Writing catch up: Crossing the Line

Good news! I’ve finished writing book two of my Crossing the Line series. All bar the editing (of course). It’s currently sitting at just over 1000,000 words and takes the surviving protagonists from Sydney to Melbourne via the Great Southern Rail Journey.

It’s well over a year behind in completing because of conflicting demands on time and creativity, but at last, I’ve written the last two words on the manuscript–The End.

Crossing the Line explores the bravery of ordinary people willing to cross physical and spiritual boundaries. Lines as simple as those that separate the northern hemisphere from the southern, reality from the surreal, the physical world from the spiritual. How much do they bring of their old ways into the new?

The historical side of the series delves into the hidden side of emigration to new lands–the stories, traditions, practices that stay with people even as they leave their old world behind. I source the traditions and practices referenced in the Crossing the Line novels from Scottish and Irish mythology. Even though emigrants like the fictional, Rosalie Ponsonby (formerly a MacKinnon from the Isle of Skye), depart their home and seem not to look back, they cannot escape what they knew–cannot escape the history and connections they may keep locked away and hidden.

Rosalie emigrated to Australia to keep her family legacy hidden, hoping that by placing herself in a world far away, she and her secrets would be safe. Yet she finds herself drawn back into her past and her obligations when Lord Algernon Benedict tracks her down. The very person she was hiding from. Rosalie’s past becomes present and future all in one. She must teach her daughters their history so that they can help protect their legacy and carry it into the future, safe from the clutches of the corrupted Lord and his son, Clement.

Keeper of the Way (book one in the series) will show you colonial Sydney from the perspective of the Ponsonby’s, a (not quite) ordinary family that live on the edge of the Botanic Garden under the looming shadow of the magnificent Garden Palace in the days and weeks prior to its mysterious destruction by fire.

Book two introduces a mysterious new character who thrown into the family’s battle against Lord Benedict and his son. Persephone Wells must navigate not only the true nature of the Ponsonby clan, her connection to them, but her own sanity in the face of the impossible. She knows the Botanic Gardens well, but she’s never heard of the Garden Palace and until the moment where she’s pulled from her world into Sydney 1882, never really believed in magic.

Clement Benedict has walked in his father’s shadow his entire life, rebelling against Lord Algernon’s pompous ways while still seeking his approval. An old legend haunts the Benedict family. It that robs them, one by one, of sanity and reason. Lord Algernon wants his revenge. He seeks the return of his family’s money and reputation, and a power that will change the course of history. He thinks he’s in control. Clement knows better. He watches his father follow the same fate as his grandfather; can feel the insanity grow in his own mind. Cursed to follow the path of the Wildwood for eternity, the time has come for the Benedict's to face their true nature and calling, to deny their own wretched legacy or wallow in an unholy alliance.

The story’s written. Time to be getting on with the hard part-making sure it all makes sense.