I always wanted to be a writer but was strongly encouraged by my family not to take on such a risky profession and moved my interest into the biological sciences. If only they had known how unstable a research job was. A chronic illness and early onset mid-life crisis has led me to take a risk on my dream of being an author.
 

The Andrayis Chronicles were born when I was sixteen and the question of why all children at some point are frightened by monsters under the bed. This followed to the question of what would happen if there really was something there. The books started with the image of Robbie's kidnapping and the world beyond and went from there. I was annoyed when Monsters Inc came out, thinking they had stolen my idea, but my story grew into something quite different.
 

It was initially going to be one book, the children were going to rescue their brothers and go home. But it turned out it wasn't as simple as that. My characters had different aims to what I thought initially. They moved in directions I had not intended to send them and at times I felt more like I was dictating that creating. 
 

In 2000 I spent five months in Denmark (the country not the town, this needs to be clarified when you live in Perth). I came out of my shell, just a bit, experienced culture shock and learned just how difficult it was to live where everyone around you spoke a language you could not understand. Here the book changed and the basis of book three, the language difficulties was developed.
 

Then it was put away. I went to the Olympics in 2000, one of the best experiences of my life, got my first real job, in a bakery, started university and set about learning what I needed to be a researcher. I did honours in microbiology and was insane enough to carry that through to a PhD. It was while avoiding writing my thesis that the Andrayis series took shape.
 

There were problems. I couldn't work out to get the kids out of the College. Yareph was invented to fix this problem. Initially he had about three pages. He was a young master who had a crisis of conscience, got the kids out and then faded back into the background. That didn't work. In the various rewrites his character took shape, dropped a few years and gradually took a major role. Yareph was a difficult name but he was only meant to take up a few pages so it didn't matter. Then it was too late to change it. That was his name for good or ill.
 

I reached the point where Yareph rescued the kids and got back to Grayonia, my end point or so I thought, but I found the story kept going heedless of me. I discovered it wasn't Amy's story after all. It was Yareph's story. From there it grew from a three book series to a five, then seven and now it looks like it will be nine books.

My work as a researcher proved useful when I finally realised that I couldn't just write whatever I liked despite the fact it was fiction. There were rules and these rules needed to be constant and make sense. Magic had to have a system. The court, the culture, the temples, times and dates, all had to be worked out. I am still working on moon orbits and how this effects tides. My characters couldn't do anything I wanted them to. My family must be sick of hearing 'no, he wouldn't do that' when suggesting a plot change.
 

I finished my PhD, some four years later than I was meant to, and found there were not many jobs going. I ended up working part time in a bank of all places. This gave me time to work on my books and I was expecting to publish book one about three months after starting at BankWest. My aunt was to be my publisher. She took one look at book one which at the time was the full story line for what is now book one and two, and said, "too long, split it." I did, splitting the book at the point where Yareph reaches Grayonia.

Now I had one small book and one large. So I expanded Yareph's flight from the College. In the original version they cross the Grayonian border with no problems. By the time I had finished I had two books only slightly shorter than the original. At that point I decided that as I was publishing an ebook it didn't matter and my aunt (publisher) and Nadine (editor) have been fighting to shorten it ever since.
 

Instead of the three months I was expecting to polish the manuscript I have now hit the three year mark. I have lost count of the number of drafts that book one has gone through. It has been a labour of love to get to this point. I am honoured to be able to share something of my journey with you. I hope you enjoy the books and be sure to check out the extras on this site.