When I was five years old, I convinced myself I could fly.

It was 1998, my grandpa had some old concrete pipes on his farm, and one day while playing near them, I had a sudden powerful belief that if I jumped off them, I would fly.

I jumped off. I didn’t fly … yet.

But I was airborne for a second, and in my five-year-old mind, that meant it was achievable. At home, I tied together three plastic bags with a piece of wool from Steiner kinder. This was to be my parachute, in case I didn’t get the hang of flying straight away. I put my arms through the parachute straps (more Steiner wool), climbed as far up the cubby-house ladder as I dared — about halfway — and jumped.

Becoming a writer was kind of like that, too.

It was a goal I set when I was too young to know it was unrealistic. I launched tons of prototypes, and crashed them all — many times, in some cases, and often painfully. And I pursued it with such earnest, stubborn focus that I took all scepticism not as sensible warnings, but as foolishness I hadn’t disproven yet. I wrote two manuscripts before Grandest, which were rejected by agents and publishers about 45 times altogether.

Fortunately for my poor little feet, flying lost its gleam after a month or so without progress — but writing never has.

I’ve loved words and books since I was a baby. I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was three years old, but I didn’t know writing was an actual job, so I said I wanted to ‘work in a shop surrounded by books that I have written.’ Before I knew how to read, I would ask my parents and relatives to read the same books to me until I memorised them and could recite them to myself. One of the first things I ever ‘wrote’ wasn’t written at all: it was a one-child play about the untimely demise of my pet chicken, which I solemnly performed with a silk scarf on the back porch.

We moved to the Mornington Peninsula when I was seven, where we had more space, more pets, and when my brother was born, more siblings. I started writing in my free time in Grade Three. By the end of Grade Five, I was writing about ghosts, time travel, monsters and body-swapping on Windows 98 in my dad’s freezing study every night. As a teenager on the school bus, I wore the letters off the keys of my school laptop writing stories about crab aliens, dark sorcery and interdimensional travel. And of course, I went to Writers’ Club every week, where students gave each other feedback on their work in lunchtime sessions (a great way to get used to editorial feedback early in your career!).

I wrote the middle-school play, The Glass Street Ghost, when I was in VCE. That production was the first time I witnessed the impact of one of my stories. It seemed like a miracle that other people could understand and enjoy something that had once existed only in my head — and I still get that magical feeling whenever people talk about my books.