TasWeekend: Star-crossed author Danielle Wood delivers blockbuster rom-com

Tasmanian author, academic and former Mercury journalist Danielle Wood is watching her first commercial novel, Star-crossed, launch into the stratosphere.

Tasmanian author, academic and former Mercury journalist Danielle Wood is watching her first commercial novel, Star-crossed, launch into the stratosphere.

THE stars have aligned and Danielle Wood is having a moment. It is the kind of moment most writers will only ever dream of.

As you read this, the Tasmanian author, academic and former Mercury journalist is watching her first commercial novel, Star-crossed, launch into the stratosphere. Back on Earth, it’s all been coming together for a while. Wood wrote the manuscript right here in the cute gypsy caravan parked in the garden of her Otago Bay home on Hobart’s Eastern Shore.

It appears all the early mornings at the desk are paying off in more ways than one. In fact, it seems as if Wood, writing under her new pen name Minnie Darke, may have just written the next Bridget Jones’s Diary; if publishers are right, her book could well take off like Helen Fielding’s in the same genre two decades ago, replete with lucrative screen spin-off. The publisher is calling it “Marian Keyes meets Love Actually”.

In a nutshell, straight from the blurb on the back of the book, Star-crossed goes like this: “When Justine Carmichael (Sagittarius, aspiring journalist and sceptic) bumps into her old friend Nick Jordan (Aquarius, struggling actor and true believer) it could be by chance. Or perhaps it is written in the stars …”

Desperate to get Nick’s attention, Justine tampers with the magazine’s astrology column. It seems harmless enough, but the ripple effects are huge.

Intricately plotted, pacey, racy and deftly written, it is a playful work by an experienced hand who knows well how to obscure the efforts of her labour. That’s why the publishing world is going nuts over it: books of this calibre in this genre don’t come along very often.

Wood is a working mother of three, with a teenage daughter and girl-boy twins in primary school, but she is also a disciplined writer who meets her deadlines. She sent the Star-crossed manuscript to her agent in November 2017, expecting to hear back in January. Two days later, the agent rang to say she loved it and wanted to send it to “everyone”.

“On the Saturday, we had our first offer,” says Wood. Four bids from other major Australian publishers came hot on its heels, but the initial one, Penguin/Random House, went the extra mile to win the manuscript for its Michael Joseph imprint.

In New York, seven publishers vied at auction for US publishing rights. Another 10 bid for it in Germany.

She picks up the Finnish version from a stack in the van. “It was the first to hit the shelves,” she says. “There was a period last year where I was waking up and there’d be an offer from Spain and another from Brazil, and so on.”

At this point, the book is contracted for publication in about 20 countries.

Danielle Wood in her writing studio, a Gypsy Caravan.

Wood points to a basket of oddments including mini bottles of sparkling wine and a copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet next to her writing desk.

“This is the basket Nick and Justine send to each other across the gap between their apartments,” she says. “And in the basket are all the things they send to each other.”

The basket was one of Penguin’s wooing of Wood ideas. Its pitch document detailed the astrological signs and traits of every team member who would conceivably handle the book on its road to publication, with Penguin’s seduction inverting the traditional striving writer/impervious publisher dynamic.

And the fun was just beginning. Wood was down at her family shack at Verona Sands, south of Cygnet, when a call came from a Hollywood agent wanting to represent her.

And she was standing in a queue at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport rechecking her bags onward to Hobart from Perth when Greg Silverman, former head of Warner Bros Studios, rang. He was now running his own production company and wanted to talk about bringing Star-crossed to the screen.

“Silverman kept asking me what my vision was. I kept saying I wanted to hear his,” says Wood. “He kept it up until I said, ‘How American would you want it to be?’ And he picked up correctly that what I was really asking was how Australian are you prepared to let this be?”

What her agent said later, she adds with a laugh, is that if Silverman wants it to be American, it’s American. “Selling rights is like selling a car,” muses Wood. “If they want to drive it off a cliff, they drive it off a cliff. I need to be relaxed about that.”

A deal was struck, Wood handing over screen rights in return for a modest initial payment and a percentage of the production budget if it ends up getting made. The first part of that process is under way, Silverman having engaged an Australian scriptwriter to transform it into a six-episode TV series. At this point, the mind skips to HBO’s seven-part Big Little Lies. Also based on a book by an Australian novelist, Liane Moriarty, the dark comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman was a hit two years ago, and a second series is expected mid-year.

Danielle Wood with her parents Peter and Jenny Wood at the 2003 launch of her debut novel The Alphabet of Light and Dark.

