{"id":20132,"date":"2025-07-01T11:28:50","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T01:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/?p=20132"},"modified":"2025-07-01T12:49:47","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T02:49:47","slug":"a-novel-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/country-living\/a-novel-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"A Novel Approach"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From her home in regional New South Wales, Author Lauren McKellar tackles some tough topics under the cover of romantic fiction.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Growing up on the NSW Central Coast, author and journalist Lauren McKellar was practically born with printers\u2019 ink in her veins. Her builder father and nurse mother were both avid readers and her grandparents ran a newsagency, where Lauren worked after school from about the age of 12. \u201cI was surrounded by books and magazines,\u201d she recalls. \u201cOne of the highlights of the week was going to our local bookstore with my dad. He would pick up his latest fix of horse racing thrillers \u2014 often by Dick Francis \u2014 and I\u2019d get another dose of my favourite genre, which at the time was fantasy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lauren grew into a \u201cnerdy kind of teenager who went to a selective high school and did four-unit English for the HSC [Higher School Certificate]\u201d, and found reading an escape from the usual angst of adolescence. Sadly, her father was diagnosed with cancer shortly before she finished year 12 in 2001 and died early the following year. \u201cAlthough we both used to tease each other about our taste in books, privately we knew reading was a great pastime, whatever it was,\u201d Lauren says. \u201cI was so happy that before he passed, I managed to convince Dad to read The Lord of the Rings. And, of course, I was secretly reading whatever he had just finished.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once again, Lauren found solace in reading, though perhaps not as voraciously as before, as she navigated her way through a degree in music business management, a touring job with a schools\u2019 theatre-in-education program and various gigs hosting speed dating, trivia nights and even crab racing. She returned to the Central Coast and landed the \u201conly job in stand-up comedy management that wasn\u2019t based in Sydney or Melbourne\u201d. \u201cI\u2019d always wanted to write, but there was this nagging feeling that I wouldn\u2019t be good enough to do it professionally,\u201d she says. \u201cI kind of drifted into reading women\u2019s fiction, with authors such as Marian Keyes, Rachael Johns and Maggie Alderson. Then I saw this mat leave job as an editorial assistant with a niche publisher in Sydney and I applied. The man interviewing me said \u2018You do realise, you\u2019ll be out of a job in nine months?\u2019 For some reason, I was emboldened to say \u2018You\u2019re all going to fall in love with me and not want to let me go\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Eighteen years down the track, Lauren\u2019s day job is as managing editor of the publisher\u2019s special projects division. After a few years working in magazines, she realised that she was, in fact, being paid to write, and this gave her the confidence to start writing her own material. \u201cI started writing for young adults, because that was territory I knew well,\u201d she says. \u201cI heard about a challenge to write a novel in a month, so I signed up and decided to give it a go.\u201d Lauren switched to her signature hyper-focus mode and assiduously devoted herself to crafting the requisite 1667 words a day to meet the 50,000-word target. With her similarly trademark candour, she describes the result as \u201ccategorically the world\u2019s worst novel\u201d. \u201cThe experience taught me two things,\u201d she says. \u201cIt showed that I could do it, I could structure a story. And it also showed me that writing fiction was my true ambition and I had the passion to make it happen.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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She turned to writing with renewed commitment, carving out any window that would allow her to hit the keyboard. \u201cI got up early to write, I wrote on the train, I wrote in my lunch break and just kept at it until I\u2019d written a second novel<\/a>, not brilliant, but better than the first. I sent it to a lot of agents and publishers and got a lot of rejections.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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She was halfway through her third novel in 2013, when she took a call from Harlequin Australia offering to digitally publish her \u2018not-brilliant\u2019 book, which was called Finding Home. \u201cI was so gobsmacked I said to the publisher, Kate Cuthbert, \u2018Are you sure you don\u2019t want to think about it overnight?\u2019 I just didn\u2019t believe that someone important thought my work was worthy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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However, it was just the impetus Lauren needed to knuckle down and write even more ferociously. Along the way, she did some structural editing courses, married her husband Pete Clarke \u2014 still finding time to knock out a few hundred words on the morning of their wedding \u2013 and delivered 15 more manuscripts, some published digitally through Harlequin and some self-published. \u201cAt the time it was financially better for me to self-publish,\u201d she explains. \u201cIt was worth my while to write to market and follow trends.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lauren also picked up a side hustle editing manuscripts for other authors, particularly in the US. \u201cOne of them went quite well, so suddenly I was in demand from other authors to work on their work,\u201d she says. \u201cOne of those books turned out to be quite adult in its content. I went from being this person who could barely say \u2018penis\u2019 without blushing, to someone who was quite comfortable handling erotic material.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As inevitably happens, life began imitating art and Lauren found her work shifting to romance. In 2016, however, it all came to a grinding halt, when after years of trying unsuccessfully, she finally became pregnant. Following a complicated delivery, she and Pete became the proud parents of a boy, whom they named Airlie. \u201cI had no idea what was wrong, but Airlie was a difficult baby,\u201d she recalls. \u201cPerhaps it had something to do with my milk supply because he was always hungry.