Peter Twohig's debut, The Cartographer, began life as part of NaNoWriMo (in which authors aim to write as much as they can of a novel in just one month).

Here, he guest blogs for us about the story behind the book – murder, mystery and a colourful childhood in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond.

The idea for The Cartographer came to me while I was out for a burn on my Moto Guzzi one day in April, 2009. The novel occurred to me more or less complete, so I worked it out as best I could under the circumstances and sketched it as a synopsis when I got home. As I was writing another novel at that time, I put the synopsis away until November, when I wheeled it into a novel as a NaNoWriMo project. I ended up writing the complete first draft (of 78 000 words) in 23 days: one chapter per day. Given that I had just finished (on 31 October) a novel of 220,000 words that had taken me four years to write, I was astonished!

However, the novel looked more or less okay, so I submitted it to my agent that way. After a rewrite in which a defining plot element was added, bringing the book to a total of 120,000 words, I produced the book that came to be published.

As a kid, I lived in Richmond myself, and still remember it fondly, not because there was anything pleasant about it, but because it was deliciously decadent. There were wall to wall shady customers, dodgy cops, violent events, and a range of colourful drunks, Irishmen and priests. The place was alive with prejudices, hypocrisies and feuds. There was petty crime, and large crime. And lashings of religion. So when it came time to find a really rotten but, to a kid, mysterious environment it didn’t take me long to decide on Richmond.

The odd thing is that I myself was not like ‘the kid’. I was basically one of those kids who is afraid of his own shadow. I did not own a Labrador dog, had no twin, and was an all-round goody two-shoes. But I was as deeply embedded in the pop culture as a kid could be. And I was fascinated with maps.

I couldn’t get enough of them. And when I couldn’t get enough of them I made my own. I was, in that sense, the Cartographer, though without the superhero status, and without the adventures.

My intention throughout the writing was always to present the reader with a story told by a boy with a familiar voice, that of the traditional Australian larrikin raconteur. But that had not been a part of the initial plan. The voice simply appeared spontaneously as soon as I began to write.

The Cartographer is out now in paperback ($24.95) and ebook ($13.99).

A book by Booki.sh