In March this year, Seven Sharp’s Tim Wilson was in a race. The former TVNZ New York correspondent had a deadline for his new novel and his wife, Rachel, was about to give birth.
Already an enthusiastic dad- of-one, there was one thing Tim knew above all else – finishing a book and caring for a newborn would not go together like strawberries and cream. More like anchovies and custard.
To help his chances, as the baby’s due date loomed closer, he stayed up late every night and rose again at 5.30am, “hunched over my laptop like some goblin, cackling to myself”.
It worked. The manuscript for his novel, The Straight Banana, was finished just days before baby Felix, weighing 3.4kg, was born on March 7 – the second arrival of what Tim (50) and his wife Rachel (30) hope to be the start of a large brood of kids.
Almost immediately, Tim was thanking his lucky stars that the novel was done and dusted because Felix suffered from colic, which meant no-one in the Wilson household got much sleep for the next two months.
With a wry grin, the seasoned journalist, who “tries to put the pop, sparkle and fizz” into the news story of the day, says caring for a baby with colic is “hands down” much harder than writing a novel.
“With novels, you can close the laptop and put it away. With colicky babies, you can’t close them, you can’t switch them off, you can’t push pause. You just have to deal with it.
“I guess the message is – to anyone who has not written that novel that they’ve dreamed of but who has still managed to get through having a colicky baby – it will be a cinch.”
The Straight Banana, which was released this month, is Tim’s third novel and a follow up to his satire News Pigs, featuring washed-up New York newspaper hack Tom Milde, who, by the end of the book, had scored himself a job in TV.
In The Straight Banana, “Tom Milde turns into Tom Wild” when he gets hooked on straight bananas, which are at the top of the FBI’s most wanted list due to the damaging effect they’re having on the American psyche.
It was Tim’s crazy time as a New York journalist that inspired his Tom Milde books. Back in 2001, he was on staff at an Auckland-based magazine when he suddenly thought, “Stuff this! I’m going to New York.”
The journalist says he doesn’t miss life in New York – if he hadn’t given it up, he wouldn’t have met his gorgeous wife.
Laughs Tim, “I was sure The New Yorker magazine had kept a job for me – and a desk. All I had to do was knock on the door and they’d embrace me, and show me my new life… I don’t know what I was thinking!”
He arrived two weeks after 9/11 “while the wreckage was still smouldering” with $20,000, which was reduced to $10,000 with the exchange rate. “After four months, I was standing at an ATM off Lexington Avenue looking at $300 in my account thinking, ‘How did this happen?’”
In desperation, he began filing stories about the US for New Zealand media, which led to landing his role with TVNZ. Among the stories he covered was the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech – “I interviewed a kid who had looked the guy in the eye as he was methodically going through and killing people. This kid’s nostrils were still twitching with fear” – and Hurricane Katrina.
“Driving towards the hurricane, my highway was empty and dark, and the highway going away from New Orleans was filled with cars running from the storm… I slept in my car the first night and in the lobby of a hotel the second night.”
Baby Felix and his big brother Roman are just the beginning of a big brood, hope doting parents Tim and Rachel.
While Tim was filing his reports on the run, he couldn’t help but notice the resources of the major US news networks, with huge buses filled with equipment and staff – and in CNN’s case, their own bottled and branded water.
The seed was sown for his Tom Milde books.
“The characters I met while I was doing TV were so memorable. I thought, ‘These people are larger than life’.”
After more than 10 years in the US, during which he converted to Roman Catholicism, Tim was ready to come home in 2012. Soon after, he met Rachel at a service at Auckland’s St Patrick’s Cathedral.
They married in 2014 and Roman, now 18 months, arrived the following year – followed a year later by Felix. And while Tim has been busy with his creative projects, former music teacher Rachel has found time for hers too. Her pop single, Elysium, written and recorded with her co-producer Koil Stark, has just been released.
“The question people always ask me is, ‘Do you miss New York?’” says Tim. “The answer is, ‘No’. Right now, I can hear the blender going, some repetitive child music coming out of a toy, the little thump of Roman’s feet… and I couldn’t be happier. I never would have met Rachel if I had stayed in New York.”
But, it seems, more than a little bit of New York followed him home in the form of Tom Milde. He’s already thinking about a third book based on his hapless anti-hero. Maybe he’s planning on creating the Harry Potter of the gutter journalism world?
He laughs, “Look, if I have a 10th of the Harry Potter success, I’ll invite you to my private island every summer!”
Words: Megan McChesney
