With 7 days to go until our official pub date, here's a potted history of Elsewhere Girls by me and @NovaWeetman (which actually features a pub, as it goes). 1/

Nova and I became friends in 2016 in the time it takes to drink a flat white. This is a photo from that day, the first Nova Weetman mega-watt smile of this thread. I have what you people call "English teeth" so they don't get out much but I'm smiling inside. 2/

A year later Nova said 'Let's write a book about swimmers'. She'd been reading about Fanny Durack, first Australian female Olympic gold medallist. I realised that Fanny and I had the exact same arms so I said: I'm in.

(l-r Fanny Durack, Mina Wylie, Jennie Fletcher, 1912) 3/

So we went to the pub -- no, wait, first we went to the ocean baths where Fanny and Mina had swum (it's called Wylie's Baths because Mina's dad owned it) and we plotted the whole novel underwater. 4/

THEN we went to the pub. This is where Fanny Durack grew up with 8 siblings. It was a sawdust-on-floor type of joint. You can imagine the fierce commitment it took for her to eventually become an Olympic champ. We were forced to drink beer for research purposes. 5/

Then a whole bunch of stuff happened...which I'll skip so as not to ruin the pace of this thread (see, I know my stuff). Once the book was written we were ecstatic to sign with Text @textpubYA - I even forgot to hide my English teeth in the photo because I was so happy. 6/