Meet Lindsay
Lindsay is the author of Darwin’s Dragons, The Call of the Titanic, and many other children’s books. After working for over 20 years as a teacher, Lindsay is now a full-time writer.
Lindsay is available for event bookings. Whether you’re a school looking for a visiting author, or a book festival looking for a speaker – Lindsay would love to hear from you.
I’m a full time author of five novels for older children – The Great Phoenix of London, Call of The Titanic, My Friend The Octopus, Darwin’s Dragons, The Secret Deep, and five books for emerging and newly fluent readers, Professor Snagglewit’s Diary of Magical Creatures, Greek Sports, Magnet Man and Me, Lily Parr Scores and Red Planet Rescue.
I live on the south coast of England because I love the sea and swim in it all year round.
Fun facts:
I’m an advanced qualified scuba diver, and have dived inside a cave in the dark at night, inside a shipwreck filled with poisonous lionfish, and been surprised by a leopard shark up close.
I was cabin crew on a cross channel ferry as a student which meant I was sea safety trained and had to launch a life raft into an English channel harbour.
I love to swim in the sea all year round without a wetsuit.
I have taught children from 4 to 14, specialising in science for the last 10 years of my teaching career.
The first stories I remember were Greek myths retold by my Dad on Sunday mornings. I don’t think those stories were accurate to their sources, as a mysterious hero named Lindsay would often crop up!
I always loved books featuring animals as a younger child such as The Animals of Farthing Wood, but as I grew older I loved the mysterious, dark and mythical, and Susan Cooper was a favourite. I also devoured ghost story anthologies.
My agent is Clare Wallace at Darley Anderson. My publisher for my middle grade novels is Chicken House Books and for my reading scheme books, Harper Collins.
My agent and publishers
I have been writing since November 2012 when I suddenly had an idea for a story set underwater.
I thought if I tried to write a page a day, I might have a book in a year, and could be proud of that achievement. I had a very old laptop, a school exercise book and I wrote at the kitchen worktop. I found I loved to write. 3 months later I had a book, it then took 9 months to edit those words enough for someone to read them. I’d enjoyed the process so much, I decided to try to get published – and 6 years after I first finished it, The Secret Deep was published by Chicken House Books.
My office is now my favourite place to write and where I do most of my work. I write on a Macbook with an extra monitor, in Microsoft Word, but always have a notebook nearby for jottings and research ideas as I go along.
I love the beginning and the end of writing a book. The beginning, where I’m exploring ideas, planning and researching, and the end where I’m polishing the words.
Writing a first draft is exciting, as I get to know my characters and there’s a surprise around every corner, but it also feels frustrating too as my words don’t come out how I want them to until I edit them. I try to get the first draft finished as quickly as I can, but if I write more than 1500 words in a day, my brain is too frazzled to write much at all the next day. So I generally stop before that!
“Oodles of charm and adventure.”
— Irish Independent on My Friend the Octopus