I have to admit I've been putting off writing this particular G'day. You know, procrastinating a bit. Finding little jobs to do instead. Cleaning the bathroom. Sweeping the yard. Arranging everything in the fridge in alphabetical order.

It's not that I don't want to stay in touch, I do. It's just that in my last G'day I said I'd tell you more about the story of Deadly, the new six-part story I'm writing at the moment with Paul Jennings. We finished the first draft before Christmas and last week we got back to work revising and tightening and fiddling and expanding and rewriting and clarifying and improving and tweaking and panel beating – all the things you have to do to a first draft to turn it into a finished story. We'll be doing this for another couple of months probably.

The first thing I did after New Year was sit down and read the whole first draft through, and that's when I realised I shouldn't have made any offers to give you a sneak preview of the story. The thing is, Deadly is a mystery. It starts off with two kids, Sprocket and Amy, who are experiencing a lot of strange things. Missing family members. Kidnappings. Mysterious memory-loss. They don't know who is doing these things to them, they don't know why. Gradually, bit-by-bit, through the story, they find out. But they have to go through some pretty unusual adventures to get the information they need.

The whole point of writing the story is so that you can go through these adventures with Sprocket and Amy and find out what's going on at the same time as they do. If I tell you now, even give you a hint, it'll spoil the excitement of the story later. Plus Paul Jennings will come round to my place and staple all my biros together.

So I'm sorry, that's all I can tell you about the story of Deadly. Instead though, I can tell you what I did in my holidays. First I have to explain that writers never really have holidays. Well, I don't. Even when I'm taking a break from writing a book, I'm usually thinking about the next one. I try not to, but it happens anyway.

So this year I decided to go with it. After Deadly, I'm planning a book about a kid who helps his folks run a very unusual country motel. I don't know much about country motels, so these holidays me and my partner Mary-Anne went and stayed in a few. I'm also looking for a country town to set the story in, so we stayed in a few different Victorian country towns. Queenscliff. Fish Creek. Walkerville. Mount Macedon.

All really nice places, but unfortunately none of them turned out to be exactly right for the book. I'll probably have to stay in quite a few more places before I find the right town and the right motel. In different parts of the country, probably. Ho-hum, it's tough work, but somebody's got to do it. I'll let you know how I go.

For now, though, it's back to Deadly for me. Until next time, oo-roo and happy reading.

26 January 2000