My latest revision

They say in writing a novel, once you finish the first draft, is when the hard work begins. Revision and more revision is the norm. The first draft I posted back in June is below. It has been edited, rewritten again and again.

FROM THIS:

Jack Carter stood on his weathered porch, the stench of rotting livestock clawing at his throat. His last cow lay sprawled in the paddock, ribs stark against taut hide, its glassy eyes staring at a cloudless sky that hadn’t wept in three years. Inside, Ellie’s fever was climbing, her whispers for water a dagger in his chest. At eight, his daughter was fading—small for her age, her chestnut curls matted, her blue eyes, mirrors of her late mother Sarah’s, clouded with pain but holding a stubborn spark. The drought had taken everything: his herd, his savings, the life he’d built on this Beaudesert farm, 70 km from Brisbane. Maybe Ellie next. The black market in Fortitude Valley was a viper’s nest where water cost blood or bullets, but it was his only shot. The radio crackled in the kitchen, some scientist—Dr. Voss—talking about towing icebergs from Antarctica. Jack snorted, kicking the cracked earth, dust choking his lungs. A billion dollars wouldn’t fill his dam, but five liters might buy Ellie another day. He checked his rifle—six rounds left—and grabbed the keys to his battered Holden, Sarah’s favorite, where she’d once sung off-key lullabies to Ellie in the backseat. The horizon shimmered with heat, no mercy in its endless blue.

The drive to Brisbane was a gauntlet of ruin. Shuttered factories lined the highway, their rusted gates scrawled with despair: No work, no hope. A raided farm near Ipswich smoldered, blood staining the dirt—rustlers’ work, maybe Ryan Holt’s crew, whispered about in Beaudesert as predators who’d slit a farmer’s throat for a calf. Jack’s grip tightened on the wheel, Sarah’s death flashing: two years ago, bandits like them had killed her on a road like this, her blood spilled for a bottle of water, her laugh silenced forever. Ellie’s frail face anchored him now, her faint hum of a nursery rhyme—“Rain, rain, go away”—looping in his mind. “Hang on, kid,” he muttered, the truck’s engine rattling. Fortitude Valley loomed, its streets choked with the reek of uncollected garbage, sanitation workers long gone, their own taps dry. Gutted supermarkets stood like tombs, shelves bare, signs reading No Produce in faded ink. A man’s body lay in an alley, skull cracked, blood pooling—a fight over a bruised apple, Jack guessed, the city’s hunger a blade at every throat.

The black market pulsed in a derelict warehouse on Wickham Street, its rusted doors guarded by men with knives and hollow eyes, their breath sour with cheap grog. Jack slipped inside, the air thick with sweat, rot, and the tang of rustled meat gone rancid. Stalls, lit by flickering lanterns, traded scraps: withered carrots, a sack of sprouting potatoes, a cloudy bottle of water worth more than gold. Voices haggled, a woman sobbed over wilted greens, a man’s shout—“That’s not enough!”—cut through the din. Mara leaned against a crate, her red dress frayed at the hem, her auburn hair greasy but her eyes sharp, scanning the crowd like a hawk. She bartered with a rustler, his jacket stained with cattle blood, a two-liter bottle sloshing in his hand. “Three liters, fresh, or no deal,” Mara said, her voice steel, her hand grazing his chest—a calculated tease honed by months of trading flesh for survival. The rustler’s grin was a leer, but he shoved the bottle at her, following her behind a tattered curtain, the sheet twitching as the market’s roar swallowed their deal. Jack turned away, Sarah’s laugh flashing, her blood-soaked body on that Ipswich road. This was the drought’s work: love reduced to meat, water worth more than a soul.

