For Canberra author Shelley Burr, the last four years spent working toward the release of her first novel, crime-fiction Wake, has been “an absolute whirlwind”.

Since conceiving the story in 2018, Burr moved quickly, completing her first draft in a “mad, tearing hurry”.

“I felt haunted by it, I wanted to get it down on the page so I could stop running scenes over and over in my head,” she told Canberra Daily.

Burr then took the draft through a former ACT Writer’s Centre year-long manuscript program called Hardcopy, giving it “a good polish” in the process.

From there, still a work in progress, her manuscript took out the 2019 UK Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger award and was shortlisted for the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript award.

“That really was a turning point, because winning that made me think maybe I’ve got something here,” she said. “I had a bit of publisher interest at the time, and probably I could have started to shop it around at that point, but I didn’t feel it was the book it could be.”

Taking another year to do more significant rewrites on the work, when she was ready, Burr had her agent send it out to publishers.

“She said maybe you’ll hear something, it can take three months to hear something, but I heard back within a couple of days,” Burr said.

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Going to auction with three publishers interested, Wake was sold in May 2021 as part of a two-book deal with Hachette.

With author copies arriving earlier this month, Burr’s satisfaction and excitement is palpable.

“It’s just been incredible, a lot of hard work and tiring, but very satisfying seeing the book shape up.”

True crime ‘fascinating and unsettling’

Based on an unsolved disappearance in a fictional NSW farming community, Wake tells the story of Mina McCreery. Twenty years ago, Mina’s sister Evelyn disappeared from the room they shared, with the case going on to become an international sensation that has taken the true crime world by storm.

The original idea for the book was sparked during a phase in which Burr was frequenting online true crime forums.

“A lot of people on there are amateur sleuths trying to solve things,” she said. “I found them fascinating but also unsettling.”

Wake was directly inspired by one specific thread where users were discussing the brother of a well-known murder victim.

One poster said the brother didn’t have any social media, but did have a LinkedIn, and that his employer’s page was public, so they went through the pictures on there looking for him.

“All I could think was how angry I would be if I was the brother. That’s how Mina was born,” Burr said.

Having always loved the genre and consumed it extensively, it was never Burr’s agenda to become a crime-fiction writer.

“I got this idea and when I set out to write this story, in putting together the outline and breaking the story, that’s when it became clear it was going to be a crime-fiction novel,” she said.

Having lived in Canberra for 12 years now, Burr is planning to relocate with her family to northern Victoria.

She’s greatly appreciative of the resources available to writers in Canberra, which “punches well above its weight”.

“I think that Canberra for a regional city is really well set up to support writers; there are a lot of regional centres where it’s a lot more difficult.”

She did, however, acknowledge that as a professional author she’s more and more regularly having to travel to Sydney and Melbourne.

“There’s a notable difference moving into the professional writer space; there’s a lot of need to travel to those cities to access resources.”

A full-time public servant, mother, and author, balancing all her duties requires deft time management and strategy. Taking an hour a night to write once her daughter is asleep, Burr puts her disciplined approach down to being so pressed for time.

“It actually kind of helped to have so little time, because if I’m going to get an hour it has to be butt on the chair, hands on the keyboard getting it done. It was a real motivator not to muck around.”

Shelley Burr’s debut novel Wake will be available for sale in Australia from 27 April; hacehtte.com.au

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