Dark Legends Block Party!

Demelza Carlton

Featured Book: Ocean's Gift

Hiya, and thanks for having me. I'm a little nervous, but I shall do my best not to stammer too much.

Welcome, Demelza! It always amazes me when writers say that; they have such a command of the English language and are such magic wordsmiths! How long have you been a writer and how did you come to writing?

I've been writing for over 20 years, but I've only been published for four of them. Ah...come to writing or come to writing something I intended to publish? Because the first book I wrote was actually the third book I published, and there's a reason for that. Nightmares of Caitlin Lockyer...no, the whole Nightmares Trilogy, is very dark . Psychological thriller type dark. It was based on a series of recurring nightmares I had during the trial of two notorious serial killers in my home town. While I won't go into the gory details, they kidnapped and tortured women before they killed them and disposed of the bodies. The only reason they were caught is because when they were about to kill one of the girls, she managed to escape and get help. That's where the similarity ends, though, because my serial killers are subject to a much darker kind of justice than the Australian legal system.

I thought the whole thing – which was just the one book then, not a trilogy at all – was too dark to publish or even show anyone, but I was talking to some other authors on the site Wattpad, who expressed a desire to read some of it. They'd tell me if it was too dark, they said.

So...I posted the first few chapters. And within a matter of days, those chapters had over ten thousand reads. So I posted a few more...and a few more...until in the end I posted the whole book on Wattpad, and the website staff offered to feature it to their (then) ten million readers. I think it had more than two and a half million reads or something – a very popular book. So, I went from believing it was too dark to release, to publishing the first book...and two more in the trilogy as it stands now.

But if you're asking about why I published my first book...that's Ocean's Gift, a light comedy urban fantasy.

How did you come up with this storyline?

Ah....that's kind of a funny story, really. I did my Masters research on shipwrecks at several remote islands off the West Australian coast, and as I was writing up my dissertation, I came across one shipwreck that just didn't make sense. During a cyclone in the 1920s, a fishing boat broke free of its moorings with the two-man crew still aboard. One man managed to swim ashore, but the other couldn't swim, so he disappeared in the waves when the boat sank. Everyone thought he drowned, but his body wasn't found...until more than three weeks later, when it washed up miles from where the boat went down, in the complete opposite direction to the ocean currents. Stranger still, the man was recognizable – which meant his corpse hadn't been floating at sea for all those weeks – and he'd done some first aid to his broken leg. There was nowhere the man could have been all that time except in the ocean, because if he'd washed up on the island, someone would have seen him and helped him. So how could a man survive for three weeks at sea, do first aid on himself, and yet drown within sight of land?

No matter how much research I did, I couldn't solve the mystery, so I wrote "mermaids did it" in my report and left it at that.

When I did the final proofread of my report, I burst out laughing when I saw that bit, because it was still there. I quickly deleted it, submitted my dissertation, and decided to celebrate with a glass of wine.

Wine in hand, I decided to search mermaid myths on the internet. Was it actually possible? I was amazed to find heaps of mermaid stories from all over the Indian Ocean, and of course I also dug out my copy of Hans Christian Anderson's tales to read the fairytale I remembered.