He pushed deeper, heart pounding, Ellie’s whispered Dad… water… echoing in his skull. A trader, wiry with a scar across his cheek, eyed Jack’s rifle like a vulture. “Five liters,” Jack said, voice low, his calloused hands trembling, still stained with the earth of his failed farm. The trader smirked, his teeth yellowed. “That gun, and your truck. Deal?” Jack’s jaw tightened. The rifle was his last defense; the truck—where Sarah’s scent still lingered in the cracked leather—was his only way home. But Ellie’s sunken eyes, her faint hum of Rain, rain, go away as she clung to her threadbare quilt, were all that mattered. He nodded, the weight crushing him. “Deal.” As he handed over the keys, a commotion erupted—a crate of bottled water toppled, knives flashed, blood spilled on the concrete, a woman’s scream lost in the melee. Jack clutched the plastic jug, five liters of life, and fought his way out, the market’s chaos a roar in his ears, a rustler’s glare—Holt’s man?—tracking him through the crowd.

The Fortitude Valley night reeked of burning tires and dust, the warehouse’s neon buzzing like a trapped fly. Jack’s truck was gone, traded for Ellie’s chance. Beaudesert was 70 km away, the roads a gauntlet of bandits and desperation. A battered Toyota Hilux sat crookedly against a crumbling wall, its bed holding sacks of sprouting potatoes, their stench sharp—a rustler’s haul, abandoned in the frenzy. Jack’s pulse quickened, Sarah’s death flashing: bandits had killed her for less. A man stumbled from the shadows, drunk or half-dead, a rusty crowbar in his hand. “Oi, that’s mine!” he slurred, swinging sloppily, spit flecking his chin. Jack ducked, pain flaring as the crowbar grazed his shoulder. He dropped the jug, its cap holding, and drew his knife from his boot. The blade caught the man’s wrist, blood welling, the crowbar clattering. “Walk away,” Jack growled, “or you don’t walk.” The man cursed, staggering off into the alley’s gloom. Jack scooped up the jug, checked the ute’s cab—keys in the ignition, fuel gauge flickering near empty. It might get him to Beaudesert if the roads didn’t kill him first. He slid the jug onto the passenger seat, its slosh a fragile promise to Ellie, and peeled out, the city’s decay fading in the rearview.

The road south was a scarred ribbon of asphalt, pocked with potholes and littered with the husks of abandoned cars, their windows smashed, tires stripped. Dust swirled in the Hilux’s headlight, the one dangling bulb casting jagged shadows. Jack’s hands gripped the wheel, his shoulder throbbing from the crowbar’s graze, the jug wedged against his thigh to keep it from tipping. Every kilometer felt like a theft from death, the night pressing in, thick with the threat of ambush. Ellie’s face—pale, fever-flushed, her curls damp against her forehead—kept him focused. Her nursery rhyme, Rain, rain, go away, hummed in his head, a ghost of hope in a land that forgot rain. Sarah’s laugh joined it, her voice in the Holden years ago, singing that same tune to a giggling Ellie, green paddocks stretching beyond the windshield. The memory stung, sharp as the dust in his lungs. He couldn’t fail Ellie like he’d failed Sarah, left bleeding on that Ipswich road, her water bottle rolling into a ditch.

Twenty kilometers out, a flicker of firelight snapped him alert. A roadblock loomed—a rusted ute and a pile of tires, flames licking their edges, smoke curling into the dark. Three figures stood silhouetted, one holding a tire iron, another a hunting knife that glinted in the fire’s glow. Bandits, scavenging the roads for fools like him. Jack’s breath caught, his rifle gone, his knife no match for three. The jug sloshed as he slowed, his mind racing. Turn back, and he’d lose time—Ellie had days, maybe hours. Charge through, and he’d risk everything. The lead bandit, a gaunt man with a patchy beard, stepped forward, tapping the tire iron against his palm. “Got anything good?” he called, voice rough, eyes locking on the jug. Jack’s heart pounded, Sarah’s blood-soaked face flashing. “Just passing,” he said, voice steady, easing the Hilux forward, the engine’s sputter loud in the silence. The bandit grinned, stepping closer, his knife-wielding partner circling to the passenger side. “That water’s worth a life,” the leader said, nodding at the jug. “Hand it over, or we take it.”

