Sometimes people ask me how it was that I ended up as a writer.
The answer is that, when I was in my early thirties, I had
a career freakout.
I was working in an office. I thought that I was happy with
my regular job. Then suddenly, quite without warning, I had
a frightening thought.
This, I realized, was how it was going to be for the rest of
my life.
That's what a career freakout is - a moment of total panic
about your work and your life.
I asked myself what I really wanted to do. The answer,
rather to my surprise, was that I wanted to tell stories.
I wanted to be a writer.
I left my job and did different kinds of writing in order
to make some money. One evening, I was reading a story
to my children Xan and Alice. As I was reading, I thought
to myself (secretly), 'This story isn't very good. In fact,
I think I might be able to do better myself.'
I wrote the words for a picture book called If I Could Work,
which was quite successful. I had an idea for another book
for young readers called Miss Heccatty and Class Three. It
was going to be about a witch with magic powers arriving at
school as a teacher.
Nobody liked my picture-book story very much, but someone suggested
that I should try to write about my witch for slightly older readers. Soon
afterwards, a character called Ms Wiz was born.
You can read more about Mz Wiz, that first book and the 17 which followed, here.
What writing about Ms Wiz and her friends at St Barnabas School showed me was that I love writing for young readers. It gives me a sort of satisfaction, and makes me laugh and, just now and then, cry in a way that writing for adults can never do.
Over the years that have followed, I have found myself getting very gradually older - that is, I've begun to write for slightly older readers. The books which I am most pleased to have written - Homebird, The Transfer, Boy2Girl and others - have been about people who are between ten and 14 years old.
When I start each of these books, I never quite know how they are going to turn out, but I always hope that they have both fun and seriousness in them.
When they're about important things - a boy who runs away in Homebird, someone who discovers that his parents have weird and frightening secret in The Angel Factory - there is also some humour there. When the idea behind them is funny - a boy who has to disguise himself as a girl in Boy2Girl or a girl who gets herself kidnapped in Missing. Believed Crazy - there is, I hope, some seriousness behind the jokes.
Writing stories is an adventure. Sometimes it can be tough and difficult but, as long as the ideas for keep coming, it's exciting and interesting to answer the question that's buzzing in your brain - What would happen if..?
Today I write for adults in newspapers and books, but I'm always waiting for the next idea for a new story for young readers to start niggling at me.
When my writing is going badly, or I think that what I've been done so far is rubbish, or I even have to start the whole thing all over again, I think back to that career freakout of years ago.
I remember that, if that hadn't happened, I would still be in an office, with a boss and with a clock on the wall showing my life tick-tocking away.
That's enough to get me writing again.
If you are interested in a longer profile of my writing life, you can find it here.