Tricia Stringer – The Model Wife Bites

Tricia Stringer’s best-selling Australian rural romance stories have helped country love blossom into the hugely popular category it is today. As a recognised “voice of Australian story telling” Tricia’s gone on to include historical sagas and multi-generational family fiction in her very popular body of work. In tune with the times her latest book, The Model Wife, examines what happens when a woman everyone relies on feels she’s been pushed just one point too far. Could it be that in her attempt to be a loving wife and mother, Natalie King no longer knows who she is? Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and we’re delighted to have three E-Book copies of The Model Wife to give away to three lucky readers. Enter the draw on the website, thejoysofbingereading.com or on our Binge Reading Facebook page.  Entries close May 30. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: How Tricia got into writing rural and women’s fiction Why reader say her stories resonate with their lives The way Covid is changing writer’s lives What she’s working on now The writers she admires most What she’d do differently second time around Where to find Tricia Stringer: Website:  https://www.triciastringer.com.au/ Facebook:  @triciastringerauthor  Twitter:  @tricia_stringer Instagram: @triciastringerauthor What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Tricia and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us. Tricia Stringer: Hi Jenny.  Thank you so much for inviting me. Tricia Stringer romance and historic fiction author Jenny Wheeler: Tricia, you are in South Australia and I’m in New Zealand and in these days of pandemic, I think people like to picture where you are talking from and what your situation is.  Is social distancing affecting you very much and where are you located in relation to Adelaide, for example? Living in semi-lockdown Tricia Stringer: I live in rural South Australia. I’m about two hours north of Adelaide on Yorke peninsula and near the sea.  We’re very lucky here, obviously we are social isolating, but we can still catch up with friends for a coffee.  What we’ve been doing is bringing our own and just sitting outside and keeping ourselves apart.  At home it’s not very much different for me because I work from home anyway.  So here I am sitting in my office, talking to you, which is my usual workplace. I’ve got a view out over my garden, but I guess the thing I miss the very most is being able to see my family, especially my two grandsons who live in Adelaide, and I usually see them fairly regularly, so we’ve been doing lots of Skyping and sending letters and lots of things like that. Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. The new technology, not even particularly new technology now, does come into its own when we’re in these situations, doesn’t it? How Tricia got started as an author Tricia Stringer: Yes, thank goodness. Jenny Wheeler: I always like to start by asking that question, because people always want to know the answer to it: how did you get into your writing?  Was there a Once Upon a Time moment of realization, or was it more something you’d had there on the back burner for a long time? Tricia Stringer: I’ve always enjoyed writing.  I never thought of myself as a writer as such, but when I was a teacher, now let me think, about 25 years ago, I had a class of Year 4/5 children and we were doing local history and I thought I could write them a little story to explain this aspect of local history that we were doing. That’s when I realized that it’s really easy to start a story.  What’s hard is to actually finish it. So I did a children’s writing course and I ended up writing a couple of children’s stories, got bitten by the writing bug, and then had this idea for a story with a rural theme.  That’s what got me into adult writing. A versatile writing career Jenny Wheeler: You’ve been incredibly versatile over that time. You’ve got three areas that you’re still working in now.  One is rural romance, one is historical saga, and you’ve recently moved into more general woman’s fiction with multi-generational stories and a lot more emotional depth.  Can you tell us something about that journey? Tricia Stringer: Yes.  I think writing what you know is something that people always say but for me it’s more about writing what you love. I got into the rural romances, I didn’t know that’s what they were called, when I wrote my very first book.  It was back in 2004 and I tried to get it published, couldn’t, so I self-published it, and I had a little byline on the front cover – “From the city to the country, a rural romance.”  That was before the genre of rural romance was really known. An early starter in rural romance  I kept writing those stories and eventually pitched one to Harlequin Australia, who were looking for Australian stories at that time.  They took that first book that I pitched to them, Queen of the Road.  So I went on writing those rural romances, which I love. Ass300Queen of The Road – Award winning Australian rural romance from Tricia Stringer But in the background, while I’d been dabbling with those, I had also been writing historical fiction. Another one of my loves is history, and so I had these partly written stories in the background and I showed them to my publisher one day and she said, Oh, I’m very interested in those.  