when I'm using my stick, well meaning people have held doors for me and that's nice. But at a theatre production, an usher pulled me out of a queue, checked my ticket and told me there was an elevator for people with disabilities. I thanked him, took the elevator up, then went to a bathroom and cried.

Pain is what I have, not who I am.

But my pain is nothing compared to what other people have, and I can understand how it can consume you. Drive you to drink, to depression, to suicide. And the only way I know to deal with it (apart from the meds), is to share it. Share it, don't hide it, so that others can help you through it.

I'm able to pull out my stick and show the world my pain. I know there are a million kinds of pain where that isn't possible - there is no stick, no badge, no red flashing light for most people showing the world how they feel.

Which takes us back to Tom Murray. Kids in pain who can't show the world how they're feeling. A community that piles around them and tries to help them through it, even though they really can't. And the bond of a brother and sister - of family - that is the real answer.

Running an e-book giveaway in the Aussie Readers' discussion group for 'Taking Tom Murray Home'



5 copies to give away, to enter, just pop in to the group and say who is your favorite Aussie poet, and why!

(Answers such as Nick Cave or Kylie Minogue are totally acceptable...)

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

ENDS SEPT 30

Joanne Shiells of Australian Books + Publishing just dropped a very nice review of Taking Tom Murray Home coming out this August!

Easily readable, highly entertaining and destined for the screen...

"This debut novel and winner of HarperCollins’ Banjo Prize is based on the ingenious premise of a funeral-protest that raises awareness of the pressures facing dairy farmers from banks, supermarkets and the cult of cheap milk. After Tom Murray accidentally kills himself burning his farmhouse down to prevent the bank from getting it, his wife, Dawn, decides to take his body via horse and cart on a five-day journey to Melbourne. Along the way, the entourage attracts wanted and unwanted attention, a colourful medley of characters and a sizeable hashtag following. Tom’s twin children, Jack and Jenny, are united by the belief their dad is still alive and their analgesia, an inability to feel pain. Narrative tension increases as the journey progresses, with the police trying to stop it, the media fuelling it and a mystery following it. Tim Slee celebrates Australia’s rebel spirit with references to Henry Lawson and Ned Kelly, and unearths the stoicism, perseverance and humour of our rural character. Easily readable, highly entertaining and destined for the screen, this book should have broad appeal. It typifies a true Australian yarn but points to more serious problems in society, especially the issues facing those on the land.

4 STARS

(Joanne Shiells is a former book buyer and a former editor of Books+Publishing)

Preorders:

https://www.booktopia.com.au/taking-t...

https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Tom-Mur...

http://www.collinsbooks.com.au/book/T...

https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/takin...