So Dexter had 3.3 million viewers watching its final episode ever!  I must admit I tuned in with a bit of trepidation, I was concerned whether TV’s favorite serial killer would get a fitting send-off. While a fairy tale ending for a man who has killed close to 100 people would be disingenuous, having Dexter sitting in a cell for the rest of his life, or dead, would be disappointing.

I love a morally ambiguous character who works on the right side of justice, and I’ve loved Dexter and his dark passenger since I first read Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter many years ago. As I’m touring around promoting my own morally ambiguous character, Berg, in my crime fiction novel The Enemy Inside, I often try to explain to my readers why people love a ‘good’ serial killer. To me, the answer is simple: I think many people feel that justice, true justice, has been lost in a modern justice system that seems to be increasingly dedicated to setting the guilty free. I think many people feel, as do Berg and Dexter, that ‘some people just need killing’. I love exploring this in my books, there is a wealth of characterization to be discovered in the fine line between justice and vigilantism and what tips a seemingly normal person over to the ‘dark side’. I talk more about this here.

Anyway, back to Dexter. The end was ok, it certainly could have been much worse. Would I have ended it the way they did? No…for a couple of reasons. WARNING, SPOLIER ALERT. Firstly, I don’t believe that Dexter would have willingly left Harrison, certainly not with a fellow serial killer who has no problem removing those who become inconvenient to her from her life. And Deb stroking out in the hospital? Come on, that felt like a cheap way for her to die. One thing I DID love is the scene where Dexter kills Saxon right under the nose of the Miami Metro with a PEN. GOLD. Anyway, it’s easy to critique when you’re not doing the writing and the writers on Dexter have done a great job for eight seasons.

Here’s how I would have ended it:

We open with the doctors working on Deb in the hospital, who is coding. Quinn calls Dexter, who is at the airport with Hanna and Harrison, telling him to get to the hospital. But Elway is lurking and the three of them are too conspicuous together. Hanna tells Dexter to go and that she will ‘take care of it and see him in Argentina’.

Dexter arrives at the hospital to find that Deb has died (sorry, Deb, you die in either scenario, it’s not that I don’t like you, your potty mouth delighted me on a weekly basis and once made me snort red wine out my nose). Quinn is devastated and says he wants Saxon dead. Dexter, with that look of calm rage on his face that we all know and love, says ‘so do I’ and leaves the room. Quinn frowns says goodbye to Deb, kisses her, and walks out, following Dex.

Elway is still stalking Hanna at the airport while swigging what we can assume is his special home brewed electrolyte mix. He’s jostled from behind by some random dude and drops his bottle, which rolls under a row of seats. The guy who jostles him apologizes and searches for it for a few moments, finds the bottle for Elway hands it back to him. Elway is about to drink from it, when he smiles and shakes his head and drops the bottle in the garbage. He goes to a nearby café and orders a fresh bottle of water from the cashier, while looking around the airport for Hanna. A uniformed server who is making the coffees hands the cashier the water bottle, who gives it to Elway. He cracks it open and takes a drink while he walks back into the airport. A few moments later he starts to choke and falls on the floor. Cut to Hanna throwing her café uniform in a corner, paying off the jostling dude, grabbing Harrison’s hand and boarding their plane.

Saxon’s bleeding and seriously pissed off. He takes the gun and sets off in search of Dexter, seeing a news report about Deb’s death. A cop recognizes him and follows him, Saxon kills him and looks up Deb’s address from the cop car, driving it there. Dexter sees the cop car out the front of Deb’s house and thinks nothing of it. He goes inside with the intent of getting a weapon, as his knives are now with Miami Metro. Quinn watches from the car. Saxon jumps Dex. Epic fight ensues, and Dexter gets the upper hand. Quinn here’s the sounds of things breaking and rushes inside.