That’s how the historicals came about. And then having written the rural romances, I started to want to delve a little bit more deeply into the layers of the way people react and get to know each other and what happens in families.  That’s what led me into more women’s fiction, I guess you’d call it. Award winners in popular fiction Jenny Wheeler: The rural romance is interesting, isn’t it? Because I hate to admit it, but I’m old enough to remember too when there wasn’t even a category for Australian rural romance, and now there are dozens of people writing in that genre and it’s very popular, isn’t it? Tricia Stringer: Still very, very popular, yes. I think the people that read rural romance are avid readers and they’re always looking for more. Jenny Wheeler: You won lots of romance awards but your two latest books are The Model Wife and Something in the Wine.  Both of them have won these awards called FAB awards.  That stands for Favorite Australian Book, and they’re voted for by readers in one of Australia’s most popular online bookstores, Booktopia. That seems to be a pretty lovely endorsement of your general readership, isn’t it? A Booktopia readers’ choice Tricia Stringer: Yes, I do think so, and it’s great to have both those books featured there. They did both come out in the same year so I guess I was still hopefully at the forefront of people’s minds, which was good.  And so, yes, I was very thrilled to have them both on the list. Jenny Wheeler: Do you try and alternate your work between doing a woman’s fiction or a general fiction book and then a rural romance, or is that just the way it happened in 2019? Tricia Stringer: It has happened that way. I was writing the rural romances and I had the historicals on the back burner, so they started to come to the fore, so then I had a rural romance and a historical in the same year.  I had self-published three books, and it was before the days of eBooks, so they’d really only had a little local audience.  My publisher really liked them and so they were what became my last three rural romances.   So I wasn’t actually writing from the very start.  Something in the Wine was already there. I would find it too difficult to keep writing two books a year.  At the moment it’s just one book a year. Spreading across different genres Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it is a big ask.  Do find that they are attracting the same readers or do you have different readerships for each of the different genres? Tricia Stringer:  I look at it as a bit of a Venn diagram, if you can remember those. There is quite a big overlap of all three genres. People find me in one and then they look up, what else has this person written?  They find the others and I get feedback from people saying they’ve loved all of them.  I think there are some people who do particularly like one or the other more so they might just stick with that, but in general my readership seems to have followed me very, very kindly with my forays into other styles of writing. Midlife woman taken for granted Jenny Wheeler: That’s great.  Now The Model Wife, as I’ve mentioned, is a multigenerational family story and it’s focused on a woman in midlife who starts to feel a bit taken for granted by her husband and family. She’s tried very, very hard, as the title indicates, to be a perfect wife and mother and then she starts to become aware of some real life betrayals and a feeling of being uncomfortable in the role that she’s expected to play.  It looks at the outdated ideas of what a woman should be.  How did you come upon the story? Did you feel that a lot of women are feeling like that today? Tricia Stringer: I think women of my generation, baby boomer age, are very much women who are caught in the middle.  We are women who have worked, had families, maintained all of those things that go with that and then aging parents who have needed us at different times to help them. Juggling man life roles  Sometimes there are people who are juggling grandchildren as well and I think it’s an age group where so much is asked of, in particular, the women in the family.  I know that men can be carers too, but I think it’s a particularly female role in this instance. I noticed it all around me, not just in my own life, but in those of my friends and people I met and so it was quite easy to imagine Natalie caught up in this tangle of trying to be true to everyone and herself missing out. Jenny Wheeler: Yes.  Have you had the feedback from people to say that they really do see themselves reflected in that story? Tricia Stringer – Something In The Wine – romance set in Margaret River wine country Tricia Stringer: I have had so many people message me and say, you’ve written my story. I had one lady at an event I was doing, where we were sitting chatting about the book in a library and she said, ‘how do you know, like, this has happened to me. This is your life ‘I’ve had this happen, I’ve got three daughters, I’ve got this and I’ve got that.  I just looked at her and said, I’ve been camping in your backyard.’ She took a breath a minute and then she realized of course, I was joking. But I think so many women of our age can picture themselves in that situation. Jenny Wheeler: The other book is Something in the Wine, set in the Margaret River wine country in Western Australia, lovely picture of the setting there, and it’s a father and son clashing over the way s vineyard is run. I must say that the father character Euan, I started to get a bit irritated by him because he seemed to be so self-involved.  