ThE last questions from 5E!

Dear Word Spy, 

- What is your favourite of YOUR books?

- Do you base any of your characters on yourself or people you know?

- Are any of your books based on your life experiences?

- How many books have you written altogether?

- Do you have a pet guinea pig of your own since you love them so much?

- Are any of your books in a museum?

- How long does the average book take to write?

- Was it hard to find the information you needed for The Word Spy?

Dear 5E,

Hmm. Of my books I CANNOT choose. I will have to ask you - what is YOUR favourite?

I don't really put people I know in my books. I prefer to make people up - although sometimes something that someone says or does will give me an idea for a character.

As for life experiences, I guess all of my books come in some way or other from my experiences - although remember you can have lots of IMAGINARY experiences as well as real ones. My books usually start with a real experience and then I start imagining things about it.

I have now written about 40 books - but some of them are very short! Novels, picture books, illustrated chapter books and of course the Word Spy non-fiction books.

I don't have a pet guinea pig at the moment because we have a lovely dog- and no matter how lovely a dog is, they are not to be trusted near guinea pigs! I would like to have another guinea pig one day - when I was your age I had two guinea pigs. One was called Bubbles and the other was called Popcorn. 

I don't know if any of my books are in a museum - although there is an archive down in Canberra (an archive is a kind of museum of books and papers) that has some of my books. It's called the Lu Rees Archive and has lots and lots of children's books in its collection.

When I'm writing a novel, it usually takes about a year to write. (I am a slow writer.) But shorter books usually don't take that long - but always at least weeks.

It wasn't so hard to FIND the information for the Word Spy - there's a lot of information out there! But it was hard to choose what information to put in the books, and what order to put the information in, and how to make the chapters. All that was pretty hard, but exciting too.

5E and Miss Jeffery - a billion thanks for all these questions and all the thinking that went into them. Keep me up to date with your Word Spying, won't you?

lots and lots of  wry and wriggling, writhing writerly wishes to you all,

THE WORD SPY