Quinn arrives as Dexter calmly dispatches Saxon despite the fact that the guy is unarmed and surrendering. He draws his gun and asks Dexter what the hell he’s doing. Dexter calmly goes about wrapping up Saxon’s body for disposal with garbage bags and tell Quinn ‘what you wanted’. Quinn watches Dexter and realizes that Dexter’s done this before, and says as much, asking ‘Are you going to kill me now?’ Dexter says no, that Quinn doesn’t fit his code. They discuss the code. Quinn realizes his suspicions about Dex in previous seasons are true and asks if Deb knew about Dexter, he says that she did. Gun still drawn, Quinn asks who else Dexter has killed. Dex tells him about the Russian dudes from the Koshka Brotherhood and Travis Marshall. Quinn asks if Dex killed Rita. He says no, Trinity did, and he killed Trinity for it because he loved Rita, as much as he was able. Quinn asks if Dex made the blood evidence against him go away in the Liddy case, Dex says yes. Dex asks Quinn if he’s going to arrest him. Quinn says no and puts away his gun, remembering that he killed the Russian guy for Nadia and covered it up. He asked what Dex will do with the body, Dex tells him he’s got it under control. Quinn walks away.

Dexter watches Deb’s house burn from the shadows, regretting letting Saxon live and realizes Vogel was right, and there is a place in society for him. He dumps Saxon’s body on his boat and unties it from the dock, knowing the boat and body will disappear with the approaching storm.

Cut to Argentina, where local asshole is heard boasting about raping women to his friends. He spies Hanna sitting alone drinking a coffee. Hanna looks nervous under his intense gaze, abruptly leaving the café, her coffee undrunk. At the encouragement of his friends, the asshole follows her. Hanna moves faster and faster, trying to get away, the man following. She darts down an alley in an attempt to get away, breaking into a run, only to find a dead end, the man laughs as he corners her, pulling out a huge knife. Cue Dexter, who emerges from the shadows, with his trusty syringe, rendering the man unconscious. The next thing we see is the man on Dexter’s table, surrounded by the usual photos of his victims and wrapped in plastic (does anyone else always think of Twin Peaks every time they see this, or is it just me?). As Dexter’s about to kill the asshole, his cell rings. He gags the man and answers. It’s a newly promoted Quinn on the other end, explaining he has a problem that needs Dexter’s ‘unique set of skills’. Dexter agrees to pay a visit to Miami and they arrange to meet. Dexter hangs up, explaining to Hanna, who we see sitting in the corner of the room, that Quinn has ‘another job for me’ and asks Hanna to look after Harrison for a few days. Hanna agrees and asks if Dexter wants her to keep teaching Harrison The Code. Dexter says it’s a good idea, as ‘Harrison was born in blood, just like me’. (After all, the family that kills together, stays together). Cut to Dexter’s face as he plunges the knife into the chest of the rapist, blood spattering over his facemask. The end.

Well, I gotta tell ya, I thought this day would never come! Seven years after I first sat down to write the first chapter thanks to a super annoying dream, The Enemy Inside is published and available in paperback and ebook! Three agents, one name change, several editors and 2,147 tantrums later, it’s here!!

As a ‘get rich quick’ scheme, this has been an epic fail, but as an exercise in persistence and thick skinedness (that’s totally a word), it has been a major success!

Anyway, I’m off to have a little cry now, and you can get your copy at the following places:

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Get it! Get it now!

So, before I read an except from my upcoming crime fiction novel The Enemy Inside, I wanted to talk a little bit about how I got to this point, in case there are any other budding writers in the audience and to show you that not all novelists are insular alcoholics. Just kidding, I’m not insular.

When you dream of writing a book, it’s very easy to get caught up in the ‘shoulds’.

I SHOULD have the entire book planned out from beginning to end before I write it.

I SHOULD have a degree in English literature from Harvard.

I SHOULD love the classics, and aim to write for posterity.

I SHOULD have an impeccable literature pedigree and be the love child of Jane Austen and Tolstoy.

Well, I am here to say that this is utter crap. When it comes to writing a novel, there are no shoulds and shouldn’ts. All there needs to be is a love of what you are doing.

I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. But like most wannbee novelists, life got in the way. And I let that be my excuse, because the alternative was too scary. Write a book? No way! Put my heart and soul on paper and have it rejected and critiqued? Are you kidding?

I started my career as a cadet journalist in the central west of NSW. I wrote a lot of stories about sheep and cows. I remember a personal highlight was visiting the cattle yards to do a story on a five-legged cow. I came away from that experience with a deep and profound sense that I needed to do something else with my life, and that I needed to become a vegetarian.

Because this job was making me tired of words, I decided to make the foray into PR, and eventually found myself managing a PR company in Sydney for Satan, beset by ungrateful clients and ‘unreasonable’ journalists.

