Mumsnet Talk

herecomesthsun

Do you ever regret giving up medicine for writing? Would you encourage your daughters to pursue either profession? What audience do you envisage as you write - your children? other children? is it less specific?

I wouldn’t say I ever regret giving up medicine for writing. It was a huge step to give up working and initially I felt a bit guilty about it, but now I’m certain that for me it was definitely the right thing. I worked as a doctor, mainly in psychiatry, for 13 years and I wouldn’t change that. But I know I couldn’t have embraced my writing career as much if I’d still been juggling it with psychiatry, which could be very stressful at times. I don’t worry that my training was wasted because I know I use it all the time when I write, just in a different way.

As for my daughters, if they did express an interest in going down either route I’d encourage them to research both options thoroughly before they made up their minds. What I hope is that they have the motivation and confidence to pursue something of their own choosing, something which suits them both academically and temperamentally and which will enable them to make a living!

I don’t consciously envisage an audience at all when I write the first draft of something – I’m either inside the head of the characters or I’m concentrating on describing the world they’re inhabiting. However I am very aware of the children who read my books when I get to the next stage of going over and revising what I’ve written. It’s really important that the narrator’s voice sits right with my readers or else I’m not going to engage them in the story.

Acinonyx

My daughter aged 7.5 wants has a lot of your books to ask: 'How do you come up with the names for the fairies?'

I’m so glad your daughter likes my books. The names of the fairies come from a variety of places. Sometimes I name one after a particular person – such as Ruby in Fairy Treasure (named after my friend’s daughter) and Cammie the wee man in Fairy Dust (named after my stepdad). Sometimes for flower fairies it’s a case of making a list of flower names. Likewise I might be guided by another theme in the story, like jewels (Fairy Treasure) or the night time (Fairy Dreams, featuring Star and Moonbeam). When I’m stuck I get out my book of babies’ names to get some ideas.

MercedesKing

Don't know whether there is a translated version in other languages or version with relatively simpler English, thought this book is suitable for my thirteen year old brother who is learning English right now, thought it can give rise his learning interests. Guess it is just what I wanted...

I hope your brother enjoys it. There is also my Cosmo series which tend to be popular with the boys whenever I do school visits. The first one is Cosmo and the Magic Sneeze.

Hopezibah

My 8 year old son is here with me now to give his feedback / review. He says: "I finished it in one night so I wish it was 300 pages long so it would last longer. Maybe the author should write one about super brothers too. I liked the whole story. Cedric the knome was my favourite character."

I am so pleased by your son’s reaction! Tell him there is more of Cedric in the sequel which is out in hardback this month - it’s called My Super Sister and the Birthday Party. And I’ll bear in mind the super brothers idea!

Right from childhood, writing was my number one hobby and my favourite form of escapism. But for quite a lot of my early adult life it had to take a back seat while I pursued a career in Medicine. The first book I wrote when I was still a medical student was a coming of age type novel for teenagers. I took it to some writing workshops and was encouraged to try and find myself a literary agent.

In the same year that I started working as a junior house officer I was taken on by an agent but to my immense disappointment no publisher agreed to take on my book. I kept writing in my spare time and decided to start training in what had always been my favourite branch of Medicine – Psychiatry.

My next book was for the younger pre-teen age group and amazingly it found a publisher. Unfortunately nothing much happened in terms of sales and it was allowed to go out of print after a couple of years. I had my career in Psychiatry to focus on which was more than enough to keep me occupied and I found myself specialising in Child and Adolescent work.
It was a few years later when my agent put me in touch with a book packaging company called Working Partners. After a successful try-out, they hired me to write some short animal books for younger children. I was one of many anonymous authors contributing to one of several series, each of which was packaged under an invented author name and sold on to a publisher. The series I had contributed to was sold to Macmillan Children’s Books where my particular titles were noticed by an editor there, who asked if I would be interested in writing a series of books directly for them.

I wrote my Mermaid Magic series followed a year later by Fairy Dust – both of which sold successfully – and this was the start of my 12 year author-publisher partnership with Macmillan. Initially I juggled the writing with some out-patient work in child psychiatry but when my publisher offered me a seven book contract I decided to take a sabbatical to test out being a full-time writer. That was 10 years ago.

Since then I’ve also married and had 2 daughters (aged 5 and almost 3) and now I am happily juggling the writing with being a mum.

My latest children’s series – My Super Sister – about two sisters with superpowers, has been inspired partly by watching the onset of the sister relationship between my two daughters. I say ‘partly’ because I’ve always liked writing about families, having grown-up pretty much as an only child (my half-sister wasn’t born until I was 12). Indeed I spent many hours during my somewhat disrupted childhood fantasising about what it would be like to have a sibling and in particular a sister to share things with. (At the time it didn’t really occur to me that it would have very much depended on my relationship with the sibling in question.)

Which brings me to one of my favourite things about being a writer – getting to invent the ‘people’ in my books and getting to decide exactly what happens to them. In My Super Sister I’ve had a lot of fun creating what I hope are two believable sisters who (despite their superpowers) have a ‘normal’ sibling dynamic that my readers will be able to relate to. Hopefully the end result is a book that is both entertaining and emotionally satisfying, both for readers out there who do have sisters as well as the ones who don’t.