I began writing Millwood two years after my cousin Kevin was murdered. At the time, I wasn’t trying to write a novel. I was simply trying to survive the trauma. Putting words on a page felt like the only sane way to make sense of what was happening around me as well as inside me.

For months, I lived under a shadow I never expected: I was regarded as one of the main suspects. In truth, I understood why. There was no forced entry, nothing obvious taken, and Kevin lived like a recluse with very few people in his orbit. I was his only blood relative. Under those circumstances, suspicion becomes a kind of logic. But understanding it didn’t make it any less brutal. It was an isolating, claustrophobic experience. One that burrowed deep.

Somewhere in that darkness, the idea of a family curse began to take root. My uncle had been murdered a generation earlier. Two killings, two generations apart, both unsolved… it was hard not to imagine a thread running through the family line. A curse was not only a literary device, it was also an emotional truth, a way of capturing the senselessness of it all.

So I dug into my family history. I researched my great-grandfather and the goldfields of the Millwood forests. I bent the truth here and there, as writers do, but the bones of the story remained close to home. Kevin and I shared the same middle name, Millwood, handed down through generations. I used that as a starting point, weaving our real history into a fictional frame. The first half of the book, as a result, is built on this lineage: gold, ambition, secrets, inheritance, violence.

But the heart of Millwood is not the past, it’s what those two years did to me. I wrote the story in granular detail because I wanted the reader to feel the horror as I felt it. The fear, the confusion, the guilt. And with all of that came my drinking. The stress poured petrol on a smouldering fire that had been burning inside me for years. My descent into alcoholism is not a side story; it is part of the spine of the book.

The final movement, then, becomes one of redemption, my realisation that I needed to get sober, and the slow, painful, necessary walk toward that truth.

I’ll be honest: I wrestled with the ending for years. One editor called the book “schizophrenic” half murder mystery, half alcoholic confessional. For a while, I tried to fix that. I rewrote the entire story as a third-person crime novel. It was competent, even clean. But it wasn’t me.

The turning point came from my daughter. “It doesn’t sound like you, Dad,” she said. And she was right. Millwood had to remain what it had always been: messy, raw, contradictory, honest. A murder mystery, yes. An alcoholic’s reckoning, absolutely. But above all, my story.

A few unlikely literary guides helped me along the way. John Boyne’s The Absolutist showed me how a story can carry sorrow without sinking into it. And then Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea gave me the key I needed for the ending, a way to land the story with restraint and dignity, without tying everything into a neat bow.

It took ten years. Life happened in between, and there were many drafts, several editors, and endless moments of doubt. But in hindsight, I’m grateful it took that long. I couldn’t have written the final version earlier. I hadn’t lived enough of it yet.

In the end, Millwood became the only thing it ever could have been: a story of loss, obsession, family, fear, and the long, stubborn journey toward sobriety. A story that tried to break me and eventually helped put me back together.