Anyway, I loathed this job. I loathed it to the point where I actually wished to get hit by the 190 bendy bus on the way to work in the morning.  And it wasn’t helped by the fact that every night I would dream of writing the first chapter of a book. Every night it was the same damn thing, the same words, the same computer screen, over and over, and this went on for about a year.

Eventually, I got so fricking tired of this dream, I sat down and wrote this stupid first chapter, just to get it out of my head. But the muses didn’t stop at this first chapter, and before I knew it, I had written a significant portion of a book that looked like it was shaping up to be crime fiction. Who knew that was in me?

I quit my job to write this book, not knowing anything about the characters, not knowing how on earth it would end, and not having any knowledge about the shoulds and the shouldn’ts of the writing world.

The point I am trying to make is this: I am not a brilliant writer; year 12 students will not study my work 100 years from now while sitting on the Death Star. But I am persistent to the point of insanity.

I wrote this book, even though I couldn’t afford to not be working. I ignored the rejections, and trust me, there were many. I sat down at my computer to write, without any clear idea of what words might come out of me that day. I did it for the love of it, and if I can, anyone can.

I shudder to think what great classics will never come to be read because they are still in a head or a desk drawer somewhere. So if you want to be a writer, be one, you don’t just owe it to yourself, you owe it to me and every other lover of books out there.

With that in mind, I’ll read the first few chapters of my debut novel, The Enemy Inside, which will finally be released in August this year, seven years after I first had the dream that inspired it. And yes, the first chapter is almost word for word of that dream…

Trigger warning! There are descriptions of assaults and violence in this reading that some people may find disturbing. There is also a helluva lot of  swearing. But this is crime fiction, so it’s not about unicorns farting rainbows…

If there’s one thing that is true of writing, and indeed life in general, it’s the absolute requirement to never give up.

Yet so many writers are stymied by the very first stumbling block—be it the first rejection, or their grandma didn’t like it, or someone just put out something similar—and give the entire game away. I shudder when I think of how many bestsellers are buried in a desk drawer somewhere because a moron somewhere (likely an assistant of an assistant of the third letter filer on Wednesdays) didn’t like them.

You may have heard these excuses: ‘It’s all about luck’, ‘People who get published know someone in the industry’, ‘I don’t have time’, ‘I don’t have the right degree/qualifications/the right to express myself creatively’, ‘I’m happy in my horrible job, really.’

I call bullshit.

I do not believe that the writers who get published are the most talented, or their books are the most well-written *cough, Twilight, cough*, or that they’re even lucky. I believe the almighty published are those who are the most determined to succeed and who believe in themselves and never give up.

And let’s face it, if you don’t believe in you, how can you expect anyone else to?

When I gave up my high-paying, soul-sucking job in PR six years ago, I did so with the firm belief that I wanted to write books for the rest of my life (I had always had this conviction, I just got distracted along the way :)). It was a pretty big leap of faith, and I had to believe in myself.

I’m not the best writer in the world, and my books aren’t going to change society (that’d make for a pretty cracked society), but darn it, if I have one redeeming feature it’s that I never give up.

And if someone tells me I can’t do it (which they have, natch) that just makes me want to do it more. So ner! *pokes out tongue*

Writing is hard. And plonking your still-beating heart down on paper for someone to critique is understandably confronting. But you can’t please everyone, and just because you’ve had 10 ‘nos’ doesn’t mean the next answer isn’t going to be a ‘yes’. Remember, Harry Potter was rejected by 12 publishers before being picked up (bet those other publishers are crying into their unemployment letters now).

But, you can know for sure you’re never going to succeed if you don’t a) finish writing a book, and b) show it to someone.

I’ve said it before (a lot), but it bears repeating: I’d rather die knowing that I tried and failed, than regret having never tried at all.

So believe in yourselves, peeps, and believe in the work. You’ll get there in the end if you want it enough and are prepared to put in the work.

‘Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it…’ – Michael Crichton.

This is enough to make most writers reel in horror. ‘You mean I’m not done yet?!” they cry. “But I’ve been writing this for (insert inordinately high number here) years!”

But, sadly it seems to be a universal truth. I’ve talked in my previous blogs about how much first drafts suck. Because they do, they suck like a breastfeeding octopus. And this is not just the case for new, untrained writers—it is true of all authors, as you can see from the quote above. If there is an author anywhere who published a first draft as it stood, I will eat the 56 copies of my first manuscript that I have laying about the house* (some of those are on thumb drives, too, which can’t be great for my insides—so you can see how serious I am about making my point).