But you get pretty involved with the wines in that one too, don’t you? Tell us about that. I really thought you might be a wine club person or something. Something In The Wine Tricia Stringer: I do like wine.  That was my second self-published book.  We had a family visit to Margaret River many years ago when my youngest son was too young to drink wine, let alone know anything about it.  And in the years that have passed, he has actually become a wine maker and now he’s a CEO of a winery, has worked in one for many years. So I was able to go back to him when I revisited this book to bring it into a more modern era because some of the things I’d originally written about, some of the controversies in the winery don’t exist anymore.  I had things like Euan and Flynn arguing over whether they should have a screw cap or a cork.  These days most wines are screw caps, so that’s not really a controversial thing anymore. Showcasing Margaret River wines Jared was very helpful for me to just go back through that.  At the time of writing it originally, I did spend a lot of time with some Margaret River wine makers who were really helpful and when I edited it this time, I went back to Margaret River and visited some more wine makers.  I just wanted to make sure that it was still credible and what was affecting people is still the right thing. Jenny Wheeler:  It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve kind of got a deep throat in the industry because it really comes through in the book. Tricia Stringer: Well, I had to drink a lot of wine to research that book, yes. Jenny Wheeler: I think you’ve got three of the general fiction novels out now, don’t you?  The other one that perhaps was your first general fiction one, Table for Eight.  Table For Eight That’s a really nice uplifting story.  It’s suitable for the days we are living in about a whole lot of people who are gathered together on a cruise ship and what happens around the dining table at night and the kind of relationships that develop.  I did wonder about that one, whether it was sparked by a cruise that you yourself took. Tricia Stringer: Most definitely. Back in 2016, thank goodness, because oh, the poor cruise industry, it’s so sad now, isn’t it? But back in 2016 my girlfriend was turning 60 and she said to her family and to a few of us, let’s go on a cruise, which we did.    It was a wonderful experience. We had a lovely, lovely time, and we went to the South Pacific, and the whole time I was gone, I’m thinking, oh my goodness there’s so much fodder for stories here that I started writing my first ideas and notes while I was still on that cruise.  Table For Eight – romance onboard a cruise ship – from Tricia Stringer author A different story now I can’t let it go, I can’t forget it.  So I sat myself on a beautiful beach in Lifou and started to write the first notes for that book, which became Table for Eight. Jenny Wheeler: Isn’t it interesting because we’re all starting to think a little bit now about how this pandemic is going to affect our writing, and that’s one book you wouldn’t even consider trying to do at the moment would you? Tricia Stringer: Oh, it’d be a very different story now. Jenny Wheeler: A very different story and, as you say, the poor old cruise industry.  It seems like that might be one of the ones that’s going to find it difficult to get back on its feet, certainly to the level of popularity that it’s been enjoying the last few years.  Have you got anything on the boil that might be affected in that way by the pandemic, that you have to rewrite a character or a storyline? Looking into the future Tricia Stringer: I’ve started writing my book for next year.  Usually February is when I start writing next year’s book and I already had the ideas.  I have three characters who are quite different women and not connected via a family relationship but the more I thought about why they are like they are and I’m projecting, so the story starts in September, 2021 and I’m trying to work out why they are like they are and I’m sitting here thinking oh my goodness, they’ve just lived through what we’re living through now. What does that look like?  And I just can’t imagine it.  I can’t think.  Will we ever go back to being just like we were?  The world is going to be such a different place, isn’t it? Finding post-Covid balance I believe we’ll get through it, but how we will be on the other side, I’m not sure. So that’s really impacting my creative writing at the moment, trying to think, how will this story be?  I’m currently also editing the book that will come out at the end of this year that I wrote last year.  There’s things in it like a woman sitting in the back of an Uber sobbing and she leaves a wad of tissues behind and I think, oh, she can’t do that!  But then I’ll have to think, no way. This was written in a different time. We’ve just had to leave all of that. Jenny Wheeler: And some people have this feeling, and I think they’re right, that readers won’t want to be too reminded of it.  It’s a difficult balance, isn’t it? Tricia Stringer:  It is a very difficult balance. Who’s going to want to read about Covid-19 once it’s all over, but it will have impacted us so it has to be somewhere in the story, I guess. Historical saga in Flinders Ranges Jenny Wheeler:  Yes, you just have to have some recognition that it’s been there.  