Jack’s hand slid to his knife, his other tightening on the wheel. Ellie’s whisper—Dad… water…—was a fire in his chest. He gunned the engine, the Hilux lurching forward, tires screeching. The leader dove aside, cursing, but the knife-wielder lunged, his blade scraping the door with a scream of metal. Jack swerved, the jug sliding, his arm shooting out to catch it. The third bandit hurled a rock, cracking the windshield, a spiderweb blooming across the glass. Jack floored it, the roadblock’s flames shrinking in the mirror, shouts fading into the night. His breath came in gasps, the jug intact, the Hilux’s fuel gauge dropping faster than he’d hoped. The bandits didn’t follow—too lazy or too drunk—but the road ahead was no safer, each shadow a potential trap. He whispered Ellie’s name like a prayer, the nursery rhyme looping, keeping him sane.

The final stretch to Beaudesert was a blur of dust and dread, the Hilux coughing as the fuel needle kissed empty. The farm’s silhouette emerged, its sagging roof a beacon in the moonlight. Jack killed the engine, the jug heavy in his arms, his shoulder screaming with every step. Inside, he knelt by Ellie’s sagging cot, pouring a capful of water into her mouth. Her lips trembled as she swallowed, her feverish flush softening. Her eyes flickered open, a spark of Sarah’s stubborn hope. “Dad… we’ll be okay, right?” she whispered, her voice faint, the nursery rhyme’s tune lingering in her breath. Jack brushed her matted curls, his throat tight. “Yeah, kid,” he lied, his sun-scorched hand steadying her frail shoulder. “We’ll be okay.” He saw Sarah in her face, heard her singing in the truck years ago, green paddocks stretching beyond. Outside, the wind howled, carrying dust and the radio’s crackle. Dr. Voss’s voice cut through: “A berg’s calved off the Ross Ice Shelf—a billion tons of hope.” Jack’s hands shook, the mad idea taking root. The outback was dead, the city dying, but the sea—maybe the sea could save them. He’d bought Ellie time, but his fight was just beginning. That iceberg, that impossible dream, was his last shot in hell’s desert.

TO THIS:

10 April 2025

Beaudesert, 70 km south of Brisbane

Jack Carter could not remember the last time he had felt rain on his skin. He stood on the sagging verandah and tried to summon the memory the way a drowning man claws for the surface: the cool shock of it, the smell of wet dust, the way Sarah used to tip her face to the sky and laugh like the world had just told her the best secret. Nothing came. Only the stink of the dead cow in the front paddock, sweet and sickening, thick enough to chew.

His last cow.

Name of Bluebell.

Prize-winner, once.

Now a rib-cage sculpture under a sky the colour of a fresh bruise.

The heat shimmered off the iron roof in visible waves. Inside the shack the air was hotter still, oven-air, the kind that cooked a man from the lungs out. He pushed the fly wire door and it creaked like something dying.

Ellie lay on the narrow cot beneath the single window that no longer opened. Eight years old and she looked ninety, skin stretched translucent over bird-bones, lips cracked and bleeding, chestnut curls darkened with sweat and stuck to her cheeks. Sarah’s locket—tarnished silver oval on a chain too long for her now—rose and fell against the hollow of her throat with every shallow breath.

“Daddy…”

The word was barely a breath, yet it punched him so hard in the sternum he staggered. He dropped to his knees beside the cot, the tin floor burning through his jeans. The cup in his hand—two centimetres of brown water left in the house—trembled so violently it sloshed over the rim.

“I’m here, baby girl. Right here.”

Her eyes, cornflower blue and far too big for her face, found his. They were Sarah’s eyes exactly, and the resemblance was a blade twisting slow.

“It hurts… everywhere.”

He knew. Dehydration was a cruel teacher. First the thirst that clawed at the back of the throat, then the headache that felt like an axe buried in the skull, then the fever that cooked you gentle and slow. Ellie had been burning for four days. Four days since the tank coughed its last mouthful. Four days since he’d started measuring her life in hours instead of years.

Jack lifted the cup to her lips. She tried to drink and most of it ran down her chin, pink where it mixed with blood from the splits. She whimpered, a sound so small it should not have been able to break a grown man in half. It did.

“More later,” he lied. “I’m going to get you more.”

