BLOGGING IS CURRENTLY SUSPENDED DUE TO IT'S TOO HOT. I SHALL BE BACK WHEN THE TEMPERATURE DROPS BELOW 30, BUT AT PRESENT IT'S ALL I CAN DO TO WRITE!!

Do visit awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com where a lot of other children's authors blog, and where I shall be posting regularly from now on, especially on 10TH JULY when we shall be having an on-line party to celebrate the blog's first birthday, with activities, guest postings, and a prize draw!!

I didn’t mean to write Saving Rafael. I didn’t want to write about Nazi Germany at all any longer, because actually it’s rather painful, if you’re half German, to write about that era, when people of your mother’s country did such terrible things.

It crept up on me. I suggested an exercise to my adult education creative writing students one day. It seemed like a really good idea. Imagine you’re in prison. Write about how you got there. It didn’t go down well with them, and most of them chose the alternatives I’d suggested. But then I thought: yes, I’d quite like to try this myself.

So who would I choose to write about? I thought of a girl, a teenager, in a girl’s concentration camp in Nazi Germany. And how did she get there? Because she’d been hiding a friend – no, a lover, who was a Jew. Only – I hadn’t wanted to write about Nazi Germany, had I? I was between novels anyway, though I had a quite different idea of what I’d do next. I told myself I’d just try a chapter.

I knew there had been youth concentration camps, so I went on the web and found a site dealing with the girls’ concentration camp at Uckermarck. Then I started writing. The ideas just spilled out, and by the end of a morning I had the introduction, much as it is now. The marionettes came in because for ages I’d had the idea of writing about a marionette-maker’s daughter. I’ve no idea why, it just appealed to me. But it was so grim, writing about that horrible place, that by the end of the morning I was in tears. So I told myself: No. I’m not doing it.

I went to bed feeling cheerful about the decision I’d taken. And then, the next morning I woke up and Jenny was talking to me. I was already thinking about her background, her family – I knew I was going to have to do this novel.