Life’s journey shows that Time Will Tell

"But when you have practical people like farmers as parents, this sort of thing is not even given the time of day," she said.

"I would have just forgotten about that and let it go, but the writing was always there and I always wrote short stories and poetry."

She lived on the family wool and cereal farm where she loved being a "farm kid" and imagined running it with her late father Tony McCallum.

"But because I was a girl and had a brother, it wasn't even worth mentioning," Fiona said.

"So that's probably why I started out writing rural-based fiction as some sort of therapy."

She recalls driving the chaser bin for her father in the mid-1980s -- an old tractor-towed PTO header.

"I went to leap out one day off the tractor steps and did a double take because there was a big snake right below where my feet would have been," Fiona said.

"I'm petrified of snakes. It's my one phobia, and I remember getting on the UHF to my dad who told me to just drive around and make sure it's gone before I get out."

Fiona is proud to have grown up in a country area and loves being out in the fresh air.

"I loved working with sheep, even though most farmers hate it, and I loved cooking for shearing and getting involved in working in the shed," she said.

She left the farm to finish her final two years of school at Wilderness boarding school in Adelaide before returning to Cleve, where she worked in the District Council of Cleve office for 7.5 years, during which time her father had endured a brain tumour and passed away.

Fiona married a farmer in the area at the age of 22 and during the state Pony Club Eventing Championships at Port Lincoln, started chatting with a photographer who had just started an SA publication called SA Statewide (now defunct) with a colleague and was looking for an Eyre Peninsula correspondent.

"I had a couple of articles published and actually got paid and I thought, 'cool, I'm going to be a freelance journo-type person'," Fiona said.

"But then the marriage ended and my life just fell apart."

At the age of 26 she moved to Melbourne and as a result of her articles, was accepted into Deakin University where she studied for a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing, graduating in 2000.

Initially acquiring work in marketing, administration and recruitment, she soon started her own writing, editing and consultancy business Content Solutions but her true interest was in writing full-length fiction.

She finished her first manuscript in 2002, which has not yet been published, and in fact, it took nearly 10 years before a publisher took on some of her work.

Fiona moved back to Adelaide in 2004 to develop her career as a corporate writer at the same time as pursuing her dream as a novelist.

"I wrote a manuscript, shopped it around a bit," Fiona said. "Wrote another one, shopped it around a bit as well. By the time I finally found someone willing to take a risk on me, I had four manuscripts."

Ironically, her first royalty cheque for her breakthrough book Paycheque came at a time when she needed it most, three years ago.

"The global financial crisis pretty much screwed my business," Fiona said.

"But within a week of defaulting on my mortgage, my royalty came through for Paycheque, which was an instant best seller."

Fiona followed up her debut with the titles Nowhere Else, Wattle Creek, Saving Grace, and now to follow-up Saving Grace, she wrote Time Will Tell, the second book in The Button Jar series.

"While it looks like I've been really prolific, I haven't really," she said. "I had four books up my sleeve and they were published more or less in reverse."

* Full report in Stock Journal, March 13, 2014 issue.