I was always just a little bit distracted from reality.

When I left home and was on my own, there was university and work, and they were a lot more interesting than housework and family chores, but I missed the wild games, and in the end, writing was still this glittering, mesmerizing thread running under everything. Keeping me distracted when I was not ferociously writing. For a while, I really got into journalism, but in the end it seemed to me that I was getting closer to some sort of cellular truth when I wrote my stories than when I interviewed a politician or even the victims of a bushfire. So I quit.

Then there was this incredible period, which was actually quite short, where I really just wrote. Well, I wrote and went to the beach a lot. What I loved most about the beach was that I was going there when everyone else was suiting up to go to work or to all those things real people did, which I had somehow miraculously evaded. I was too young to feel worried about the future. I lived on what I had got together and I lived very, very simply. I was incredibly happy all the time. I wrote, and I was working on the same story I had been working on at fourteen – the first Obernewtyn book.

Then I finished it and I sent it off to the first publisher on a long list I had made, because I had been told that you had to get rejected hundreds of times before being accepted. But it was accepted by the first publisher I sent it to. I felt so lucky. In fact, I felt so lucky it made me nervous. I thought I would probably have to be in a terrible accident as a way of balancing all that luck!

Then the book came out and was short-listed in the young adult section of the Children’s Book Council awards and in one step I went from being no one to someone. Suddenly my book was in libraries, and the publishers wanted the next one, which I was working on …

So I worked and worked, and everything I wrote was published in due course, and I won or was short-listed for awards. Basically, I didn’t do much else in that period. For a while I went to and from journalism whilst editing and writing – I liked it but my stories were what held me. The river had grown a lot wider and I could just focus on it now.

That went on for some years. So many that I thought: Okay, this must be life. It depressed me a little, I am ashamed to say, to think that was it. I was reasonably successful, and from all the indicators it seemed like I would go on being moderately successful. I started to travel, always because of writing, and all that I saw and did was woven into my work. I was content, but somehow I had lost that sharp beautiful painful delight in life that I had earlier on.