Hello, it’s me. Yes indeed, I am alive. I just haven’t posted here in a long time because I’ve been writing. Which is a good thing.

The thing that I have been writing is a middle-grade novel, which is also a good thing. And hopefully a good book. It is approximately two years overdue, which is a less good thing, and also why I have not been posting here.

Because when your long-suffering publisher is patiently waiting for you to deliver a long-overdue book, it feels odd to be spending time rambling in a bloggy way. However, I am back to bloggy-rambling because my publisher is no longer suffering, at least not at my hands. This is for two reasons:

i) Long-overdue book is now done!

ii) In the process of working on long-overdue book, I got an idea for another book and that book is about to be published!

Well, you ask – and well you may ask – how does that work? That I’ve somehow been through the entire writing and publishing process on that book while still failing to finish the first one?

My friends, let us not go there. Or if we do go there, let us perhaps just marvel at how quickly I wrote the second! I am speed-writer, hear me roar.

Or indeed, hear me quack.

Because, yes – this is another book about a duck. Because one can never have too many of those.

In order to tell you a little about this book, I must first tell you a little about long-overdue book, which has the working title Catch A Falling Star and is a middle-grade novel set in 1979, against the backdrop of the US space station Skylab falling uncontrollably out of orbit.

I did a lot of research for this book. So much research. Too much research.

Did I mention it is long overdue? It is possible I love the rabbit hole of research a little too much.

In any case, in the course of said excessive research, I came across the following article:

Whereupon it occurred to me how ridiculous the word ‘duck’ was in this context, and shortly after that, how ripe the duck/duck homonyms are with comedic potential.

And so I sat at the microfiche in the State Library, jotting down notes for a picture book. A picture book which somehow went on to be written, illustrated, designed, and printed while the Skylab book remained a work-in-very-slow-progress.

I’ll have more to say about this picture book very soon. In fact, I’ll be running around the place yelling DUCK! DUCK! very loudly, because that’s exactly the kind of book it is and how could I possibly resist?

But for now, I am thrilled to simply say that my brand-new picture book, simply and gloriously entitled DUCK! and illustrated by Nathaniel Eckstrom, will be out in July with Walker Books. It has been described as a delightfully duckish tale of farmyard disaster and is going to be heaps of fun to share with kids; I can hardly wait for Book Week!