By the time I was nine I had lived in Denmark, England and the United States and had just arrived in 1970s Australia.

As one of eight children, home life was pretty crazy and crowded, and I took refuge in books; I have a clear memory of colliding with a lamp post whilst reading. If this hadn’t been so hugely entertaining for observers, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

I joined an acting troupe when I graduated, and toured outback Australia doing educational theatre, and then, after a stint in more ‘serious’ theatre productions, moved into less interesting roles in television – mostly ads. From here it was a relief to escape to the other side of the camera and get involved in making programmes. I moved up the ranks from secretary and assistant, to co-ordinator and then into more creative roles like researching and script editing, which I loved. I learnt that stories are made up of elements that could, to some degree, be crafted. I had a vague notion that I had the imagination to be a writer but I had always been daunted by the mysteries of the craft.

The process of writing my first novel "Tapestry" was enlightening, torturous, enthralling and frustrating, and not necessarily in that order. It took a story that captured my heart as well as my imagination to step onto the rollercoaster ride that finally arrived at a finished novel!

At first, all I knew about "The Ninth Stone" was that it was to be set in and Victorian London and Benares; both places which excited me. The plot crept over me slowly as I researched and built a framework for its characters. The settings I chose in London; the newspaper office; the slums of Devil’s Acre and the embankment of the Thames, were the places I wanted to find characters who would bring the world of the novel to life.

But it was not only through the dingy back alleys of Victorian London that my imagination ran wild. When I first went to India, of all the cities I visited crammed with life and death, the place that haunted me for years afterwards was Benares. Besides being the holiest city of the Hindus and, tangibly, the dwelling place of an entire pantheon of pagan gods, I could easily imagine a time when the crumbling stone palaces that lined the Ganges were inhabited by Indian princes….

I was led to the novel’s themes and sympathies partly by its characters – Lily Korechnya, quite naturally and with no prompting from me, had blue stocking tendencies. Martha Vesper shocked me when she started seeing ghosts. Sarah, the Irish street urchin, was perhaps the only character that arrived fully formed and immediately took over from Lily as the central voice. She led the way through parts of London that Lily would never venture into; the locations for the dark side of the plot. Once the characters each had a purpose, "The Ninth Stone" was underway and I was, to some degree, merely the typist.