Not metaphorically. Literally.
Sharyn Nilsen grew up in outback Australia. At ten years old she had a golden blonde ponytail, blue-grey eyes, and a tendency toward dramatic overreaction that her family found both exhausting and occasionally impressive.
She was also an avid reader from a very young age. Far off worlds and school girl heroines. Secret adventures and impossible places. The kind of books that made a vivid and active imagination not just possible but inevitable.
She actually ran away to her grandma's once. Got caught. Brought back before the adventure really started.
She lost her father when she was eleven. And for years afterwards, longer than she'd like to admit, she quietly imagined he wasn't really gone. That he was out there somewhere. Doing something important. Something secret. Something that meant he couldn't come home yet but would, one day, when it was safe.
Her little sister had red hair, pigtails, and the cutest freckles you have ever seen in your entire life. A temper of legendary proportions. Always in trouble. Almost always forgiven. She barrelled into every room like she owned it, and somehow, by the time the chaos settled, everyone was smiling.
Her mum worked hard to raise her girls well. The house was always warm, with food on the table and friends and family always welcome. And she tolerated her daughters' tantrums and legendary tempers with a patience that occasionally, if you looked closely, contained just a hint of amusement.
Sharyn didn't always appreciate that at the time. She does now.
There were cousins and friends too, both real and imaginary, who have found their way into these pages in ways Sharyn is only just beginning to notice.
Sharyn didn't construct these characters. She remembered them.
For decades, Sharyn has been wandering. Ancient cities built on secrets older than memory. Landscapes and cultures and foods and music that don't exist on any tourist map but feel, somehow, like places you've always known. The kind of places that make you believe, completely and without reservation, that another world is entirely possible.
She has stood where the spices are piled in mountains and a man with an impossible moustache pours tea from a height that defies explanation. She has walked through tunnels carved with symbols she couldn't read. She has eaten things she had no name for that made her tastebuds dance. She has felt that particular electricity in the air that comes from being somewhere ancient, somewhere layered, somewhere that knows far more than it's telling.
Every world in these books begins somewhere real. The details are observed. The wonder is genuine. The sense that something extraordinary is just around the corner, if you only knew which corner to turn, is something Sharyn has felt personally, throughout her travels across continents.
She has been collecting the ingredients for these stories her whole life. She just didn't know it yet.
About ten years ago, sitting in a café in Vietnam, Sharyn started writing a children's book.
She got close. Really close. Life got in the way, the way it tends to. She set the manuscript down.
She didn't forget it.
A recent stint in hospital had a way of clarifying things. Unfinished business has a way of making itself known. Back in Saigon, back in the same café, she picked it up again. Second draft. A much clearer sense of what the book needed to be and absolutely no intention of setting it down again.
The result is Penelope Pickles and the Magic Backpack, Book One: The Stone of Cryon.
It is dedicated, quietly, to the father she never really lost. To the mum who kept the lights on, the house warm, and her girls loved through everything. To the little girl with the red hair who made everything louder, warmer and considerably more interesting. And to her husband Tim, who shares her love of adventure, wanders the world beside her, and has never once suggested that writing a children's book was anything other than an excellent idea.
Sharyn loves visiting schools. In person and virtually. She talks about the book, the writing process, running away to grandma's as a child, and why a ten-year-old girl from outback Australia makes the perfect hero for a story set in another world entirely.
She also talks, carefully and warmly, about losing a parent young. About the stories we tell ourselves to make the unbearable survivable. And about why those stories sometimes turn into books.