With short stories I compose directly onto the screen, but with longer novels I write scenes or character descriptions on paper first. And I always sign letters to publishers with a blue pen, for luck, because the first story that I ever had accepted for publication was signed with blue ink. The strangest place I've written a story was in Pizza Hut on a serviette. Ideas for my books come from stories my children tell, things I see or hear, articles from newspapers, movies, other books, pictures, songs and childhood memories. Every story is like a jigsaw.
Pieces come from everywhere.
I have 17 books published, and am working on three more during 2000. My books include fiction for adults and young readers, history, travel, biography, business and cultural relations, travel, texts for secondary and tertiary students, cultural studies and editing of an anthology. I love writing all kinds of things because the work takes me on journeys of discovery. I've written in a plane above the Black Sea, a room in Istanbul with a huge bear staring at me through the window, a slum in Bombay, a mountain top on the Silk Road, a Chinese train, a Fijian beach, and here at home with the door open onto the garden. I live at Mt Barker, in the Adelaide Hills.