It's whiplash time again – that neck-snapping moment when an author is plucked from the privacy of the writing desk and tossed into the spotlight. One day you're working quietly away pretending to be an intestinal worm, the next you're doing interviews and signing autographs and trying to sound intelligent on stage about a book you haven't really thought about for several months.

It's a shock to the system, but I'm not complaining. In fact I'm delighted that Girl Underground is out in the world and I have a chance to tell people about it. This story has been a part of my life since soon after I finished Boy Overboard, my earlier story about two kids from Afghanistan who journey across the planet believing that Australia will offer them a safe place to live and play soccer.

As I travelled Australia after that book was published, talking to readers, listening to their thoughts and feelings about Jamal and Bibi's amazing journey, I realised I wanted to write another story. This one from the perspective of some Australian kids. I started to get to know a couple of characters and soon realised they could be Jamal and Bibi's penfriends. Next thing I knew, my new characters wanted to rescue Jamal and Bibi from their desert detention centre.

One was a character I'd been getting to know in my imagination for some time – a girl with extremely loving and caring criminal parents. The day I decided to make her the main character in Girl Underground, and she made friends at her new school with the son of a federal government minister, I was off and running.

Well, not immediately. I did pause to make a note reminding myself in big letters that the government minister wasn't, of course, an actual real government minister. One of those ones with lawyers. So if you read the book, please don't think he is. Or if you do, please don't tell anyone.

And now, all this time later, Girl Underground is in bookshops and libraries, and even as you read this I'm probably somewhere gabbling into a microphone or struggling to stop my weary signature collapsing into a straight line. I love it all. When you care as much about your characters as I care about Bridget and Menzies and Jamal and Bibi, you'll do anything to encourage readers to get to know them too. Including, as I did recently, sitting at your desk at 5.30 in the morning answering a series of email questions compiled by a fashion assistant at Barbie magazine.

I love it because it's so different to living in the world of a story. And because moments come along that fill you with terror and joy both at once. Such as the one in a theatre recently where I spoke to about 900 readers from about eight schools. It was a long signing afterwards, and as a couple of the very last kids plonked their copies of Girl Underground onto the table and I dragged my weary pen over the title pages, I said 'thanks for being patient, I hope you both enjoy the book.'

'We already did,' they said. 'We read it in the queue.'

Until next time, oo-roo and happy (not too fast) reading.

14 June 2004