Shadow and light.

I captured this image while walking in the Pukenui Forest in Te Kamō. I’d been working hard on promoting ‘Julia Eichardt: A Life of Grit and Grace’ and needed a break. Setting out early one morning after dropping the dog off at the sitter, I entered the bush shortly after sunrise. As I wandered down this path, the sun cleared the canopy behind me.

My eye saw a silver tree ahead of me, but my camera caught this – golden light striking the trunk and my shadow, clutching walking poles, superimposed on it.

Shadow and light.

Writing a book is a similar process. I think I know what should come next, but what appears on the page is often quite different to my initial, limited idea. My intuition perceives something different, cleverer, than my tired old brain had mapped out.

The forest is my thinking place, my church, university, and art gallery. It is the place where my imagination is set free.

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Julia Eichardt

On August 1st 2025 my historical novel, ‘Julia Eichardt, A Life of Grit and Grace’ will be released by Flying Books.

I’ll share the cover as soon as I can. It’s beautiful.

Julia was born in Ireland and raised in Australia.

In her early twenties, she travelled to Queenstown, then the centre of a gold rush.

Starting at Bracken’s Queens Arms, a demolished shearing shed, she rose through the ranks from barmaid to manager. She married Albert Eichardt, and together they grew the modest hotel perched on the shore of Lake Wakatipu.

After Albert’s death, Julia continued to modernise and upgrade the hotel, making it the first in Queenstown to have electricity in every room.

Eichardt’s, now a five-star luxury hotel, retains some original features. It is Julia’s dream made real. Long may it continue.

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Arise

He relishes the cool dark.

No more rushing desert wind, no shimmer of heat.

He’d lived beyond the stone wall, outside this oasis of peace, dreamed of a future: alone in a gently rocking boat, nets flap-full of fish.

The past week has been febrile with activity.

He’s been adrift in the darkness, muscles relaxed.

Four days.

A disturbance at the door shatters the calm.

Burning light stabs his dry eyes.

He clings to the sheet, pulls it tighter, a death grip.

‘Arise,’ commands his old friend.

‘No. Don’t make me,’ Lazarus’s tears are bitter.

A resurrection refused?

Jesus wept.

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MILA AND THE BONE MAN by Lauren Roche

Buy your copy here!

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Graduation, AUT, MCW.

I made it!

Thanks to COVID-19 most of our classes were held on ZOOM.

I am very grateful to my mentor James George and fellow classmates – especially Maria, Kit and Rob – who helped me get the best out of my thesis.

That work, Songs to Sing to the Dying, has been optioned by a New Zealand publisher and I hope to get it to you next year.

I’m tidying up The Anatomists’ Handbook, Kat’s Cradle (working title) and Grace. All very different titles.

Life is good.

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The character Mila came to me while I was running in the bush in Whangārei. Her story gradually unfolded under the guidance of tutors at NorthTec in 2019. Pip Adam was my mentor. Together we worked through some creative issues and then, with further guidance from my agent Vicki Marsdon of HighSpot Literary agency, we had a manuscript that was ready to send into the world.

Quentin Wilson’s reader loved the story, so does he. So save your pennies – ready for a launch in early 2022. I will keep you updated.

I’m looking forward to having proofs to edit in my writing hut which is about two weeks from completion – thanks, COVID-19 for the delay!

PressRelease Mila – click to read full press release

Quentin Wilson, publisher and Vicki Marsdon, agent, are happy to advise that Mila will be published in New Zealand in 2021.

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Until August 1, 2019, I worked a large portion of each week as a general practitioner.

I loved being a doctor but had to retire for medical reasons while I was well below the usual retirement age.

Once, I’d been a writer, and loved that too; the act of placing words next to one another to make meaningful sentences and patterns and to evoke emotions. Knowing that I would need to abandon my medical practice I began writing classes. In 2018 I completed some writing courses through NorthTec – the polytechnic college that serves the top of the North Island. I learned how to write articles – and had one published. Also how to review writing, how to sling words together and how to structure a writing life.

In 2019 I completed a Diploma in Creative Writing, producing a manuscript called Mila and the Bone Man. All this while still working 3 or 4 days a week as a doc.

Now the doctoring is over, and I sit in my office for forty hours each week, competing for space with my very supportive partner Graham. We don’t mean to, but we get in each other’s way. I have long dreamed of a private, quiet space where I can write and read and be in nature. And now it’s happening – my room of my own – and I am so excited!

Here are the first looks at the hut as it develops. It is going where a dead puka tree stood tall and held the space at the bottom of our garden. We’ve had to prune a few limbs from healthy trees and remove some pest plants to prepare the stage. We will underplant with ferns and rengarenga lilies. Soon there will be a floor, then walls, windows and a roof. I’ll let you look at this physical work in progress as I create the next textural one – in our shared office!

Life has taught me that blessings are often wrapped in live wires, in pain and loss. The end of my medical career has given me sadness but also the opportunity to return to some other loves of mine – writing and reading.

I’ll let you know when my books have passed through the editing and – hopefully – publishing stage.

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I currently have three works in progress.

Three!
it wasn’t meant to be that way.

The Anatomists’ Handbook started life two years ago as a dual storyline book, weaving together fact and fiction, contemporary and historical strands. A reimagining of the writing and illustration of the great Gray’s Anatomy which intertwined with a contemporary strand about an injured New Zealand doctor. Editors in London enjoyed the historical strand, the new – not so much. So I am separating the parts, keeping to London, late 1850s with both real and fictional characters, and beefing the book back up to novel-length. The handsome man in the photograph is Dr Henry Gray – who conceived and wrote the text for Gray’s Anatomy. Little is known about his life, making it fun to write a fictionalised version of the writing and illustration of his great tome.

Mila and the Bone Man is a novel I wrote in 2019 during my Diploma in Creative Writing through NorthTec. Mila is a young woman from Northland who has an autistic friend, Tommy. Tommy finds a human hand buried in the forest. Mila knows whose it is. How much does Tommy know and understand? The MS is currently with my agent Vicki Marsdon. We’ll iron out a few knots, re-edit, submit, and perhaps one day we’ll see what the world thinks of her.

In 2020 I am also working on a story cycle called Songs to Sing to The Dying. This will form the thesis for a Masters in Creative Writing through AUT. James George is my mentor, and I suspect we will have fun chats and a few coffees in between some bouts of very hard work.

Writing is my new passion. Many years ago I published Bent Not Broken and Life On The Line, autobiographies that many people still remember. Some with great fondness.

I recently had to retire from doctoring – which I adored and was good at – for medical reasons and now spend my time with words and the occasional wounds of my characters. They bleed and cry on the page, not my shoulder.

In this blog, I want to talk about writing and healing and putting words to the things some people wish we’d leave alone. I’ll post snippets from my works in progress and we can chat about life, the universe and whatever else takes your fancy.

I’m a writer. now, I’m allowed to make stuff up.

Come and sit beside me. Stay a while. Humour me

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