She managed half a nod, then her fingers—thin as sticks—found his wrist and clung. The locket slipped sideways, revealing the tiny photograph inside: Sarah holding newborn Ellie, both of them laughing at something just out of frame. Jack’s own face, probably. Back when he still knew how to laugh.

“Sing, Daddy,” Ellie whispered. “Sing Mum’s song.”

His throat closed. He couldn’t. If he started he would sob and never stop and the sound would terrify her. But her eyes were pleading, and he had never denied those eyes anything, not once in eight years.

So he sang, voice raw and cracked and ugly.

“Rain, rain, come again…

Little Ellie wants to play…

Rain, rain, don’t stay away…”

He got halfway through the second verse before the tears came. He didn’t bother hiding them. Ellie’s thumb stroked the inside of his wrist, back and forth, the way Sarah used to when the world got too loud.

When the song ended the silence pressed in, thick and merciless.

From the corner the ancient battery radio hissed static, then a voice, thin and urgent: “—repeat, unconfirmed reports of a pre-1980s mining cache at coordinates 27.4 south, 140.1 east. Volume estimated in the millions of litres. Ryan Holt’s crew already moving. Armed. Do not approach—”

Jack reached over and snapped it off. The silence rushed back louder than before.

Ellie’s eyes had drifted shut. For one terrifying second he thought — No. Her chest still rose. Barely.

He rested his forehead against the edge of the cot and let the grief have him for ten full seconds. The howl wanted out in ten seconds to shake and bite back. Remembering Sarah’s death on the Ipswich road, black blood pumped under starlight for water. He was about to fail again, ten seconds to admit it.

Then he stood up.

The rifle leaned in the corner—Sarah’s old .243, wood stock sun-bleached, six rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber. Checking it was muscle memory, as he had for years. A canvas pack held the few remaining essentials: a photo of them, Ellie’s spare knickers, condensed milk, and crushed paracetamol.

Jack knelt again.

“Ellie. Baby. I have to go into the city. Five litres will buy you a week. Maybe more. You stay right here, you keep that locket tight, you sing the song if you get scared. Daddy’s bringing the rain home.”

She didn’t open her eyes but her fingers tightened around the locket chain until the knuckles blanched.

“Promise?” A thread of sound.

He kissed the furnace of her forehead, tasted salt and death.

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He left her clinging to the song the way a sailor clings to a broken mast in a storm.

Outside, the ute waited like an old dog too loyal to run away. Sarah’s scent still haunted the cracked vinyl—vanilla and jasmine and something metallic underneath that might have been the night she died. Jack turned the key. The engine coughed, caught, coughed again. He let it idle while he looked back at the shack one last time.

Seventy kilometres of dead highway between him and Brisbane. Seventy kilometres of ambush and desperation and men who would gut him for the sweat on his skin.

He put it in gear and rolled down the drive, red dust boiling behind him like blood in water.

The road south was a graveyard.

Abandoned sedans sat on flat tyres, boots open, everything of value long stripped. A child’s booster seat lay in the middle of one lane, faded unicorn pattern sun-bleached to grey. Jack’s stomach turned. He kept his eyes forward.

A water tower loomed on the left, leaning drunkenly, bullet holes weeping rust tears down its flank. Someone had spray-painted across it in letters two metres high: GOD IS THIRSTY TOO.

He passed the turnoff to Scenic Rim, and the memories ambushed him harder than any road gang ever could.

Sarah laughing in the passenger seat, seven months pregnant, hand resting on the swell of her belly while Ellie kicked in time to the radio. Rain that day—real rain—hammering the windscreen so hard the wipers couldn’t keep up. They’d pulled over under a stand of gums and made love in the backseat like teenagers while the storm shook the ute around them.

He blinked hard, and the memory dissolved into heat shimmer.

Forty kilometres to go.

The radio crackled again. He’d left it on low.

“—repeat, martial law extended south of the Logan. All private water trading declared illegal. Shoot on sight orders in effect—”

Static swallowed the rest.

He switched it off and drove into the mouth of hell.

Fortitude Valley had always been Brisbane’s wild heart. Now it was its rotting corpse.

