My first book, Your Time, My Time, was written after a ten day short writing course in Wells, B.C. with Robin Skelton. It took ten months, and I wrote it on the kitchen table on a manual typewriter, each page typed at least three times, 230 pages in the completed manuscript. I was very surprised when I actually finished it and more than surprised when, after a year, it sold to a publisher. When I write I do a lot of pre-planning and research (many of my books are set in B.C.'s past) and I plan the plot of the story thoroughly before I begin to write. I believe that rewriting is the most important part of writing: revising, checking grammar and spelling, deciding if each word is exactly the right choice or if the characters and plot are believable. That is also the hardest part of writing.I enjoy speaking to readers of all ages, and do a lot of travelling and talking in schools about my books and B.C.'s history. My short stories and articles for adults have appeared in Canadian Living, been heard on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and been printed in journals and magazines around the world.Five of my novels for young readers are set in Barkerville, once a rough and crowded gold rush town, which nestles among pine trees and mountains in the heart of the Cariboo Region. The gold and the miners who sought it are long dead, but the the very air of the restored townsite is thick with history. Modern visitors often feel as if their presence is unwanted --as if the people who once lived in Barkerville are still there, hiding in the shadows, waiting patiently to reclaim their town. All of the people who created British Columbia have left their imprint on our province; from the First Nations people, to the gold miners, to the early settlers who felled trees and built houses in what is now downtown Vancouver. A writer must use imagination, sprinkled like fingerprint power, to raise those faint imprints left from earlier times; to discover who left them, and when and why, and which story needs to be told. The past is there, waiting, in our forests, rivers, mountains and even in the recipes which have been passed down to by those who have lived in this land before us.