Welcome to my website. I hope you enjoy reading about my books.

"I’ve always been captivated by adventure stories - from reading Enid Blyton’s Famous Five as a young girl, to sharing The Hardy Boys with my two sons. As an English teacher I’ve had the joy of watching students’ eyes light up when adventure stories spark their imaginations and inspire confidence. Now, as a writer of children’s adventure stories, I’m lucky enough to create the kind of books that I’ve always loved. I hope my stories bring the same excitement and joy to readers that those early adventures brought to me. There’s nothing like the thrill of discovering a new world on the pages of a book!"

People often ask author’s where they get their ideas for writing. I always answer, “ideas are everywhere.” They may come from something you hear or see, or something you read in the paper or see on your screen.. Sometimes, like for the book Glued, the words just came into my head when I woke up one morning.

My children’s books are for boys and girls between the ages of 9-13 and they are always adventure stories. You won’t find too many issues or many children in unhappy situations (although my first book, The Niello Necklace Mystery starts with a very sad event).

You will certainly find my characters in terrible danger sometimes. They will have to be resourceful, brave and resilient to survive, and they will need good friends to help them. I hope this is what all young people can find in their lives.

Because I like to see young people face adventures and win you can probably guess I love:

▪    Enid Blyton
▪    JK Rowling (Harry Potter)
▪    Isobelle Carmody (although her characters are not exactly ‘people’)
▪    Lemony Snicket
▪    Garth Nix
▪    Morris Gleitzman
▪    Phillip Pullman

This list is getting too long, and I’m sure you can add many more favourites as well

My books are at the bottom of my home page. Keep scrolling. They are arranged backwards from my latest book to my first. If you click on the book you are interested in, you will be able to read the first chapter and discover where the idea for the book came from. 

MY FAVOURITE THING ABOUT WRITING

One of the things I love most about writing is choosing characters and watching them grow. The first step is deciding on a name and this often takes some time as you think about names and then reject them until suddenly a name comes into your head and you realise the character could not be called anything else.

I often have no idea what my characters might do next. There is an overall description in my head and a general understanding about how they will react but quite often they seem to ‘go off on their own’ and I find a story going in a different direction. Some characters also seem to get stronger over time. In The Entwhistle Experiment, for example, Ming starts out as Horatio’s sidekick. By the end of the series, she is the one who takes the initiative on many occasions and proves to be a great problem solver.

In a way it’s like watching your children grow up and being amazed at how interesting and clever they become.

It is great fun to put characters in a ‘sticky’ situation (often literally in the Entwhistle Series) and watching how they extricate themselves. And, of course, they always do.

WHAT I LIKE LEAST ABOUT WRITING

Some days, no matter how hard you try you cannot write. You start a chapter, don’t like it, delete and then try again. It may take more than one go, and lots of deleting before you are happy. When this happens, I usually go for a walk and think about my characters.

You may be interested to know that the famous writer Ernest Hemingway, re-wrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 47 times before he allowed it to be published.

EVENTS