Jason weaves Deni life into his writing

Jason, 35, is a construction manager by day and a budding author by night.

Almost every day for nine months, the former Deniliquin High School student dedicated a few hours each night to write as a creative outlet to “escape the world”.

“I've always been a really avid reader and I loved English in school, but it was more that I just wanted to do something creative,” he said.

“I'm always working with my hands, building and working on stuff.

“But I pretty much read a book every two weeks and I kind of thought to myself, I know the outline of all of these stories and I know how to put it together, and I think that I can do it myself.”

Jason lives in Melbourne with his wife, Hannah, and two young daughters, Rue and Winnie, but said he was “born and bred in Deni” and spent a lot of his childhood out on his grandparents property, ‘Warranilla’, near Blighty.

Those childhood memories became the inspiration for his debut novel.

It follows the story of Detective Sergeant Nick Vada, who returns to his small country hometown for his sister's wedding but ends up investigating a murder.

During the investigation, Vada is unable to shake the parallels of his own mother’s murder from his childhood and discovers a “shocking secret” leading him to uncover more about his family and friends that he never knew.

Jason said as soon as he started typing one night, the words just “flew out” and he was surprised how easily the novel came together.

“It was really random,” he said.

“I hadn't really done much writing before; I've done a little bit here and there but I never thought like, ‘Oh, hey, I'll write a novel’.

“I basically wrote the entire book in four weeks. I was writing 5000 to 10,000 words a day.

“But then the editing and sticking it all together and making sure everything lined up took longer than the actual writing.”

Jason said there are “lots of parallels to home” in the book that local readers would see straight away.

Even the cover may look familiar - Jason took it himself on the Hay plains.

“The town in the story is called Milford, but it's basically very loosely based on Deni.

“It's got a river running through it and all that sort of thing, so a lot of things relate back to home.”

The main character of his novel, who finds himself “spread between the bush and the city”, has many similarities to himself.

“It’s easy to write what you know, like it sort of just comes out because you've experienced it yourself.”

Jason said he enjoys reading rural crime thrillers, with some of his favourite Australian authors being Jane Harper, Chris Hammer and Matt Nable.

Since Jason’s book was published in January, he has sold 250 copies and he receives new orders daily.

“That's 250 more than I thought I'd ever sell.

“As soon as I released it, like within a few weeks, it started selling.”

But like many writers, Jason said he didn’t have a “huge amount of confidence” in his writing and didn’t contact a publisher before releasing the book.

“They've got the new self publishing page and set up and everything, so you can do the whole thing yourself and it doesn't cost anything,” he said.

“If people buy it, they buy it. If they don't they don't.

“I pretty much only published it because I wanted to have my own paperback copy that I could have for my bookshelf, and for Mum and Dad.”

Jason’s parents, Mick and Michele Summers, still live in Deniliquin and said they were “very proud” of him.

“He was a bookworm from when he was born onwards,” Michael said.

“The Harry Potter books I think started it for him. He could really recite those books to you. He’d read them over and over and over.”

Mick said Jason was always a smart kid in school, and joked that he has no idea where his son gets his talents from.

“He'd done his apprenticeship as a builder in Deniliquin and then moved to Melbourne,” he said.

“Now he's a site manager for Marvic, the biggest construction company in Australia; it's a very intense job.

“Jason just rang one night and goes, ‘so I'm writing a book’. He said, ‘I just needed something to get away from the world’.

“It was a big thing that he was self-published through Amazon.”

Although time is scarce, Jason said he’s already 80 per cent through writing a sequel called Into the Flames.

He is considering reaching out to a publisher once it's finished.

“I've got a two year old and just had another baby six weeks ago, so there's not a lot of time as it is,” he said.

“But I pretty much open the laptop at about 8pm every night and just try to write for two hours.”

Jason said he hopes to finish and publish the sequel by the middle of the year, and he said he’s aiming to write three books for this series.

“As soon as I finished the first one, I was like ‘I really enjoyed this’,” he said.

“I plan on doing three but, who knows, I might just keep writing.

“It's good as it means I'm not spending more time sitting on my phone.”