When I was about eight years old I decided to write ‘Alice in Wonderland’. I wasn’t all that bothered by the somewhat monumental fact that this book had already been written. I dutifully made my own notebook (by folding over pieces of A4 plain paper, cutting them in half and stapling the concoction together – the pages were all wonderfully skew-iff) and wrote the book on the basis of the Walt Disney film, which I knew off by heart. I wish I still had that book. I can’t remember much of it now, 22 years later, except that it was probably dialogue orientated, with minimal description and (how Alice would abhor) no pictures!
At 13, I wrote another book – or at least, I started to. I wanted to write a book about a girl who found a pet poodle and went on adventures with it, until my dad pointed out that stray dogs were unlikely to be poodles, due to their pedigree. Simple, I thought. Poodles being French dogs (are they?) would enrage some sort of anti-French moron, who would then evict their pet, allowing my protagonist to find it. The novel was abandoned in its early stages. Really all I wanted was a dog.
At 14 or 15 I wrote my first full length book – A Blaze in the Night. This I actually completed and spent long months researching. It was about a family of foxes and their lives in a Devonshire wood. These foxes were rather forward thinking canines, adopting a badger cub and an orphaned vixen cub to add to their already improbably large brood of six cubs. In the early stages I was inventing characters purely so I could use all of the lovely names I had created. The protagonists were Redblaze (dog fox) and Willow (vixen). Their cubs were: Scamper, Hawthorn, Moondancer, Velvetpaws, Brightdawn and Bracken. Bracken died a horribly sentimental and painful death, the like of which literature has not seen since Little Nell. The orphaned vixen was Fala (no, officer, I was not simply adapting the name Nala from ‘The Lion King’) and the badger cub was Grey. As the book progressed, many of the characters external to the main family died nasty deaths. There was a gassing, a severe storm, and a skulk of evil foxes who lived on the edge of Exmoor. In the sequel there was a plague, killing off as many of the surviving characters from the first book as was seemly. Before long I was actually inventing characters with the express purpose of killing them off as tragically as I could. A cast of thousands, with very few survivors. Neither hunting or illness has ever posed such a severe threat to the foxes of Devon than I did.
I was born in 1980 and raised in Devon; specifically in Plymouth. People from Plymouth are usually called “Janners”, but I didn’t make a very good Janner so I left to go to University in 1998. Even though I lived in Exeter it was still the University of Plymouth – twelve years on I still haven’t been able to figure that one out. I studied English and Media for three years, bought some rats and went on to train as an English teacher.
Bought some rats? Well, yes. This can’t come as much as a surprise really, unless you weren’t too sure if the Rodent Rebels were based on an animal species that actually exists . The Rodent Rebels are rats – all three of them.
I taught in Devon for two years but decided that, much as I enjoyed working with teenagers and letting them share my love for writing, I didn’t feel that teaching was for me. I had gone into teaching straight from University and wanted to experience life outside the education system. So Si, who I had met a year previously, and I moved to London, where we lived for five years. In that time I worked in Information – aka research.
Now I live in Devon with Si and our seven rats. Currently I work as a copywriter in a marketing department, and spend my free time writing, drawing cartoons, making jewellery, taking photographs of swans and wondering if I should kill off any of the characters in “That Fat Rat’s a Brat” – the first book in the Rodent Rebels series.*
*Just kidding. Snitch would never allow it.
