Aged 11, unbeknown to my parents, my bedtime routine would involve sitting on the windowsill of my bedroom until precisely 1050pm, staring out into the night sky hoping passing aliens might land in their garden, right where dad had dug out a huge cherry blossom in front of my room. They’d lower their airstairs so I could climb aboard and be whisked away to an exciting, unheard-of adventure. 

They never came. I often fell asleep at school.

As a teenager my next plan was to become a news reporter. I figured this job would thrust me into the middle of thrilling dramas. That happened, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the sadness I would witness almost every day, human lives abruptly shattered by tragedy. Their sadness often found permanent lodgings in my soul. Then there were the gangsters, the crooks who traded in the shadows and poked at death until it found them. It did, in spectacular fashion born of that business.

It was while sitting on rocks writing a news story surrounded by the unimaginable horrors of the Boxing Day Tsunami that I drifted into my well used coping mechanism, my imagination, to escape the sensory overload of hell, for just a few minutes. This time it was different, as my mind tried to wander, it kept coming back to the one powerful thought, that one day I would write for children.

In that moment I made an agreement with that thought.

So, with almost 30 years working for newspapers and TV networks on stories around the world that most people would run from, my imagination is now free to roam and write from my tiny treehouse office at almost the bottom of this beautiful world, Australia. 

As the saying goes, ‘what’s meant for you will find you.’  What I didn’t realize, is I had been training for this part every day.