The Elevator Version/ ‘About the Author’~

Yvette Carol’s enduring fascination with fantasy fiction for children inspired her debut novel, ‘The Or’in of Tane Mahuta’, the first volume in the trilogy, The Chronicles of Aden Weaver. An ex-freelance journalist, Yvette has a short story soon to be released in the children’s anthology, Kissed by an Angel, and she had an article published in 2014’s book, The Insecure Writer’s Support Group Guide to Publishing and Beyond. She lives with her family in New Zealand.

In 1962, my parents emigrated from England to New Zealand with my two elder sisters. I was born in 1964, my brother two years later. We were raised Catholic. As a child, Mum tells me, I had a vivid

imagination. I remember I never felt alone.

The curtains in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother displayed a variety of animals and toys. A favourite game was to take turns with my brother, to pick an image from the curtains and make up a story. The author Lee Child said, "We are not story showers, we’re story tellers." I relate to

that primarily because I know that’s how I started out. Before I knew how to write, as a three-year-old, I started out telling stories to my brother.

From the age of seven, I could read and write. In class each time the teacher asked us to write a story, I remember being gripped with a spirit of joy. In the absolutely powerless world of the child, I had

something I was good at.

Barefoot days

Growing up, I was a tomboy. I spent my days outdoors, barefoot - there was a sense of limitlessness then. That state is what I crave to return to in my books.

We kids spent half the year exploring the forest and backyards. We played Bulrush, cowboys and Indians, raided the old orchard for peaches. We picnicked in the bush and rode our bikes. The other

half of the year, we spent in the Coromandel. We camped and fished with dad off the beach. We explored the mountain and raced down vertical hillsides on cardboard. We made tunnels and caves in

the waist-high bracken.   

Back at home in the city, if it was really stormy - unbeknown to my parents - I would let myself out the bedroom window and run around outside in the rain. This is the true story behind one of my earliest hand-written hand-drawn "books", which I wrote in my late teens, The Unsightly Wet

Nightie. But that’s the way things were when I was young. We were wild and carefree and I always felt safe.

Teenage rebel

When I entered high school, I started hanging with a new group of friends and the years of teenage rebellion began. At sixteen-years-old, I left school with U.E accredited and pregnant with my first

child. For the first three years of my son’s life, I studied fashion design part time. I worked a number of jobs. I worked in a café, as a bartender, a cleaner, a phone salesperson and a shop assistant. I studied photography, art and writing part-time. And in my spare time, I wrote short stories and

children’s stories. The short stories were often forced but the children’s stories came naturally. That was when I began to feel the pleasure of storytelling I’d had from when I was little start to return.

I began to develop characters along mythical storylines, The Survivors, and The Great Adventures of Splat the Wonder Dog, I spent years illustrating them by hand. Every time I showed them to a

publisher, I was told the same thing, ‘fantasy doesn’t sell’, ‘there’s no market for fantasy’.

Conforming

In 1983 after attending a live band, I wrote about the show, and the article appeared in the Auckland University newspaper, Bifim.  Later, I landed my first job as a freelance journalist for the Inner City News. During the rest of that decade, I wrote articles, interviews and even restaurant reviews for all

the inner city papers, the City of Sails, the Harbour News, the Sunday News and Fifty Plus. But it was the feature articles I enjoyed writing the most. These were published in Auckland’s Metro Magazine. I

enjoyed them because they were the most like telling story.

Motherhood 

In those years, I worked full-time as a nanny. I took on the daily care of my nephew from the time he was three weeks old to the age of seven years. This helped me to stay in touch with my target audience and with what children were reading. I married again in my mid-thirties and had two

children with my second husband. Our first child, a boy, was born with Down Syndrome. Our second child together and my third son was born with a hole in his heart. He had open heart surgery at the tender age of five and made a full recovery. After ten years together, my husband and I separated. I

became a single parent again. My youngest sons and I live together.

I like to share stories with my youngest boys. They’re avid readers and reading together is part of our daily ritual. My youngest son wrote me a Mother’s Day poem this year that said, “I like it when mum

reads me stories.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I think it’s with the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, whom I feel the greatest kinship. Of him, his close school friend said, Hawthorne lived 'in a mysterious world

of imagination which he never permits me to enter'. Upon graduation, Hawthorne retreated to his home in Salem to become a writer. He spent a full twelve years in solitude writing. Like Hawthorne, I

spent most of my twenties and early thirties at home with my parents, in seclusion writing. All I wanted to do was to write and to keep learning the craft. I have been very fortunate to have had the

family I have.

Why do I Write for Children?

As the inimitable Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne put it so eloquently in 1853, “Children are now the only representatives of the men and women of that happy era (the golden age) and therefore it is that we must raise the intellect and fancy to the level of childhood, in order to recreate the original myths.”

I hope that one day someone will say of my book(s) what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said of Hawthorne’s Twice-told Tales... “Live ever, sweet, sweet book.”

Work-in-Progress

At present, I’m writing two short stories for Chicken Soup anthologies, as well as a short story for an anthology with the online group, Writing for Children, with all profits to go to the Sturge-Weber Foundation. Once these stories are finished and submitted, I can go back to my first love, the real

work-in-progress, ‘The Or’in of Tane Mahuta’, my first book which I intend to publish at the end of the year. When the book is ready for launch, I’ll announce it here with a new slide-share, and on my

blog at http://www.yvettecarol.blogspot.com as well as a blurb on my ‘News Flash’ page on my website http://www.yvettecarol.com

Yvette K. Carol

To live a creative life we must first lose the fear of being wrong. ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce