Questions - And Almost-True Answers

When did you decide to become a writer?

I wrote my first poem at six and immediately announced I was going to be an author.  My parents bore this news with outstanding calm.  Now they know better.  Unless you are Bryce Courtney, writing is one of the most poorly paid and cut throat professions you can choose.  Unfortunately it is also very addictive!

Who is your favourite character from your books?

Tess from Dreamcatcher.  She's so feisty and strong and she has a great sense of humour.  She starts up this Green Guerrilla gang for kids to fight pollution - and also to get back at her politician father.  I wish I could have been so gutsy as a kid.  I was a lot quieter - but I suspect, just as stubborn.

What are your writing habits?

When I do the researching, planning, editing and fine tuning of a novel, I am a perfectly normal person with normal hours.  (Don't listen to my kids who say otherwise!)  However, it is the bit in the middle - the actual first draft of the book - which is the problem.  Drafting is when you have to be the most creative - and I have discovered I am most creative at about 1.00 in the morning.  So I start writing in the afternoon and draft all through the night, and 3,000 words later it is four or five in the morning. The birds are waking, the sun is coming up and I am going to bed.  It feels kind of weird - but wonderful.  (See my Diary of An (Almost) Sane Writer for the real secrets about this!)

Do you have any pets?

As a kid I kept a multitude of mice, canaries, terrapins, lizards and even a green tree snake. (Called Joe Blake/The snake, get it?)  Fortunately, neither of our kids have inherited this passion for pets. Now we only have one cat and 18 goldfish in a pond outside my studio.  (Actually, come to think of it, there are only 12 fish now and the cat is putting on weight.)

Do you get lots of fan letters?

I love getting letters from kids.  My favourite fan letter was from a student studying Deamcatcher as a Year 7 text at Star of the Sea.  She said this:

'Dreamcatcher made me suddenly realise what a great dad I have.  I told him so this weekend for the first time ever.' 

You use a lot of sport in your books.  Are you sporty?

You bet. I love sport, any sport.  I started water skiing at six, was a trained swimmer for four years swimming at State level, got addicted to SCUBA diving at 12 and was the youngest girl to get a PADI license in Victoria. .  I tend to pick up a sport and become totally addicted to it. When I left uni I spent five whole winters in Austria and Switzerland snow skiing 

My current passion is beach volleyball. The game goes like this.  Two people on either side of the net coat themselves in the stickiest suncream available, chase after a ball at full speed to get really sweaty and then they dive full length in the sand at regular intervals. We all wear a lot of sand.  I play beach at least twice a week (my ranking is about 16th in Victoria in the women's circuit) and I am also currently the local Men's A-grade champion.

Our kids love sport too.  (Not that they had a choice.)  Our daughter has won the National title in her age in trapolining four times (that's where I got the idea for Laura in Dreamcatcher) and our son is a black belt in karate, so don't mess with him!

Did you enjoy reading as a kid?

Enjoy is probably not the best word. Crazy, addicted and totally hooked might be a more accurate description. Given a choice between reading, eating and sleeping as a kid, I'd go without both the latter (and frequently did) to read. I read curled up in the branches of trees for privacy, under the bed covers at night, (after my mother had given me five warnings!) I still hold the record for the most number of books confiscated in one day in my school: - seven, by five different teachers (and that's not counting the eighth book they never found.) I lived dangerously.

What's your secret passion?

You expect me to tell you that?  OK, I'll give you a hint.  Once a year, we take the whole family and train on a circus trapeze for a week.  Madness, but amazing fun.  Currently I'm working on a back somersault.  (That's me in the photo 10 metres up in the air.)

Who is your favourite author?

As a kid, Ivan Southall was my all time favourite Australian author. He wrote Hills End and Ash Road (which I still cry at when I get to the ending.) His books were wonderful stories that always had kids tackling difficult problems and succeeding through their own tenacity and courage.

My second book, 'Where are the Billabongs When You Need Them?', is a story about five kids, who hate each other, getting lost in the bush up near Mansfield. Starving, and suffering from dehydration and hypothermia, they finally make it to a road, and survive. A year after the book was released I read it again - and realised I'd actually written my own version of 'Hills End'! I sent the book to Ivan Southall with this note.

'It has taken me a huge number of years to tell you how much wonder and strength Hills End has added to my childhood. Here is my fan letter. It is 45,000 words long.''

He loved it!

When did you start writing?

I started writing at the age of six, poems and stories every night because I had a dad who believed you had to practice writing in order to write better. (He also made me write out math tables every night - which may explain why I love maths and am probably one of the few authors around who can actually understand royalty statements.) Of course, what I wrote wasn't exactly great, but then the first time I played tennis I wasn't great either.

Practice really does work.

Was it easy to get published?  How did you start out?

I was 25 when I first sent something out to be published. I was celebrating my 25 birthday and a friend poured me a glass of wine and said, 'Well, now you are a quarter of a century old.' I thought, 'Wow, that sounds OLD.' And then I suddenly realised that my lifelong passion to be a writer had not yet happened.  I was writing quite a lot, but I wasn't actually sending anything out. I was waiting for editors to knock on my door, shower me with champagne and roses and beg me to write for them - and that is definitely NOT the way the publishing world works. I went home, fished out one of my best stories and sent it off to a magazine. It was accepted the next week, and that was the start of my professional career.

Are kids easy to write for?

Er, let me think about that. NO! Kids will dump your book faster than an ice-cream melts if it's no good. They'll throw it across the room, shove it into their school bag under a rotten banana or use it as some sort of square football to kill a few minutes at lunchtime. An adult may give your book some time, maybe even whole chapters to establish your characters and get the plot moving. Kids give you two paragraphs and then they either keep reading, or say 'This sucks'.

What's your favourite quote?

"There are three rules for writing the novel.  Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." (Somerset Maugham.)