A few days later, Wood is replendent in a star-spangled, fifties-style frock at Star-crossed’s Hobart launch party in an upstairs function room at a city pub. In a thank-you speech following a launch by Peter Jerrim (the primary school teacher she says turned her into a writer) she says she is enjoying “the princess treatment”, including the publisher’s gift of the dress.

This is Wood’s sixth solo book, following her Vogel Award-winning debut novel, The Alphabet of Light and Dark, set at the Cloudy Bay lighthouse on Bruny Island, in 2003; Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls; Housewife Superstar: the Very Best of Marjorie Bligh, about the late Tasmanian home-crafts legend; Marjorie Bligh’s HOME: Hints on Managing Everything, and Mothers Grimm, a collection of long stories about darker aspects of motherhood.

“I wrote Alphabet when I had a boyfriend and a puppy and I wrote Rosie Little when I had a husband and a baby,” says Wood. “Then I had the twins and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, the first year of their lives. The sleep deprivation in having twins is not something I was prepared for. Plus it just brought on this existential panic in me that I was never going to be able to write again, I was never going to be able to do anything again other than breastfeed — and so I didn’t surrender to it, though in hindsight I probably should have. I fought, and that’s when I wrote Housewife Superstar.”

Danielle Wood and her gypsy caravan.

Earnings from that book bought her the custom-built traditional timber gypsy wagon. And she started spending a lot of time in it, rising at 4am for 18 months to write Mothers Grimm.

“If you can see darkness in that book, that’s why,” she says. “I had young children and a demanding job, but I wanted to write another book. I had a lot to say about the early years of motherhood. I wrote that book through a sheer act of will.”

She also co-wrote a trilogy of Angelica Banks children’s books with good friend Heather Rose, and edited several anthologies.

Wood says her new pen name, Minnie Darke, is not a mask. Rather, she sees Minnie as a fully formed character who came along to write some of her books for her. She even knows Minnie’s star sign. She is a Gemini to Wood’s Leo.

“In a way Minnie Darke is just a character I created when I started writing Star-crossed,” she says. “She was the first character in the Star-crossed universe. If you think about fiction, who is really the teller of the book? Is it always the same person as the author? Is a third-person narrator you or is it someone not quite you? Am I really just naming up something that’s already there?

“Some people make the assumption I have chosen to use the pen name because I am somehow ashamed of the work … but I am not. I’m very proud of it.”

Like all her books, Star-crossed is a product of a solid work ethic, for which the 46-year-old thanks her training on a suburban newspaper and her time as a journalist at the Mercury.

Raised and educated in Hobart, Wood spent five years on our paper in her twenties, covering everything from the entertainment to environment rounds.

She left to move to Western Australia for three years with her newish Aquarian love and now husband of many years, John Godfrey, working part-time for ABC Radio and writing the manuscript of Alphabet for her Phd at Curtin University.

“What I learnt at the Mercury was that you just have to write,” she says. “If you have done the interview you go back to the office, you sit down and you write it. You don’t do it because you feel like it. It’s your job so you just do it.”

It was way back on the suburban Star newspaper that the idea for Star-crossed came to Wood. She had just experienced that dizzying moment in the life of every new cadet journalist, realising she could alter words in the newspaper before it went to press and possibly get away with the mischievous meddling.

Star-crossed, a romantic comedy novel by Danielle Wood.

“I remember sitting there one night and thinking I could change the horoscopes,” she says. “I could write a little something. I could make one of the horoscopes really creepily accurate for a friend, or if I knew someone was trying to make a big decision, I could maybe influence that decision using the horoscope. I’m not saying I definitely ever did that, but it certainly occurred to me as an idea.

“And, I thought, if you did that, tweaked it for one person, and all the other Virgos or Aquarians or Leos in the world read it and made big decisions based on a misdirection, what would happen? I had that idea in the back of my head for a long time.”

Now that it’s fully realised, Wood is full steam ahead on her second Minnie Darke romantic comedy, hoping to get it finished before she runs out of long-service leave from the University of Tasmania, where she is employed part-time as a creative writing academic. She’s on a punishing schedule, but she’s already planning her next project: a young adult fantasy quartet.

Whatever she goes on to write, a pair of cloth dolls, named Enthusiam and Patience, will be watching over her desk from a high timber shelf in the gypsy van.

“I keep little things around me to keep me on track,” she says, “because writing is essentially a confidence game.”

Star-crossed, published by Michael Joseph, $32.99, is out now