Now with your historical sagas, I wondered if your interest in local history, because they are set in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, does that reflect your own family? Have you got a long history in South Australia yourself? Tricia Stringer: Yes, I do.  Where I live there’s a beach near here called Simms Cove and that is named after my great, great grandfather.  There’s certainly a long history for me here in this area and I’d like to write that story one day maybe.  But I picked the Flinders because we’ve been going there for probably 30 years for long weekends and things, we’ve got to know people there and now have really good friends on a station there.  Secret of Tricia’s writing success It spoke to me, the history of that area. I felt that there was a story that needed telling.  When we went on holidays, once again, my notebook came out. I jotted things down and I wasn’t really sure where it would lead me but of course, then it led onto that saga. Tricia Stringer Jewel in the North – Flinders Ranges historical saga from Tricia Stringer author Jenny Wheeler: That’s terrific.  Moving away from the specific books, looking a little at your wider career, is there one thing you’ve done in your career more than any other that you would credit as the secret of your success? Tricia Stringer:  Yes.  I’d been writing for quite a while, I was still doing the self-published and I was lamenting that it was all too hard and why was I doing it?  I really would like to have some sort of publication beyond my own efforts.  And I was talking to a well-known a South Australian writer, Fiona McIntosh, who has been a great mentor at different times and she said, what are you writing at the moment? Advice from a master novelist And I’d said to her, and she said, how’s it going? and I said, oh, well, you know, the family’s doing this and work’s doing that and whatever. And she just looked at me, if you’ve ever met Fiona, she has a very piercing gaze and she just pinned me with it and she said, do you want to be a writer or not?  And I said, well, yes, I do. And she said, then write every day.  It doesn’t matter if it’s only a few hundred words, you write them down, and over a period of time, you’ll end up with your story finished.  That has become my mantra. I write every day.  Now I have to step back and say, I don’t technically write every day, but I’m thinking about my writing every day and I certainly write very, very regularly.  In fact, if I leave it for too long not writing, I get the twitches.  A daily practice important I think that has been the single most important piece of advice.  If you’re a writer, it’s like anything, you have to practice it and you have to keep doing it and keep doing it. Jenny Wheeler:  Do you do it at the same time every day? Have you got a routine, like two hours in the morning? Tell us a bit about your process. Tricia Stringer: Yes. It took me a while to work that out, writing and having a full-time job. I was a teacher librarian, ILT coordinator at a school near here. That was a very busy job so my writing was fitted into tiny little pieces of my day.  Once I resigned from that job and took up full time writing, suddenly I had all day and I found I was a very good procrastinator. I could do all sorts of things and not write. So then I had to reteach myself, retrain myself to write at more regular times. Getting down to the job I start my day as if I’m going out to work.  I get up and have my breakfast and do my jobs and bits and bobs, and then be at my desk by 8, 8.30 in the morning.   My aim is to write 2,000 words when I’m in the creative writing part.  It could be that I’m editing and that’s a different process.  It just depends what I’m at. But when I’m actually writing, my aim is for 2,000 words, and that can come quite quickly, or it can take all day.  It’s really so different depending on what stage I’m at with the story. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Are you a planner or a seat of your pantser? Tricia Stringer: Very much seat of my pants, which is another stress because sometimes I sit there and think, what is going on with this story? The creative writing process I don’t know where these people are going, but eventually, usually about a third of the way into the story, the characters do take over more, and I have a feeling for where they’re going and it seems to flow better.  In the early stages where I am now with next year’s book, sometimes I think, I wish I was a planner, but I don’t really want to know what happens at the end because that would kind of spoil it for me. It’s a bit like reading the last page of a book before you’ve read the story. I don’t like doing that. Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. So your characters are speaking to you all the way through. Tricia Stringer: Yes. They live with me here in this office, we go lots of places together, I can see them around the dinner table.  They become real to me while I’m spending so much time with them. A wide ranging taste in books Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely.  This is The Joys of Binge Reading, so turning to your reading habits, Tricia as reader, it sounds like you have read all your life, that you were probably one of those people, when you were young, who was a bit of a bookworm, but tell us about your tastes in fiction and what do you like to read now and even binge read now? Tricia Stringer: Oh look, I read nearly everything that is put in front of me.  