What is your book all about? How to Catch a Mermaid is about a group of kids trying to catch a mermaid! Each trap is more extravagant than the last, but in the end it is the mermaid who saves them! We went through a number of drafts to get to the final story, and really wanted it to be the mermaid who helped the kids, to create a point of difference from the other How to Catch stories.
What inspired you to write the book? This book is part of a series I was doing, the How to Catch series, that already included books such as How to Catch a Leprechaun and How to Catch the Easter Bunny. It was at the suggestion of the publisher that we do How to Catch a Mermaid and I was all over that, I love mermaids! We had built up a nice formula and structure in the previous books, so we followed on from that with little tweaks.
What is your target audience for the book? It’s aimed at kids from round about 3-7, but what we have found with these books is that they go really well with teachers and schools. This is mainly because we really tried to install a STEAM element into the books, and I was actually just looking at a photo a teacher had posted about her students building their own traps to try and catch a Leprechaun!
One funny moment was a school that had got the kids to build traps, I think for the Tooth Fairy, one of the other How to Catch books. Some of them didn’t like that idea, and decided to build castles to protect the character from the traps!
What do you hope readers could get out from your book? Firstly, a super fun time! It was so fun writing a rhyming book that escalated on each page, with the traps. Also, the illustrations by Andy Elkerton are SO amazing and bright and he adds little bits that aren’t in the text, that really create a world for kids to dive into.
Secondly, a love of books and reading, and thirdly, as I mentioned above with teachers going further, a deep dive into STEAM and the opportunities for fun, experimentation and design that lie there.
What are your future goals/plans for the book? To keep doing what it’s doing! Entertaining and inspiring kids all around the world. It has been out for a few years now and has really gathered some great momentum, so for that to keep going and to have the book entertain and inspire kids for years to come would be an amazing result! It was a really cool experience working on this book, and to see it still out and available after all this time is brilliant, as some books can have quite a short shelf life. It has gone so well and been so well received already, everything from here on in is a bonus!
And something more about yourself. There isn’t much to tell! I love writing, and get to do it every single day. I have been fortunate enough and have worked hard enough to get to a position where I can do this amazing creative pursuit as a career, and I will be forever grateful for that and the opportunities it has presented me, to do things like writing this book and doing this interview! Aside from that, I love drawing as well, playing golf (I have a mini-golf course in my backyard), going to live music (now that our lockdowns are over!) and taking afternoon naps on my couch!
