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DADDY ON HER DOORSTEP
Special Edition
March 2012

I had great fun with this story!  For anyone who's found that parenthood didn't start out quite the way they expected, this book will bring back memories.  And for anyone who believes, as I do, that our children change us more than we change them, Claudia's journey will make you smile.  Hero Andy is a little wiser than Claudia is, at the beginning, but he, too, needs to question a few very important things before these two can find their right path.

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ALL DRESSED UP
December 2011

You can read more about this book on the News page. Right here, I'm just going to talk about the cover. I absolutely love it! I've published this book myself, and have loved the level of creative control involved at all stages of the process. Cover designer Kim van Meter has taken a few vaguely artsy suggestions from me about the cover and run with them, and look what she delivered! Don't you think it's gorgeous?

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CAFÉ DU JOUR
May 2011

Well, I’ve talked about this book so much.  What more can I say?  Maybe talk a little about where the research for the hospital, workshop and restaurant scenes came from? 

I used to live in Sydney, in a shared house set-up very similar to Susie’s in the book.  During that period, I worked as a volunteer French interpreter at one of Sydney’s major hospitals.  French-speaking patients would be flown there for medical treatment from various Pacific islands, most notably New Caledonia, which is still a French colonial outpost.  As you can imagine, it wasn’t the routine cases that were flown so far, it was the really serious ones, and it was up to me to make sure that the communication between patients and medical staff was clear.  I saw some dramatic things during my time there, including a woman who was recovering after being shot in the head by her father, and a woman who’d had a stroke at home on her tiny Pacific Island, fallen unconscious and then woken a day or two later to find herself in a hospital hundreds of miles from home.  This woman had never seen a telephone before.  She didn’t even speak much French, because she used a local Melanesian dialect, but we shared a few laughs as we struggled with the three-way communication.  Although none of the cases I saw as an interpreter appears directly in the book, the atmosphere of my fictional hospital is very much steeped in that experience. 

For the restaurant scenes, I also drew on personal experience with a French flavour.  In my early twenties, I worked as a nanny for a lovely family in the French Alps.  The father of the family managed a large hotel there, and I used to have to go into the huge restaurant kitchen twice a day to pick up meals to bring to the apartment for the children to eat.  It was great fun talking to the cooks, who came from all over France and elsewhere, and as a budding writer I found the whole flavor of the experience fascinating on every level – the sounds and smells and conversation, the quirky detail of the way the kitchen worked, the tensions and flare-ups and jokes.  I took heaps of notes, even though back then I didn’t have the slightest idea how I’d ever use them, and loved the opportunity to peek into a world I would be unlikely to experience at any other time.

Jody’s workshop draws on my acting experience, which began when I joined a local youth theatre company at the age of 14 and continued through involvement in an experimental theatre company on a semi-professional level.  Many acting exercises can be re-badged as personal growth exercises, which is exactly what Jody does in the book, although we’re not quite convinced he’s right to do so.  I would never say that you can’t learn about yourself from these exercises, but I’m skeptical of Jody’s tendency to claim life-changing status for them.  As Susie eventually learns, real change isn’t easy.

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