Liliana Stafford writes . . .
I was born in 1950 in Sussex, England and emigrated to Western Australia in 1970. Seventeen years and six children later, I began writing for children. It took another twelve to thirteen years before the first three of my picture books were published—all in the same year. I didn’t plan it that way, it just happened.
I work on and off throughout the day in between going for long walks, listening to music, gardening and spending time with my family. My two youngest children still live at home and the others come and go, sometimes staying for weeks or months.
For almost a decade we had horses and I taught children to ride. I am currently working on a series of four horse novels I began during this time. The first two books of the series were released in May 2001.
When I first began writing, it was in longhand in a series of notebooks often in between teaching riding lessons and caring for up to ten horses and ponies. Then I acquired an old computer that held one chapter per disk. Now I have a good computer but I still start a new story in a notebook, scribbling away until I hear the voice. I’m not sure where my stories come from but I know they come when I take the time to live life slowly and approach the world around me with an open mind.
Writing is like breathing, it’s present in everything I do and the stuff of stories is drawn from the normal everyday things that happen.
|
|
