You’ll find details about booking a school or festival visit, a link to my biography, a signpost to learning resources, and a few other things every author website should have, including a bit of boasting. In fact, now I’m spruiking, there’s a fair bit of other stuff on the way down. Ideas, anecdotes, insights, confessions, aspirations and regrets, all artistically displayed with sensible lighting.

If you’re here for a peek at my life and creative habits, there’s plenty of that too. You can read the first chapters, (including of Digging Up Dad), and listen to them on audio, and also check out how and why I wrote each story. My books are all down there somewhere, neatly arranged and keen to be explored. Just in case you're still feeling nervous, please be reassured that no swimming-pool swamp weed, flared stretch leotards, federal politicians, nervous speed bumps, giant sloths, lumps of toe fluff, rugby-playing wheelie bins, real estate agents' teeth, scary removalist trucks, very naughty year six dance and drama groups or bouncy bouncy settees were hurt in the writing of this book.Īfter your visit to the Digging Up Dad book page, where you can also read an entire story from the collection, you might feel like more of a look around. You may mostly have heard the word Hopeful being used by stern bossy people saying things like, 'I'm hopeful we won't have to jail you,' but that's not the sort of Hopeful these stories are about. Before you do, though, please don't panic.

To find out why Hopeful is in the title this time, have a peek at the Digging Up Dad book page. You may already have spotted the H-word in the title, a word that describes all my short stories, but one I haven't used on a cover before. The stories in Digging Up Dad are of a similar type to the ones in my other collections, but this time I've highlighted one aspect of them a little more. And of course short stories fill a book with more laughs, thrills and tears per page than would be possible for characters in a novel, who quite reasonably need meal breaks and rostered days off. There's nothing like short stories to recharge the batteries with creative energy of the most renewable kind, and set an author up for the next novel. I've done this before with my other story collections, Give Peas A Chance, Pizza Cake, and Snot Chocolate. It's a collection of short stories I've been working on for the last year or so - as a kind of refresher course for the imagination after the long and exhausting (but I'm not complaining) process of writing a novel. Digging Up Dad and Other Hopeful (And Funny) Stories was published in Australia and NZ on 18 October, and in the UK and other book-loving countries as quickly I hope as the majestic but sometimes slow-moving wheels of the publishing industry will allow. I'm delighted to greet you with my favourite kind of news – a new book.

Once then and now books