FOR KIDS

I love to write poems and short stories for kids. They can be a lot more fun than stories and poems for grown-ups!

Over the years I've written stories about a magical circus, a talking cat called Barry, a ghost goldfish, invading aliens who think the school is the Global Parliament, and many more. Lots of them have been published in the School Magazine, and others are in anthologies like Stories for Seven Year Olds and Stories for Nine Year Olds.

And now I have a book just for kids, called The Girl in the Mirror. It's an adventure novel based on a short story published in the School Magazine Touchdown edition way back in 2005. Two girls who sleep in the same bedroom more than a hundred years apart discover that they can talk to one another through the mirror hanging on the wall. That's lucky, because an evil spidery force is threatening 1890s girl Clarissa's mother and thoroughly modern Maddie's baby brother, and the only help they're going to get is from one another – and the ghost of Clarissa's dead brother Bertie. Read more about The Girl in the Mirror.

Poems are great because they're short, but they pack a lot into a small space. Lots of my poems have been published in the School Magazine, too, mostly about cats, but there's a Viking and a flock of chickens as well (not in the same poem!) In fact, the Viking poem (called "Viking") was originally published in the kids' pages of the Sunday Herald when I was 12! I've been writing poetry for a long time, though I took a break for a while.

I write a lot about cats because my cat is SO furry and SO silly. He's always doing something for me to turn into a poem. Sometimes I call him my Muse ("Mews", get it?) That's him asleep sideways at the top of the page. And because there are never enough cat photos on the internet, here are a couple more:

Yes, he is lying on the ironing board. On top of something waiting to be ironed. My favourite top, to be precise.

Twelve of my cat poems are collected in my little book THE DUTIES OF A CAT, which has beautiful black and white line drawings as well (by a real artist, not by me, which you should be very happy about.) You can read more about it HERE, if you want.

Here's one of my favourite poems from THE DUTIES OF A CAT, which has been printed in the School Magazine:

Soft silk sack
 
Cat puddles
against the floor
his body flat as milk.
 
He sleeps as if
the world's supplies of dreams
were running out.
 
Now on my lap
a soft silk sack of bones
turns, warm, against my thigh.

And a whole lot more poems are in my new collection, THE LOYALTY OF CHICKENS – which is not ALL about chickens. In fact, there's only one chicken poem. Not enough! We need more chicken poems! But there are dogs, and koalas, and pterodactyls, and griffins, and crocodiles, and... Well, you get the picture. You can read more about it HERE.

Here's a tiny poem from the new book, which was published in the School Magazine a few years ago:

Game of Cat and Dragon
 
The white cat coils at my feet
like an albino dragon –
smaller than most, perhaps,
and furrier,
but sharp enough of tooth
and admirably clawed.

Even more poems are in The Alpaca Cantos, which is suitable for people around 14 or 15 years and up.