After directing two full seasons of the 3-Day Novel Contest, tormenting and documenting writers as they tried to pound out 50 000 words in 72 hours, I thought I'd best try writing it myself.

Took a crack at it in 2010 and won 3rd place out of 700+ contestants. The jury called it a ‘witty thriller about a bloody murder, a very large diamond and a dogwalker on the run’. It’s currently under option consideration for development with a local production company, but the gist of it is:

Madeleine Severene is a professional dog walker on the run.

Three days ago, she returned her favourite Rhodesian Ridgeback to a client’s North Juncture mansion, and witnessed a botched robbery that left a Russian Cash-for-Jewelry czar shotgunned to death. Madeleine pulled the dog off the man’s body, his spine sprouting up from his neck like a broken light bulb. Amidst the carnage of splintered bone and caked-on blood, she noticed a walnut-sized pink diamond hidden beneath a shattered skullcap. And promptly dropped it in her purse.

Because Madeleine’s been looking for a new life for awhile. She’s spent the last year plagued by visions of a dead body she abandoned on a gravel road in the West. Obsessed with death and getting laid in a new city, she has no one to talk to except her dogs, and she wants to start over. Again.

But jewelry thieves don’t care about that—they just want their rock back. So now, Madeleine plunges into a world of violence she doesn’t understand—swirling with ruthless South African diamond gangs, corrupt cops, a duplicitous homme-fatale, and savage dogs bred for hunting lions.

Terrified and half-mad, she tries to cash in and make it out of the big city, but she’ll be forced to confront her visions of the dead if she wants any shot at redemption—and survival.