I’ve got access to books, obviously, with libraries and I buy lots of books.  Every now and again my publisher sends me some advanced reading copies of other books, so I’ve always got piles and piles of books everywhere.  I think the only thing that I probably don’t read is horror.  I’ve got a vivid enough imagination without going down that path. What Tricia is reading now I read so many different things. I was just looking at what I’ve read in the last little while. I’m currently reading Fiona Lowe, Just an Ordinary Family which is women’s fiction, I’m loving that.  Dervla McTiernan’s crime one favourite of Tricia Stirling as reader I’ve read Dervla McTiernan’s The Good Turn, which is crime, Bronwyn Sell, who’s a New Zealand author, Lovestruck, which is romance, Victoria Purman’s The Women’s Pages, that’s historical.  I’ve just read a book called My Dark Vanessa, (by Kate Elizabeth Russell) )  which is contemporary fiction, and it does have some very dark issues around the Me Too movement and things like that.   Really, I’m happy to read anything. I just love that reading expands where you’re at, takes you somewhere else, and you always seem to pick up some little thing from a book you’ve read.  I can’t imagine life without reading. Jenny Wheeler: We’ve had Bronwyn on the show just in the last week or two.  It hasn’t even been posted yet.  Funnily enough, she was one of the first ones because I probably spoke to her about 10 days ago, just after we’d gone into lockdown, and she’s got a book coming out in February.  Of course Lovestruck is set on a tourist resort in the Whitsundays and she’s got Book Two coming out in February and she has all these people flying in and out from America and she doesn’t know if she should rewrite that or just how she should tackle it. Tricia Stringer: I think we just need to go with the flow, don’t we?  It’s fiction, so we can have in it whatever we like. Jenny Wheeler: Yes. She was saying how far into fantasy am I going to go? Tricia Stringer:  Yes. It’s so hard, isn’t it? Jenny Wheeler: I noticed you didn’t include sci-fi in that list of things that you’re reading, Tricia Stringer:  I haven’t probably read any sci-fi for a while.  I am a Star Wars fan and all those sorts of things and I have read a bit of sci-fi but I can’t think of anything I’ve read recently. The Womens Pages by Victoria Purman – one of Tricia Stringer’s book choices Jenny Wheeler:  We don’t really go into sci-fi and fantasy because I do think they are rather specialist areas and people who love those books tend to stick with their genre. We do a more general thing of the romance, mystery, historicals, but I don’t attempt to cover sci-fi and fantasy because I think we’d be spreading ourselves a little bit thinly.  But it’s interesting how far we are all going to be going into fantasy with this pandemic thing. Is there anything she’d change? Circling around, you’ve had a very good career over a number of years.  Looking back over a long and successful career, is there anything you’d change and if you did want to change something, what would it be? Tricia Stringer: Oh gosh, I cannot think of anything.  I don’t look very far in advance.  I just live in the moment of writing what I’m doing now.  My goal is obviously always to finish the next book so I don’t think there’s anything I would change. It’s been a wonderful learning process and each step has had its challenges, but then you go on and there’s a new day.  I don’t know that I would change anything. I certainly am hopeful that one day I might get overseas publication. That is something that is a goal that I’m looking on to. But I don’t know if I would change anything. It’s all been good for me. What’s next for Tricia the writer Jenny Wheeler:  You certainly seem to have transitioned very successfully from being an indie author to finding a publisher. Tricia Stringer:  I have, yes, and I think being an indie author was a good learning curve for that because I came to a publisher already having written, and to a certain point, had a very small readership and not necessarily just family and friends but people were giving me a strong feedback on what I’d written so I guess I counted that as my practice for being published. Jenny Wheeler: What’s next for Tricia, the writer, your plans for 2020? Tricia Stringer:  As I said, I’m writing my book for 2021.  That’s what will take up most of my time this year. I had hoped to be going away, travel up to the top of Western Australia, but that won’t be happening now, I don’t think. A new book in the wings I’ll just be hunkered down at home writing, writing, writing.  That’s what I’m working on. And of course, I can’t picture how the launch of my October book will go. The Family Inheritance comes out then, another women’s fiction.  It might be a lot of virtual touring perhaps, depending on where we’re at. Jenny Wheeler: Tell us a little bit about The Family Inheritance. Tricia Stringer:  The Family Inheritance is about four women in the same family across three generations.  