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I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.

I wrote a few children's books... not on purpose.

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

I'd always been around kids, and when you don't have kids, you have a lot more time to do things. Before I had kids, I was a lot more prolific and wrote books a lot faster.

It was the case for a number of years that I was doing a book a year, but that was back when I was part-time teaching - and since 1991, I've been a parent, so that cuts into the time!

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.

I've written something like 17 novels, which isn't bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I'm lazy.

I can always track my career by the children - I started writing right after the 14-year-old was born, and sold my first book just in time to pay for the birth of the 12-year-old.

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.