Paradise Gold

In Paradise Palace the Grennan family won a brand-new home on Paradise Coast now read the sequel. Paradise Palace is on the Paradise Coast sun, surf, and beginning of a whole new story for Roland! Young Roland found that starting anew was not all he hoped for, but now he has found new friends. Even the bullies don't faze Roland any more. But one day Laurie and Gabrielle, Roland's mum and dad, tell Izzy, talia and Roland that they may have to sell their new home - they can't pay all the bills and they still have to eat! Roland decides to enter a competition to make a video showing Why Paradise is the Best Place in the World" Roland gets his video in just on time and, although it doesn't win the prize of a pot of gold, there is a wonderful surprise in store for all the family...Ages 9+

I've wanted to be a writer for so long that sometimes it still takes me by surprise to realise that I am. I was brought up with my mother reading bedtime stories every night and my father telling long involved fables about our dog's Great Great Great Grandfather, who had travelled wherever we went and invented everything that we happened to see along the way. Travelling seems to have been a constant in my childhood, as Dad was in the Canadian air force and we not only moved frequently, but explored widely from each successive home. If there was one significant moment, though, in my decision to write, it would be the night shortly before my seventh birthday when my parents left two Dick and Jane readers by my bed. I was an English-speaking child growing up in France, learning to read and write in French, and I've never forgotten the thrill of picking up these books and realising that I could read in my own language. Once I'd learned that I could have power over words on a page, the step of wanting to create those words followed naturally. Like reading, writing is an act of discovery. My stories start as a vague idea ' a large, foggy lump ' and layers are gradually stripped away until I wake up one morning and realise what a character's name is, what they look like, or the way they see the world. Apart from very minor characters or incidents, I rarely feel that I've decided what a person will be like or exactly how they - and the plot - will get to where they're going. It's more like getting to know a friend: hearing snippets of their life, meeting their family, discovering what makes them tick' At this stage of a story I feel as if I'm walking around with radar detectors for anything that will give me a clue into what's going to happen and how or why. It's alternately the most exciting and the most frustrating stage, because I'm impatient to jump into this thing that's constantly bubbling in my mind ' but I can't actually start writing until I've got a fairly firm idea of the characters and the general shape of the story. And sadly, I know that this pure shining shape floating in my head will never be the same once I actually start trying to capture it with words. Once I start, the discovery continues. Each sentence, no matter how right it seems when I write it, will be whittled away, reorganised or thrown out, as each draft of the story tries to come a little closer to that original idea. Finally, usually around the seventh draft, when I read it through I think that it's nearly there. Just to make sure, I read it once more - and realise it's so bad that the only possible thing to do is burn it. Luckily by then it's usually been discussed or seen by a publisher, so I quickly shove it in an envelope and get it safely out of the house. People ask where I get my ideas from: are characters drawn from real people, or my stories taken from real life? Ideas, it seems to me, float constantly in the world around us, in everything we do, see and hear. Of