Jack left the ute three blocks out—too risky to drive deeper—and walked the rest, rifle slung but ready. The stench hit first: human waste, rotting food, the sweet copper reek of old blood baked into the asphalt. Then the sights: pyramids of black garbage bags split open by scavengers, a priest in a clerical collar picking through them with skeletal fingers, a teenage boy pissing against a wall painted with the words WATER IS A HUMAN RIGHT in what looked suspiciously like excrement.

People moved in slow, predatory drifts. Eyes tracked him—gaunt, fever-bright, calculating. He kept his hand near the rifle and his gaze forward.

The warehouse on Wickham Street throbbed like a diseased organ. Kerosene lanterns swung from chains, throwing shadows that crawled across faces no longer entirely human. Voices rose and fell in a language made of threat and plea.

Mara found him before he found her.

She looked worse than the last time—cheeks hollowed, auburn hair hacked short with something blunt, red dress now more rust than scarlet. A knife scar ran from her left ear to the corner of her mouth, fresh enough to still be pink.

“Christ, Jack.” Her voice was smoke and broken glass. “How long’s the kid got?”

The question sliced him open.

“Hours,” he said. “Maybe less.”

She closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them the pity was gone, replaced by the flat mercies of survival.

“Five litres clean will cost you everything you’ve got left.”

“I know.”

She led him deeper, past stalls where withered carrots lay like mummified fingers and tins of beans changed hands for gold jewellery and sexual favours. A woman sobbed over a single potato sprouting pale tentacles. Somewhere a baby cried with the dry, hopeless sound of something already giving up.

Then the hand on his shoulder, grip like iron.

“Jack Carter.”

He turned slow.

Holt’s lieutenant—everyone just called him Scar-lip—stood smiling the way a shark smiles. The scar pulled one corner of his mouth permanently upward; the other corner stayed flat. His eyes were the pale washed-out blue of drought sky.

“Boss has been asking after you,” Scar-lip said. “Says you still owe him for that calf.”

Jack’s mouth tasted of dust and fear.

“Tell Ryan the drought took the calf. Took everything.”

Scar-lip stepped closer. Close enough Jack could smell the rot on his breath.

“Drought takes what we let it take.”

The stories about Ryan Holt were legend now, whispered around dying fires like ghost stories.

Once upon a time he’d had it all: five thousand acres of black soil, a white weatherboard homestead with wind chimes made from old horseshoes, a wife who laughed like rainfall and two kids who ran barefoot through paspalum up to their knees. They’d buried their first baby—a little girl born too soon—under a coolabah by the house dam and Laura had planted a rosebush on the grave that bloomed blood-red every Christmas.

Then the rains stopped.

In year one, Ryan laughed it off.

He sold the headers during year two.

The dams turned to mud in year three, and the cattle began to die.

During year four, Ryan was away chasing stores when the bank took the homestead. He came home to find Laura and the kids sitting on suitcases in the dust, eight-year-old Tom holding a fence strainer like he meant to fight the world.

Laura kissed him goodbye on the verandah—no tears left—and said, “Bring the rain home, Ryan. Or don’t come back at all.”

Three weeks later a looter’s cigarette turned the rest of Kooroomba to ash. The rosebush burned. The coolabah burned. Five generations reduced to cinders while Ryan watched from the ridge and something inside him finally snapped clean in two.

After that, he started taking what the drought withheld.

First water.

Then cattle.

Then lives.

Scar-lip leaned in until Jack felt the man’s breath on his cheek.

“Boss left something for you,” he whispered, and slipped a folded square of paper into Jack’s shirt pocket, right over his heart.

Then the knife came out.

Jack moved first—pure reflex—slamming the rifle butt into Scar-lip’s gut and bolting into the maze of crates. The chase was a nightmare of narrow alleys and stinking shadows, blades flashing, blood hot on his arm where steel kissed flesh. He lost them eventually, or they let him go. Same difference.

He found Mara again near the back exit. Her eyes flicked to the blood soaking his sleeve and something like sorrow crossed her face.

