Some years ago, I realised it was time to fulfil my lifelong dream of publishing a book. In my usual way, I went for it with all my heart. I started working on a historical novel, and hit a snag: there were so many other stories I wanted to tell first, stories which wouldn’t take me as long to develop. 

So, Feelings in Staccato, my first literary ‘baby’, was born. 

I dusted off memories of past travels, my childhood, ideas vaguely developed and vaguely remembered from decades ago. With all those stories and a bunch of new ones, I wound up with a collection of 21 stories. But, of course, in the publishing world the number of stories is less important than the word count, which in the end was about 40,000 words. 

Before this, I had never thought that it would be quite so difficult to write that many words, then reshape, trim, reshape and trim again until each story matched my vision for it. I also learned a lot about self-publishing, and all the hoops I had to jump through in order to do just that. 

In the end, my debut collection of short stories, Feelings in Staccato: The book of stories was self-published on 27 July 2021, a commemoration of 15 years – to the day! – of the date I arrived in Australia with my children.

One year later, a second edition of the collection was published; now each story has an accompanying photograph.