I often have people ask me why I write young adult fiction. I tell them it’s because I enjoy reading it, which inevitably leads to the question of why I read it.

I blame my daughter for getting me back into young adult books. From about the age of ten she’d read a book and give it to me, telling me I had to read it. That it was amazing. Since I’d done the same to her so many times, particularly with books I’ve kept from my childhood, I thought it only fair I tried her recommendations. Some of them were good, but some had far too many horses in them for my liking. As she grew older the books she gave me to read kept getting better and better. Soon I was looking for young adult books myself and telling her when there was one she needed to read. I also shared them with my boys. I enjoyed them so much I returned to writing young adult fiction.

It didn’t take me long to remember how much I had previously enjoyed writing young adult stories, back when I was a young adult. So I hunted through some of my old ideas from my teenage years. There were so many of them I wanted to write and that caused even more ideas to form.

I still read adult fiction, but I have a lot of favourites amongst books written for young adults. Both ones I read when I was a teen and ones I’ve read recently.