A Big Shout Out to the students at Jesus and Mary Language College I met on World Book Day. It's great to meet so many kids who are so articulate and passionate about reading. I was very impressed. So thanks for having me there and sharing your thoughts and ideas. Hi too to those who came to see me at One Tree Books and Waterstones in Petersfield and Chichester. I am off to Lincoln to talk to SCBWI writers there and pop into Waterstones. Next stop the mysterious Sipson Village Fair on May 5th (It's right in the heart of Heathrow - who knew!)

Writing stories has always been my thing. From early beginnings as a kid concocting adventures in Spain as I listened to my big sisters classical music - Manuel de Falla and Rodrigo mostly. I had never been to Spain so they must have been quite strange stories. All I remember was dusty streets and strange wistful girls dressed in black longing to be somewhere else. On an exchange trip from Canada to an English school I recall we were taken all the way to France to visit to a kipper factory. How weird was that! We also went to Versailles Palace of course, but it was the damn kipper factory that stuck in my mind. In this period my family moved around a lot and we went to Africa for a while and then back to Canada. Each time it meant saying goodbye to friends and then having to make new ones. Maybe that's how one becomes a writer - the need to invent new friends who'll come with you wherever you go.

After careers that involved teaching, travel and photography, (add a smattering of gold prospecting in British Columbia) and working in radio drama in Africa, not to mention being a tour guide in America and Europe I finally committed to writing for real. I enjoy meeting people and collecting their stories.  I'm a great believer in belonging to the city I happen to be living in, that way you get to meet the people who shape it.  But my heart belongs to Vancouver, no matter where I am at any present time. It is a city that is changing so fast the past is disappearing almost before it even happens.
 
Living in Vancouver you belong to the 21st Century – whether you like it or not.  The shift of historical gravity has already moved to the Pacific rim because of the growth of China and Vancouver is one of the lucky cities that reflects that huge change in the buildings and people that flock to live there.  This is one of the places where the future happens and I love to set my adventures there. 

You can never leave town for long because when you return your neighbourhood will have already changed.  I think this must be what it is like to live in China right now.  Almost overnight huge cities seem to appear, like magic, and no one remembers the past, only the future.  I don't rule out setting a book in China in the future, but for now my stories resonate in Vancouver and in the hinterland of B.C..

The Repossession is set in the mountain town of Spurlake. Spurlake must have been pretty exciting place to live in around 1890. A couple of years before that no one lived there at all.  It was a barren, lonely mountainside facing onto a lake.  Once gold was found a whole city grew in just months.  People came from all over the world to get rich or more often die poor.  B.C. has a number of towns like this  - overnight cities that flourished until the gold ran out and then slowly began to die as people drifted away. 

I'm fascinated not only by the future but these ghost towns of the past.  Modern China is our equivalent of the gold rush. Everyone is going in there to make a fortune and everything will be transformed. Little of their past will remain.

Science fascinates me too. ‘If we look back to the turn of the last century everything really exciting happened right near the beginning.  Electricity, the petrol engine, (the electric and diesel engines too), the record player, radio, x-rays, even antibiotics and eventually one important pill – the aspirin, followed by the jet engine.  Some things happened really quickly to change the way people lived – others such as the jet or radar or atomic fission developed with the demands of war.  Right now we live in a time when everything one could be sure off twenty years ago is no longer certain.  Science is changing the way we eat; live (think social media); or even die (in the west we all live fifty percent longer than one hundred years ago. 1 in 6 of us will live to be a hundred).  The nature of work is changing, no longer can someone have just one career, but several, retirement might be impossible for children born today. In fact a child born today, if they are lucky and live in a prosperous country, may live for 150 years, replacing body parts as they wear out.  Imaging going for career advice at 100! This is why I love writing for kids. Everything is changing and their futures with it. It may not be perfect and there might be a lot of confusion and even pain on the way, but the 21st Century will be so different to the last, people in 2080 will look back on 1980 and wonder how it was people could live so primitively. Of course given the ubiquity of social media, they'll wonder what it was like to live in a time when no one knew your business. Privacy will be the great casualty of the future, secrets will be impossible and we shall miss them I think.

Happy Reading

Find More Background to The Repossession research and character profiles here. Search and you'll find some extra stories about the main characters.

* Just ventured onto Facebook - but not on Tumblr or Twitter and I know my publisher says I definitely must be on Twitter but I'm not because my phone ended up in the washing machine recently and well I just don't want to. (My best friend has a crick in her neck from following Tweets all day long. Ha!). But if you write me on old fashioned email here, I do check it most days and will write back as soon as - OK?

The Curse of the Forgetful Writer

There’s no excuse.  Losing one’s notebook for the third time in one year is frustrating and annoying, but entirely my own fault.  A lack of pockets big enough in winter and a lack of pockets altogether in summer is one excuse, but a friend says it has to be my brain cells.  Each year you lose more and more until poof, they're all gone.

A picture I like of Genie Magee sheltering in the rain - images and music intrigue me and stimulate stories

tIt’s just a notebook you say.  But actually it is much more than that.  It was Chapter Two of a new novel I left in a coffee shop ‘Bean Around The World’ on Walnut Street in Kitsilano. (Along with my very expensive scarf).  What’s the problem you say, you can re-write it.

Yes of course, but it was my Notebook! It has all those random bits in it that you jot down before you finally grope your way to the Chapter in question.  I can certainly get Gabriella back (the girl in question) and put her through the awful things that happen to her in Chapter Two, but those four hours in the coffee shop where it all suddenly came together are lost forever. You ‘sort of’ remember what you wrote, but it won’t ever be written with the same level of emotion and excitement that you first had.  It might even be better without the emotion but could one be sure?
           
Of course at least it wasn’t my laptop or the iPad I was thinking of getting.  I still write by hand.  Shocking isn’t it.  All these wonderful electronic devices and I still use pen and ink (no not quill – that would be stupid).  I have a natural relationship with paper and the ideas flow more immediately from my mind, through the pen to the page.  Also, it is less likely to get nicked when you go to the loo.

Chapter 11 was left on top of the pay parking thingy in the Isle of Widget during the summer.  I know that because I rushed back just one hour later and it was gone.  Never handed in, despite my name and phone and email address on the front. (I learn from my mistakes).  To this day I am never quite sure what I actually wrote in Chapter 11 first time around.  Tomas in a library trying to come to grips with the Dewey Decimal System.  I’ve rewritten it twice but it never quite works the way it did the first time around.
           
Chapter 16 or was it 18 was left in Pret a Manger – a devastating blow.  This was the very complex details of a flight from London to Ireland through a storm with all the little notes about the size of the cabin and seats and who was in the plane and why.  You can remember much, but not everything and besides that Chapter had taken at least a week of constant writing and false starts.  Yes my name and details were on the cover and no, no one called. 
           
Perhaps people look inside – decide my handwriting is so awful, so unreadable, it is worthless and no one would miss it and they chuck it in the bin.  If it were an iPad they’d just wipe it and keep it I suppose – so I am not sure you can win.

Perhaps I might try some memory exercises – make my brain do press-ups every morning or something.  Or like Paddington Bear I could wear my notebook chained to my jacket.  Look a bit foolish of course.

Soon no doubt I shall lose myself.  I’d better write a label on my shirt like they used to do in school so long ago.  Sam Hawksmoor – If Lost Call this number – Return to So and So.  Yes, better get on with that now I think before I forget.

I have a lot more stories to tell, but right now I sincerely hope that you will enjoy the story of Genie Magee - Order your copy now or go to Waterstones, WH Smiths or your local indpendent bookshop and they will get it for you pretty darn quick.