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before that, however, Lauren found herself in a mothers\u2019 group with \u201cnothing more in common than the dates we\u2019d had sex\u201d. \u201cI was in this room full of women with their babies cooing and gurgling and my beautiful baby thought the floor was lava,\u201d she recalls. \u201cHe was constantly grizzling and the only way I could comfort him was to constantly hold him and alternately rock and jiggle him. He didn\u2019t sleep and I was totally exhausted. \u201cSomething else I was struggling with after his birth was the feeling that there was something wrong with me because I was struggling with motherhood. Here we were with this baby that we both desperately wanted and yet I felt trapped and depressed and I wanted more. I wanted to be back at work.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Lauren pulls no punches when describing the dark places this conflict took her to, even to the point of considering ending it all. \u201cFortunately, I was cognisant enough to realise this was not normal and I saw a psychologist,\u201d she says. \u201cI started exercising, I returned to writing and I started to feel better. Also, Airlie started eating solids, his sleep improved and so did mine.\u201d When daughter Matilda came along in 2018, she was a dream-boat baby. But Lauren had also put strategies in place to help her cope in case that wasn\u2019t the case. \u201cI had a very clear plan that as soon as I came home from hospital, I was going to make time to write every day,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time art imitated life, and Lauren chose a subject close to her heart. She began working on her latest novel, The Calendar Mums<\/a>, which was recently released as her print debut and first solo novel for Harlequin. Her story focuses on a group of new mothers from a country town, not unlike her own \u2014 \u201cthere\u2019s a bit of me in every character\u201d \u2014 who band together to raise funds to save the local mothers\u2019 group meeting place by posing nude for a calendar. While it would be easy to fi le Lauren\u2019s take on this situation as kitchen-sink fiction, along the way, she addresses some very serious issues. Not the least of which is the precarity of access women in rural and regional areas have to community services such as postnatal care that their city sisters take for granted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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She also delves into post-natal inadequacy, anxiety and depression and the most troubling issues of all, coercive control and domestic violence. \u201cIt\u2019s a sad statistic that one in three women is a victim of domestic violence (DV),\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s also true that, for many women, leaving is not an option and that many women leave and are forced to go back to abusive relationships because they feel they have no other option. While I\u2019ve never been in a physically abusive relationship, I was once in a relationship where I believe I was financially and emotionally abused and I wanted to draw attention to that as well.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lauren says she was drawn to the subject because she kept seeing posts in her local community women\u2019s Facebook group from women pleading for nappies and other essential items they couldn\u2019t afford to buy for their babies after fleeing a DV situation. \u201cI reached out to the group asking them to talk to me anonymously about their experiences, and some of them generously responded,\u201d she adds. \u201cWhile part of me was thinking, \u2018How can this be happening,\u2019 the other part was realising that the only way out of it is to raise awareness and bring it to public attention.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As life and motherhood got in the way, Lauren shelved her manuscript until after the birth of her younger son, Milo, who is turning five later this year. It was worth the wait, however, as The Calendar Mums is selling well in Australia and is about to be released in the Czech Republic and through Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and US. As the conversation progresses, it becomes very clear that Lauren has a lot on her plate. She still works full-time in magazine land, coaches authors, mentors emerging writers, manages her own writing schedule plus does the school drop-off s and pick-ups, not to mention a host of after-school activities and roles on community groups, sports clubs and the P&C. \u201cI\u2019m very fortunate that Pete works nights and weekends and I work days,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m my own worst enemy because I put my hand up for everything.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When challenged, Lauren confesses she doesn\u2019t sleep much and usually wakes for a \u201cmental list-making hour\u201d around 2am, when she itemises all the things she needs to do in the coming day. \u201cI get up around five, write for an hour, get everything ready for the kids, take them to school, then come home and work until pick-up time,\u201d she says. \u201cThen I do kids\u2019 stuff and dinner and usually write again after they\u2019ve gone to bed. I\u2019m lucky that both Pete and my mum are very supportive of this crazy routine. But it\u2019s worth it because it allows me to write books like The Calendar Mums.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lauren says she\u2019s well aware that not all domestic violence issues are resolved as neatly as they are in her book. \u201cBut I\u2019m hopeful that it starts a few conversations and raises awareness about the challenges of parenthood, the most challenging and rewarding job we will ever take on,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m also proud that, at its core, the book is about women supporting each other. I\u2019d actually gone quite a long way into my next novel when I realised that the protagonists weren\u2019t doing that, so I\u2019ve abandoned that for now and I\u2019m starting again. At the end of the day, I\u2019m only interested in writing books that my kids will be proud of when they grow up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From her home in regional New South Wales, Author Lauren McKellar tackles some tough topics under the cover of romantic fiction. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":20139,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[260,161,336,165],"tags":[71,74,48],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20142,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20132\/revisions\/20142"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.australiancountry.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}