My first book The Enemy Inside is currently on its 8^th incarnation (including a title change), and it hasn’t even been published yet! When I think about what my publisher will want to do to it ON TOP of what I’ve already done, I shudder and reach for the gin.

But I can also appreciate the process. The draft I am working with now with my agent is entirely different to the first draft I sent to a manuscript appraisal service five years ago (thank god that crappy draft didn’t go anywhere important!). Characters are more three-dimensional, plots lines are fleshed out, sub-plots appeared and the ending is different. And each appraiser/editor/agent that has got their hands on it has made it a bit better (ok, a lot better).

Of course, there is something you need to maintain during the editing process—artistic integrity. I have not taken on all the suggestions made by agents/editors, because some of them were not in keeping with my vision for my characters, and some of them were just plain dumb (don’t you love how some editors give it a cursory glance and then think they know your characters better than you do?? Bitches—please!). I had two Australian publishers try and get me to change the setting of The Enemy Inside to Australia, which I would not because it didn’t feel it was true to the work. Of course, they didn’t sign me, but I am comfortable with my decision. (Really, I am. I don’t cry myself to sleep at night at all—why, what have you heard?).

We all know that we writers can be a weensy bit precious when it comes to our babies. Like the mother of a newborn with scarily big ears, we do not see the imperfections in the work. We see helpful critique as criticism, and we do not like criticism, we take it very personally (about as personally as telling a mother that her baby has big ears—don’t ever do that).

So be prepared. The editing process is long, drawn out and painful. But worth it in the end, I think. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I redraft my second manuscript, Broken, for the third fucking time.

*Promise does not include self-published manuscripts; I’m not a complete idiot.

So today I thought I’d share with you a few of the writing tips I have picked up over the years, both as a fiction writer and a journalist. In this blog, I’m trying to preach about brevity, so lets just get on with it.

1. When you are writing a novel, think of KISS. That’s right—keep it simple, stupid! Thanks to the technological age, most people have an attention span just shy of that of a cocaine-sniffing hummingbird. Flowery prose and long-winded descriptions of a single sun-dappled leaf may have been de rigueur in days of yore, but frankly the people of yore had more time and less Apple devices to distract them. So try to say it as simply as possible.

2. Keep the majority of your sentences short, consisting of no more than 25 words. Of course, you will occasionally have a longer sentence in there, maybe one per paragraph, and that’s ok. But avoid, at all costs, the long-winded sentence that just bangs on and on and on about one thing or worse totally changes tack in the middle for no reason and goes off onto some random tangent until the reader gets bored, turns on the television or surfs the net and then completely loses track of what you were say—oh look, a kitten!

3. Another great way to keep the readers interested is to vary the length and style of sentences. So some sentences may be brief. And some sentences, such as this one, may be a little longer and include some kind of feature or qualifier. And then you might want to think about adding another brief one. Change it up.

4. Try and stick to around three paragraphs per page, at least. There is nothing worse than one long paragraph that never ends. I loved the Millennium Trilogy, but fuck Larsson waffles on about some nonsense in there. I skipped pages and pages of never-ending paragraphs and still kept up with the story—as far as I’m concerned, his editor should be dragged naked over gravel by his earlobe. Along that vein, each paragraph should deal with a single idea, and each paragraph should include no more than about three to six sentences.

5. Get to the freaking point. Lee Child’s books are an excellent example of this. He leads the reader straight into the story from the first line. He rarely uses sentences of more than 20 words. He keeps descriptions to a minimum. His main character, Jack Reacher, never stops to admire how the sunlight reflects off a dew drop perched indolently on a blade of grass and shatters into a myriad of rainbow-like colors. Reacher doesn’t give a shit and neither do your readers. No—Reacher crushes that blade of grass under his boot as he trudges along because, frankly, he has places to go and people to fuck up. As a result there are no boring spots, which is why I am still up reading about Reacher at 3am.

6. Of course, you will need have the odd description in there. But, like an all-nude strip club, peel back your descriptions to their most interesting elements. I don’t care how amazing it is, no single thing needs more than 100 words to describe it. A neat trick: whenever I feel like a description is overly long or complicated, I try and fit each single sentence on to Twitter. This helps me narrow it down to the most important words.

Well, this list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a start and it includes stuff I didn’t know until editors started telling me in a not very kind fashion. Hope it helps!