Maris Morton writes: I’ve always been an avid reader, especially of crime and mystery fiction, and while I had the idea that writing a book myself would be a fine thing, I never had the confidence to attempt it. What I was good at was drawing and painting, and if I was to have a creative career, everyone expected that I’d be an artist. However, after University, real life intervened, and I found myself as a single mother, living in a country town in WA, doing whatever I could to keep food on the table: cooking for shearers, teaching art, cooking for old people, teaching English, and in between, developing a tiny self-sufficiency farm of one acre, and involving myself in the cultural life of the town. It wasn’t until later, when I moved to northern NSW to take up the position as director of the local art gallery that all my qualifications, skills and experience came together, and after ten years I was ready to make a start on writing fiction. In 1997 I wrote the first draft of Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man. After that there was no stopping me, in spite of a spate of rejections. I was hooked on writing: the excitement of it, the fascination of words, of cutting-and-pasting events and characters to make a gripping story. A Darker Music was the third novel I attempted, and I entered it in the CAL/Scribe Fiction Prize last year with no expectation of winning.