When you're gathering around the water cooler this week, in among the topics of conversation may just be The Rook.
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Set to premiere on Stan on Monday, the supernatural spy thriller tells the story of a young woman who wakes up near London's Millennium Bridge surrounded by dead bodies, with no memory of who she is.
While this paranormal tale of a British secret service for the supernatural may seem like a far cry from the everyday happenings of an office, what you probably don't know is this tale of espionage and paranoia has strong ties to the Canberra public service.
The Rook is based on the book of the same name, written by Canberran Daniel O'Malley, who by day works in communications and strategy for the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
The work he and his colleagues do, while important, obviously has nothing to do with the paranormal. But that doesn't mean there aren't elements of this - what some would call - mundane office job that provide inspiration for a spy thriller.
Sitting in the front foyer of the National Library of Australia - a place where O'Malley does a lot of his writing - the author jokes that if there was a department responsible for monitoring the paranormal, there is no one he would trust more than his colleagues.
"I take inspiration from little day to day details of working in the public service - how offices work," O'Malley says.
"The people I work with are really amazing. They sit in an office, they sit at their desks and then the call comes that there has been a transport accident that needs investigation and they're opening cupboards and taking out kits, and going travelling off that day.
"Sometimes they have to helicopter out to accident sites so it's very much the public service but then people going off and doing these remarkable things at a drop of a hat.
"And that certainly helps in my [fictional] organisation, when it's characters who are working in an office but then they get the call that they need to go and fight vampires or hunt down werewolf or deal with a bridge that is suddenly melting for no reason."
O'Malley says it was almost inevitable that he would end up in the public service, "as it is in Canberra". But while the author has taken elements of his APS career for The Rook - as well the sequel Stiletto and the yet-to-be-named third instalment he's currently working on - the tale of Myfanwy Thomas and her quest to find her memories began in the United States.
The son of two Americans, O'Malley grew up with the mindset that you go away to university. So after graduating from Canberra Grammar School, he took nine months travelling around England before heading to Michigan State University for his undergraduate degree, and then Ohio State University to earn his master's degree in medieval history.
It was the last day of graduate school that O'Malley first sat down and started The Rook.
"That was the first night in ages that I didn't have to grade papers or worry about my thesis. I could actually sit down and write something for my own entertainment and this was really the idea," he says.
"I really liked the idea of stepping into someone else's life and seeing how well you could fake it. Really it came from the occasional boring lecture in grad school, or meeting, where I thought 'How easy would it be to fake being me in this situation?' You wouldn't need that much preparation.
"I'm very easy to fake being but you would still need a certain amount of preparation, so this is where the letters throughout the book came from. It's advice saying if you're going to be me, this is what you need to know. This is what you need to do. This is how you need to act, that kind of thing."
He spent the next three months - during the American summer - working as a waiter and writing, before returning to Canberra, picking up a job at The Coffee Club at the Canberra Centre, before entering the public service. And so O'Malley continued to work the 9 to 5 and fill his nights working on his novel.
As if it was completing a circle, The Rook found its way back to America, first through O'Malley's literary agent and US publisher Little Brown, and then when the filming rights were optioned by none other than Twilight author Stephenie Meyer.
At the time Meyer was just getting into production. She had already been a producer in the last two instalments of The Twilight Saga, as well as on The Host - another of Meyer's own book adaptations.
The author-turned-showrunner was involved with the project up until the early days of filming when she decided to amicably depart in what reportedly stemmed from creative differences with the other producers.
However, it was Meyer's own experience in having her novels adapted for the screen that enabled her to give O'Malley advice on what the process would entail for The Rook, particularly during the early days.
"I always say, as a writer, I have an unlimited budget. I can put in an infinite number of characters," O'Malley says.
"I can say 'Suddenly the room was filled with a thousand hedgehogs', where they [production team] might be like 'our hedgehog budget will only spread to two hedgehogs'.
"So you have to modify your expectations and she [Meyer] gave me very good advice and I really appreciated that."
But that leaves the question, what is it like to see your literary work transformed for the screen? And was O'Malley ever worried about witnessing - first hand - the nearly age-old question 'is the adaptation as good as the book?'
It's very disconcerting to see the four blonde siblings walking towards you in unison when you made them up while helping a friend move furniture.
- Daniel O'Malley
The Canberran is a lot more nonchalant about the matter than one would expect.
O'Malley admits he's not an expert in TV "beyond, probably, watching too much of it", and was happy to take a hands-off approach when it came to the production.
"I have always been very encouraging of them, of the writers especially, to do exactly as they see fit," he says.
"What works in a book isn't necessarily what's going to work on TV, especially when I have hundreds and hundreds of pages to tell my story and they have eight episodes.
"They have to pick the elements that they can use and also because they're such good writers if they have good ideas I want them to feel free to develop them. And the same goes for the actors.
"There are so many times when a character, who in a book is sort of incidental, is fantastic in a movie or a TV show."
O'Malley looks at characters like Lafayette in the vampire drama True Blood and Effie Trinket in the dystopian series The Hunger Games as examples of this.
In both instances, the books saw these characters die quite early on in the piece, whereas their adaptations saw them take on a longer lasting role.
"These are the kind of characters you want to keep and have and use for as long as you can," O'Malley says.
"You want to leave them [the production company] to make their own choices and if there is a change that works better for TV or if they have an opportunity that they get to use a character or a location.
"I very much wanted them not to be slavishly bound to the book especially because it would be lovely if the show could continue beyond the boundaries of the book. They need to have new storylines and characters to develop and pursue."
The result is an adaptation of The Rook which, according to O'Malley, has a different tone to the original.
Through the characters of Myfanwy Thomas (Emma Greenwell), Lady Farrier (Joely Richardson) and Monica Reed (Olivia Munn), the TV show is darker and has more action than the novel.
"They've really played up the paranoia and the espionage thriller which I think makes for a really interesting and great interpretation," O'Malley says.
An interesting side effect of this change in direction is that the novelist himself can't take anything for granted - a fact which he is excited by.
"I wrote this book to surprise and entertain myself and they've carried over the characters and they've carried over the setting but they've made some twists and they've made some tweaks which means I can't take anything for granted," O'Malley says.
"It's like the show was made for me to watch and it's nice other people get to watch it, but I'm entertained and excited by it which is really cool."
But it has also offered him the chance to see the characters which he created up close and personal. As part of the filming, O'Malley was flown to London - where a lot of The Rook was filmed - to shoot a cameo.
"I'm not an actor so I didn't have any lines but I really had to try and conceal the ongoing delight and excitement," he says.
"Everybody else was quite serious at points and I really had to work to keep the big grin off of my face.
"But everyone was magnificent and hearing some of the characters deliver speeches, I was enraptured.
"One of the actresses Joely Richardson plays a character, Lady Farrier and she delivers a long speech and it was just hypnotic.
"She's giving a speech to a crowd and honestly, the entire crowd was just fixated by what she was saying, by the story she was telling."
There were four characters in particular, which really took O'Malley aback.
Known as the Gestalts, these siblings - twin brothers, a third brother and a sister - were all born on the same day and share one mind.
"I've got to tell you it's very disconcerting to see the four blonde siblings walking towards you in unison when you made them up while helping a friend move furniture. It's very startling in that regard," he says.
It's perhaps even more startling to know that from Monday the world will be introduced to the Gestalts, and the rest of The Rook characters, when they hit the small screen.