Vanessa was a daydreaming child whose nose was permanently stuck in a book. Now, she is a keen writer of stories for children, and has been published by Upstart Press, Duck Creek Press, Oratia, Sunshine Books and Learning Media. She was a finalist in the 2023 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, and has also been shortlisted for both the Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon and Storylines Joy Cowley awards. She holds qualifications in Writing for Children, and Library and Information services. She currently works as a primary school librarian and volunteers on both the School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (SLANZA) Tāmaki Makaurau committee, and Storylines Children’s Literature Charitable Trust of New Zealand Hui committee. What is your writing day like? When and how do you create? Confession… I am an amazing procrastinator and timewaster! I am not a writer who is up early, knocking out thousands of words every day before breakfast. I work in a school, and I always ...

What is your writing day like?  When and how do you create ? My days tend to very eclectic because I have a very fragmented life! I usually get up around 5am, do half an hour of yoga, then get started with a pot of tea on hand. At the moment, I am studying, working a part-time job, contracting as a freelance writer and editor, and writing my own books. Plus, I have two kids (out of four) still at home and my mum living with me temporarily. And I volunteer in a couple of places. Hence the fragmentation.  I spend a lot of time trying to pull my mind into one place (and make it stay there), so when I’m working on something creative, I find it best to try and do that in the morning. Once I’ve arrived at writing, I find it easy to stay there, because I enjoy it immensely, and then it stays with me too, throughout my day.  Where do your best ideas come from? How do you develop them further? My ideas tend to arrive of their own accord, like shards of something sparkly and promis...

Sherryl Clark shares the unexpected publication journey of her new picture book. “The Night Tiger” is a picture book. With a long story behind it. Not a story about the writing, but about what can happen when you least expect it. Originally, “The Night Tiger” was accepted by Allen & Unwin in 2015 and a lovely, eccentric, talented illustrator was chosen and accepted the job. We had several meetings with him (which is often unusual - I have other picture books where I have never met the illustrator) and discussions about the text, and working on it a little more. I saw roughs, then I saw two or three completed page spreads. They were beautiful. Then … nothing really. A few more roughs. Eventually, after several years or more, I was emailed some files of ideas for the other pages. Then nothing. The publishers really tried, but the illustrator was somehow stuck, and was doing other work to earn a living. I tried to be patient, but gradually I lost hope. It became the picture book tha...

What is your illustrating day like? When and how do you create?  It really depends on what’s on my desk! For example, I’m currently illustrating a book for CSIRO Publishing in Australia, which is taking up a lot of my creative energy. In reality, I’m a bit of a "calendar blocker." I map out my week to cover every corner of my business - from children’s books and surface pattern design to admin, marketing, and running my online course and community. They all require a substantial amount of time, so staying organised ensures I don’t miss a beat. When it’s time to actually illustrate, I have a little ritual. I put on a podcast, an audiobook, or some music to "get in the zone." Once the audio starts, the rest of the world fades away, and I can just focus on the drawing! Where do your best ideas come from? How does surface pattern-creating evolve to children’s picture books and vice versa?  My ideas usually sprout from everyday life. So a walk in nature or the hilarious ...

Firstly, to clarify, middle grade fiction in the US tends to be for 8-12 year olds, what we in NZ would say is upper primary grades, and/or lower intermediate. It’s more wide-ranging than we think from that age span. Check out the books that win the Newbery Award as a starting point.  A couple of years ago (2024), it seemed like the big news in the US was the downturn in middle grade fiction. It came up again in 2025, and I’ve heard similar things for 2026. So what might be going on here? Firstly, I went back to articles from 2024, such as this one - https://fromthemixedupfiles.com/the-middle-grade-slump/ - that talked about the big slump in sales. MG was down by 10%, and that was after slowing sales in previous years. However, some ‘experts’ said it was just sales returning to pre-pandemic levels. Was that actually true? Because along with the slump in sales came more book challenges in schools, MG books that were longer and therefore either less appealing to poorer readers or th...

  October is always an exciting time of the year with lots of artistic initiatives taking place around us, awards submissions opening here and there and Halloween looming up on the horizon. So, coming mid-September, I was genuinely hopeful and since I had just delivered the full storyboard for Miles and Jones #4 , I felt like I had plenty of time ahead to work on personal projects before starting the final pages.  I looked at the SCBWI Artober Prompts and started to draft a story based on those. This quickly morphed into a storyboard and soon I had a ten to twelve pages of a short comic story based on these prompts. I was really excited and then I realized that there was a 2 weeks school holiday in October and that we booked a bach at the beach for a week. I had also promised family that we would visit them, time suddenly shrank. I also discovered that a US literary agent specialising in comic books, was launching a 6 week-long marketing course on how to launch your graphic no...