With his first novel, Maelstrom, currently on the longlist in the Best First Novel catgeory of the 2008 Ned Kelly Awards, Michael MacConnell, has a new novel titled
Splinter out this week, and is interviewed in "The Sydney Morning Herald" by Keith Austin.
Sitting in a Thai restaurant on the Terrigal beachfront just minutes from his home, MacConnell says the new book begins with his female protagonist dealing with post-traumatic stress caused by the violent denouement of her first outing: "I wanted to work that into the novel because I got a bit tired of characters who can get into a stoush with criminals or terrorists or whatever, throw in a snappy line and then walk away into the sunset and everything's peachy."It's not like that, it's nothing like that at all. I tried to insert some of my own experience in there because I had some post-traumatic stress after some incidents at work [working security for RailCorp], some attacks, arrests, that sort of thing. I wanted to show what you go through just as a biological creature, not because you are weak or because you aren't tough or whatever, it just happens, it's unavoidable. So she's suffering a bit from that. And the story's different because it's a kidnapping, or rather a failed kidnapping."
