Luna-C
Listen to the Luna-C audio book by Bolinda Books
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Published by Allen and Unwin
For 14 to eighty+ year old readers.
Phoebe's getting ready for a time when she'll be famous. She is convinced she'll be a world sensation. The problem is, all the will in the world cannot make up for lack of talent. Phoebe has enormous energy, enormous belief in her friend Dale, and in the band Luna-C, and is filled with huge hope, but grows to recognise that the one special dream, for herself, will never come true.
That's what Luna-C is about - two girls who want to be singers in a band, who, according to their individual needs, seek fame. Fame, and the underlying need to be loved, is an issue for me - working in an industry where a fast rise to stardom is possible. I wanted to write about that.... what it means to those who achieve it, and those who don't.
Luna-C is also about music. How many times do we catch ourselves singing a song that takes us to a time where we felt strong emotions? Music is like scent, it brings back memories. There's a need in all of us to sing, at least I think there is, and that too is what I've tried to write about. What that means.
Luna-C has taken a long time to write, about fifteen years all up, and more than any of my other books, draws from my own experiences. In 1986 I managed a band in order to research 'Lunatics' - a mini-series I wanted to write. After years of hawking around the script, rewriting it, changing it from six to four parts, getting other work on the strength of it, I finally realised 'Lunatics' would never be made. But I couldn't let the story go. So I decided to write it as a novel - and a huge learning curve began, because essentially my training has been in television. This book is my attempt to master another discipline of writing, but more than that, it's a fictionalisation of all the things I've learned - a celebration of where I, and many others before me, have been.
I wonder, now that Dale and Phoebe are official - are real - has that part of my life gone, has it been set free? I've felt loss, once the book was published, because I didn't have the project to work on any more, that dream - my dream of a limited amount of, if not success, at least recognition. A book is an act of giving, an act of love. I don't think I really understood that until Luna-C was published. I miss my relationship with it, with the words, my ability to revisit a world I knew well. When I finally wrote 'the end', when the final proofs were finished and I couldn't change it any more, it was frozen in time. I'll continue to grow, I hope. But the book is now locked in a time capsule, it is what it is, and stands or falls by that. I have no control any more. It's the weirdest feeling - expectation, hope that people will enjoy it, trepidation that it will be ignored - it feels a bit like watching a teenager leave home, ready to live life independently of me! It's all up to the reader now.