When the patriarch of the family dies, he reveals in his will and a follow-up letter some secrets that have been kept in the family and that kind of blows them apart, and it’s how they will gather themselves up and try and pull themselves back together again. Talking on Facebook Live Jenny Wheeler: Sounds great. I love family secret stories. Tricia Stringer: Oh, there’s plenty of family secrets. Every family has them. Jenny Wheeler:  You mentioned the social media and particularly in this time, and I know just before we started recording this, you mentioned that you’d been doing a live Facebook group to replace the idea of actually going to a book club.  Tell us about that, and I guess you’d be looking to do a bit more of that. Tricia Stringer: Yes. It was a lot of fun. It was disappointing to start with because this was a new book club. My daughter lives in Adelaide and she works at a big place and lots of the women there had said, let’s have a book club.  They had decided they would and that they would read my book Table for Eight and asked if I would come to their inaugural book club meeting.  Of course, I was delighted to say yes, I would.   Reaching out to bookclubs Then when the time came, of course we couldn’t.  So I said, you send me your questions and let’s do Facebook live and we’ll invite other people as well who’ve perhaps read Table for Eight and might like to join in. So we did that and it was great. It was a lot of fun, I got a lot of great questions and the feedback from that was very positive. So I thought perhaps later on I might do another one on one of my other books just to see how it goes. Jenny Wheeler:  That feeds in very nicely to what is always our final question in these interviews and that is how people find you online and whether you enjoy interacting with your readers. It sounds like there might be more of those Facebook lives there in the future as well, but tell us about interacting with your readers and where they can find you. Where you can find Tricia online Tricia Stringer: Oh, I love interacting with readers. I have a website, I’m on Facebook, I’m on Instagram, and Twitter, although I’m not much of a tweeter.   I also send out a newsletter, which, because of the strange times we’re living in –usually that’s only four times a year at the change of each season – but I thought people are looking for good things around us, I suppose and so I thought I’ll just send out a chirpy little newsletter a bit more often while we’re all stuck at home.  I have all of those places where I interact and I get a lot of emails back from people about the online stuff or the newsletter or things like that, or people reaching out when they’ve read a book and they want to tell me how it impacted on them.  I love getting those. I’m always looking for nice chances to interact with readers. Don’t forget to enter the draw! Jenny Wheeler: And probably this is the place to mention that we have talked about doing a giveaway for The Model Wife.  It might be best to make it an eBook version with the way things are, because I don’t know if many bookshops in Australia still open. Tricia Stringer: Yes, they are.  And if they’re not open to the public, they’re still taking orders and answering their phones and doing all that sort of thing. I should have looked it up before I came on, but Books & Publishing have made a list of a lot of the shops that are still open or at least operating in some way. If your local bookshop’s not on that list, still check them out because I know not everyone is on that list. Putting a spark in people’s lives Jenny Wheeler: We’ve talked about this, and you’ve very generously suggested that you’re going to give away a little bit of your book swag as well, maybe some bookmarks and things like that.  But we’ll do three copies of The Model Wife to give away to readers in a drawer.  Thank you so much, because I think at this time it’s especially nice for people to win something.  After last week’s contest I let a lady know that she’d won and she said, Oh, it’s been the most fantastic day. I’ve won a book, and I had a phone call from my son saying that his test results came back and he doesn’t have Covid-19 so she was so excited. Tricia Stringer: Yes. Because it’s book thirteen coming out for me this year, I’m doing a Facebook giveaway each month too and people seem to be enjoying that. It’s nice to be able to do something that might bring a bit of spark to people’s lives. Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful, Tricia. Thanks so much for your time. It’s been wonderful talking and all the very best with getting your head around this new book. Tricia Stringer: Thank you very much, Jenny.  If you like Tricia Stringer you might also enjoy: Sarah Barrie’s rural Australian mysteries or Alissa Callen’s rural romance . . . Sarah Barrie – Australian rural mysteries Alissa Callen – Bright Light in Darkness Australian rural mysteries Thanks For Technical Help The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with fantastic technical help from Dan Cotton and Abe Raffles. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project.  Seek him out at [email protected] or check our show notes. He’s fast, he takes pride in getting it right and he’s great to work with. Our voiceovers are done by Abe Raffles, another gem of sound and screen.  Abe has 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a camera man, director and also as a voice artist and TV presenter.  I think you’d agree that his voice is both lighthearted and warm. He is super easy to work with no matter what the job. You’ll find him at [email protected].  The full details are in the show notes on the website. That’s it for now. Thanks for listening. Hopefully see you next week.  Bye.