“Five litres,” she said, producing a clear plastic bottle beaded with condensation—actual condensation, the most beautiful thing he’d seen in years. “Rifle and the ute.”

He didn’t argue.

Outside, the night pressed hot and close. A drunk owner snored in the gutter with his Hilux parked crookedly against a wall with the keys in the ignition.  Jack took the bottle, took the truck, took the drunk’s crowbar when he woke swinging.

The fight was short and brutal. Bone snapped. Blood sprayed. The drunk crawled away sobbing and Jack climbed behind the wheel with hands that would not stop shaking.

That was when he found the letter tucked under the visor.

Cheap notepaper, engine grease fingerprints, handwriting that started neat and deteriorated into scrawl.

“Laura,

Tom turned eleven yesterday. I counted it by the moon because calendars lie now.

Grace still asks for her doll sometimes. The one that burned with everything else.

I’ve got the cache. Millions of litres. Enough to make the creeks run backwards. Enough to wash every bad thing away.

Tell the kids their dad is coming home rich.

Tell them the drought is nearly over.

I just have to kill one more man.

One more and I get to be Ryan again instead of this thing I’ve become.

Wait for me.

—R”

Jack read it three times, the words blurring as something vast and terrible opened inside his chest.

Two fathers.

Two little girls burning up with fever.

One underground sea.

Only one of them was going to drink from it.

He started the Hilux and pointed it south.

The drive home was seventy kilometres of pure torment.

Ten kilometres out the radiator boiled over, steam hissing like a dying snake. He patched it with a rag and spit and prayer.

Twenty kilometres later a chain trap glittered across the road—old logging chain painted black to hide in the dark. He saw it at the last second and veered onto the dirt shoulder, tyres screaming, with the precious bottle sliding across the dash and fetching up against the windscreen with a thud that stopped his heart.

Shadows with clubs lunged from the scrub. He floored it. One of them bounced off the bull bar with a wet grunt.

At the fifty-kilometre mark the burning roadblock appeared—three silhouettes haloed by firelight, blades catching orange glints.

The leader stepped into the headlight beams, tyre iron resting on his shoulder like a promise.

“Water or blood, mate,” he called, voice almost friendly. “Your choice.”

Jack’s foot eased off the brake. The Hilux crept forward.

The leader grinned and raised the tyre iron.

Jack whispered Ellie’s name and floored it.

The impact was a sickening crunch of metal on bone. Something warm and wet splattered on the windscreen. Jack maintained his pace.

Just as the first hint of dawn bled across the horizon, with the tin roof glowing like hot iron, he hit the shack.

With the engine off, he ran, clutching the bottle like a heart.

The fly wire door banged open.

Ellie was sitting up—impossible, but she was—knees drawn to her chest, Sarah’s locket gripped in both tiny fists.

“Daddy?”

The word broke him all over again.

He fell to his knees beside the cot and unscrewed the cap with teeth and fingers that no longer felt human. The first drop touched her tongue, and her eyes went wide, pupils blown with shock and wonder.

Actual tears—real salt tears—welled and spilled down her cheeks.

“Daddy… it tastes like Mum.”

He gathered her up, all sharp edges and fever heat, and held her while she drank in great desperate gulps that soaked the front of his shirt and his skin and his soul.

When the bottle was half-empty he made her stop. Five litres had to last. Had to.

She curled into him like she had when she was brand new, fist tangled in his shirt, breath warm against his neck for the first time in days.

Outside, the drought still ruled, merciless and absolute.

But inside the shack, for one trembling morning, there was water.

And in Jack’s pocket: a blood-smeared map to enough water to drown every sin ever committed under a pitiless Queensland sky.

And a letter from a man who had once been a father exactly like him—only Ryan Holt had lost the fight and become the monster instead.

Jack pressed his lips to Ellie’s temple and tasted salt and life and the faintest ghost of rain.

“I’m going to bring the rain home, baby,” he whispered into her hair. “All of it. Every last drop.”

Even if he had to kill the devil himself to do it.

I have completed the novel first draft. It comprises 37 chapters and 86,000 words. Now it’s just revision and more revision. Any feedback you can give on this first revision is much appreciated.