How a Minnow Can Eat a Shark
Due for release October 2024.
There is nothing complicated about achieving outstanding personal and professional results.
The Origins of This Book
As a teenager, I spent many hours on the beach at Black Rock. Those experiences are the inspiration for the start of the story. We would often swim out to the HMVS Cerberus breakwater and climb onto the deck through the corroded hull. You’re not allowed to do that anymore. You probably weren’t allowed to back then, either. We still did, though.
One day, we met a girl on the beach, and we all became friends. We were just a group of youngsters having innocent fun. We’d swim out to the Cerberus, snorkel in the rocky shallows, and sit around on the sand and just talk. We’d arrange to meet her on the beach from time to time, but one day, she never turned up, and we never saw her again. We figured she probably had better things to do than hang around with a bunch of nerdy teenagers like us. She was the inspiration for Joel Hayward’s teen sweetheart, Annie.
Who this book is for ...
The book’s title was revised many times. Ultimately, I based it on the room under the house of an old abandoned property we discovered in a nearby suburb. We were petrified the first time we descended into its depths with nothing but a flickering torch. We didn’t go all the way down, and we didn’t make another attempt. That’s how much it scared us. We’d often sit in class at school and wonder what might lurk in the room under the house. But even if the passing of time were to eventually remove the fear of going down there, the decision was taken out of our hands – one day as we walked past, we saw that the house was in the process of being demolished.