Amanda Cartwright. Author.

 

Daydreaming was my escape from school.  School reports came home to my exasperated parents with comments like ‘I hope Amanda’s world is more exciting than ours.’  Well it certainly was, so it only seems natural that I would end up putting my marvelous talent for daydreaming into writing stories.  I was born in Leicestershire and spent my early years in Lutterworth.   I have however become quite adept at moving over the years and have notched up a long list of addresses, some more permanent than others.  After 16 years (and 3 different homes) in the small Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach, I’m now, for the moment, in Penistone in South Yorkshire. 

I wrote ‘The Owl’s Supper’ after getting very fed up with the lack of good things to read my 5 year old twins.  We lived at the time in Germany, it felt, as it was, rather cut off from the English speaking and written world.  I even found an amazing illustrator, but the whole project ended up gathering dust for 10 years.  Fate played a great hand in events that have led me to holding, very proudly, the completed project.  The first, I hope, of many.

Nowadays words, lines and stories come to me while I am out walking – thank heavens for my adorably mad cocker spaniel.  You’ll easily catch me speaking to myself – I’m just testing, listening if words sound good together before scribbling them down on a note pad.  Then I put them away, out of sight, and out of mind for a few days – before returning to them and making a first edit.  After a while these scruffy scribbles make it to a word file on my pc before another process of editing begins.  Sometimes this all seems like an awful waste of time – I’m sure my kids think that when dinner isn’t carefully planned.  But every so often I really like what comes off the printer…

I’m working differently to how I always imagined, but you can’t force a story.  A big, fat, juicy, really clever, murder mystery is top of my ‘to do’ list, but ‘The Owl’s Supper’ came to me first.  I guess you have to allow the people, places and time that surrounds you dictate what your head thinks and your hands produce.  As long as it’s not forced everything falls into place eventually.  In the meanwhile, whilst I wait for that little gem of an idea to find its bigger story, I shall keep making the most of where I find myself and keep my mind open to more ideas.