DEMI LYNCH
Young adult Queensland author Melissa H North will be launching her second novel ‘A Confabulated Compendium of Anecdotes,‘ at Brisbane’s Comic Con this weekend.
Ms North is currently on a book signing tour of Queensland with her first novel ‘The Halfling‘.
“The Halfing sort of wrote itself,” Ms North said.
“It was just one of those things that just had to happen – as I was writing it sort of just fell from my imagination onto the paper.”
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Ms North says she began storytelling when she started reading books to her children at bedtime.
“When they wanted to read a particular book, they would want me to read it again and again every night and I kind of got bored with it, so I kind of just made up my own stories,” Ms North said.
“At the time, my kids never knew I wasn’t reading from the book, I was just making it all up until of course they got older.
“And in fact, the stories I made up they preferred.”
It wasn’t until Ms North was 35 that she began to put her stories onto paper.
“If I ever wrote stuff down it was always just ideas and thoughts that weren’t much longer than a paragraph,” Ms North said.
“Until one day I went to a publishing seminar.
“At first I thought I would just sit in and listen but by the end of it I was totally inspired so I ran off and started writing.
“After that I wrote The Halfilng – it was head down, bum up and that’s all I did for 6 months.”
‘A Confabulated Compendium of Anecdotes,’ is a collection of short stories of the steampunk genre which Ms North says has been a fascination since first reading Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’
“That era she wrote in, the 1800s, really inspires me,” Ms North said.
“And I was able to see that era in the 1970s when steam punk started coming out so I bought a steam punk book so that I could learn about the history.
“Just the way they are able to mash it up together with new technology is just amazing, and it’s limitless the imagination just goes on and on and on … and that’s what inspires me about steam punk.”
Ms North will be at stand 38 at Brisbane’s Comic Con this coming Saturday and Sunday on 23rd and 24th of September.