It Started With a Dream

Bitterport – the town that time forgot

How a ghost screaming down a chimney became a Gothic mystery series and why I needed two very good friends, a hand-drawn map, and a lot of video calls to build it.

Most of my books start with a character. Or a situation. Or, occasionally, a single line of dialogue that lodges itself in my brain and refuses to leave until I write around it. This one started with a dream.

I dreamed I was standing in the ballroom of an old mansion, looking around, when something came screaming down the chimney. I woke up, thought, “Okay, that was vivid.” I remembered everything about the room. From the color of the walls to the carvings on the mantle and even the wallpaper, and then I forgot about it.

A few years later, I visited Port Arthur in Tasmania. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand immediately what I mean when I say the place gets right into your head. If you haven’t, I’ll try to explain. Port Arthur is a former convict settlement on the Tasman Peninsula and is one of the most historically layered places I’ve ever visited. The buildings are extraordinary. Some preserved, others ruined, all of them full of strange, leftover energy. But it’s the stories that really hit home.

I spent hours wandering through the grounds, reading about the men and women who’d passed through there. The First Nations people whose land it had been. The convicts transported from Britain for offences we’d barely register today. The families who built lives there under extraordinary circumstances. The men and women who were eventually granted their pardons and went on to live ordinary and sometimes complicated lives elsewhere.

What struck me most was the resilience of these people. The evidence of choosing kindness, community and connection in conditions that gave them very little reason to. The abandoned buildings weren’t just ruins to me. They were still full of people. Every ruin had a story attached to it, and those stories were absolutely begging to be told.

I started thinking about an abandoned fictional town on the Tasmanian coast. A place with its own version of history. The boom and the bust, the cruelty and the kindness, the lingering energies of everyone who’d passed through and left something of themselves behind. And a ghost who came screaming down a chimney.

Here’s the thing about building an entire fictional town: there is a great deal of material needed. Far more than one author can reasonably populate alone. The more I dug into Tasmania’s history — the Female Factory system, the convict era, the mining booms, the WWII home front, the stories of women the official record had done its best to forget — the more I realized that Bitterport needed more than one voice to do it justice. Fortunately, I knew exactly who to call.

Suzanne Gilchrist, KL Paterson (Kerrie) and I met through the Romance Writers of Australia back in 2012, all of us newbie writers finding our feet at roughly the same time. We’ve been friends ever since, and we’ve already written one Australian series together, so we know how each other’s creative minds work.

I told them about Bitterport. What followed was months of video calls, email chains, and shared ideas that grew beyond our expectations. Building a fictional town from scratch turns out to require a surprising amount of infrastructure.

Suzanne, with her gift for the visual, took on the task of drawing the map of Bitterport, and Kerrie added the layering. Having that map meant that when any of us wrote a scene, we knew exactly which direction a character was facing, how far the walk from the Seacrest Bath House to Millmerran House actually was, and what you’d see from the upper windows of the Bitterport Savings Bank.

We discussed seasons, weather, architecture, which year certain buildings would have been constructed and what condition they’d be in now. We brainstormed the tunnels beneath the town (because of course there are tunnels!) and which buildings they connected to, who had used them and why. We gave Bitterport its whaling history, convict era, mining boom, WWII catastrophe, and the aftermath that left it with a handful of stubborn residents and a lot of unanswered questions.

We also gave this abandoned town its people, and three characters became the connective tissue of the whole series.

Victoria Carruthers is the anonymous benefactor behind every property transfer in Bitterport. She is Arthur Carruthers’s granddaughter, spending her final years methodically repairing the damage his crimes caused. She communicates exclusively through letters to her lawyer, and she has a dry wit that is completely irresistible.

Arthur Carruthers is the villain of the piece. Deceased long before the series begins, but casting a very long shadow. His wartime crimes, his exploitation of Bitterport during its most vulnerable years, and the web of harm he left behind are the foundation that every book in the series is built on.

And George Denakis, the Hobart solicitor who executes Victoria’s instructions and has his own reasons for caring what happens in Bitterport. George appears in all three books, always measured, always professional, always carrying more than he shows.

We developed a shared series bible that covers everything from the town map to the central characters to the timeline of what happens when across the series and revised it a lot! We discussed character names, ages, quirks and opinions. We gave them a history with each other that predated all three of our books. Some of them became considerably more important to the series than we’d originally planned, because that’s what good characters do. And Bitterport turned out to be full of them.

Murder at Millmerran House by Raven Corbin (Juanita Kees) When London hotelier Aiden Bellingan inherits a Victorian mansion with a ghost who has been waiting eighty years for justice, he discovers the renovation is the least of his problems.

The Body in the Bath House by Suzanne Gilchrist Bitterport’s long-abandoned Seacrest Bath House has a new owner and a very old buried secret.

Betrayal at Bitterport Bank by KL Paterson The old savings bank seemed like the perfect venue for a new theatre until the renovation uncovers something that changes everything (coming soon!)

Murder at Millmerran House is available today!

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