I fell in love with high fantasy, and had several abortive attempts at writing stories set in secondary worlds which always failed because I kept making the world bigger and bigger and adding more and more characters and forgetting about the, you know, narrative. I got really into Jane Austen, and I’m really glad that old computer document with my 10,000 word Pride and Prejudice knock-off is lost to the world, because it was super pompous and really embarrassing. This pattern of mimicry persisted right through my teenage years, when I tried to write… god, who knows how many books. I was really into Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby series at that point, so instead of imitating Enid Blyton, I imitated her. Someone gave me a beautiful journal, and I wrote in it by hand religiously every day. The next serious attempt at writing a book came when I was eleven. I intended it to be an epic series in the manner of the Famous Five, but tragically I never got beyond that first instalment: The Mystery of the Advent Calendar, where a naughty magpie was responsible for stealing a new piece of the calendar each day. I read a lot of Enid Blyton, and it was a complete knock-off of her mysteries – it involved me, my younger siblings Hayley and Sam, and our neighbours Lynda and Peter teaming to be detectives and solve mysteries around our neighbourhood. I attempted my first book when I was six. As soon as I learned to read, I knew I wanted to write. Writing a book was the first thing I ever knew I wanted to do. Let’s go back to the beginning…have you been telling stories since you were a kid or was writing something you fell in love with as an adult?
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