I’m a hybrid author and have been scribbling for as long as I can remember.
Apart from blogs and columns, I’ve written both children’s books and stuff for the whole family. Then there’s Out Damned Spot that I wrote when I was angry – it’s not for little eyes.
Hmmm… I hear you thinking, what on earth is a hybrid author? It’s simply somebody who is traditionally published and has also independently published their own books.
Had the most enormous fun writing a column in the Springs Advertiser for over eight years, called A Dog’s Blog. It was life from our SPCA mutt, Fudge’s, point of view. Ran as a real blog until the blog site died (That’s when I realized that it’s rather important to run blogs from your own site.) Only stopped writing it when our darling dog died in 2016. I’ve turned the first couple of years into books, and am slowly (very slowly) doing the rest.
Occasionally I now write blogs from above – just because I can.
Also wrote Sibo’s blog for many years. This was published in the African Reporter and also runs as a real blog (although I’ve been a bit shite about updating it recently). A wide range of topics are covered – baking, making things, recycling, upcycling, empowerment and loads of other useful information. Sibo’s blog won a Ukiyoto global blog award in 2018 and the best blogs were turned into a book.
Currently, there are 16 titles traditionally published in the Sibo series, and a number of other titles independently published on Amazon (check out the tabs above).
Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), I grew up in Malawi and finished my schooling in South Africa. I then worked at a multidisciplinary science centre for many years and ended up running the outreach department, developing resources, making posters and games and telling kids how cool physics was and what you could do with it. My family found this hysterically funny because I’d had “hope abandoned” written on my science report in Form Two in Malawi. Surrounded by experts, I could simply ask anything I didn’t know. This formed the basis of my writing – taking difficult subjects and breaking them down into bite-sized bits of information that kids can easily understand.
However, I do now have a Ph.D. – I married him! You may think it’s a bit odd, an artsy-fartsy writer person hooking up with a physicist – but when somebody once asked Chris about it, he airily replied…
“Oh, I’m used to dealing with complex, chaotic systems.”
But I do still drive my lovely husband nuts with some of my crazy marketing stunts – like volunteering to read Sibo in Space at the Jozi Book Fair…in my hula hoop spaceship!
“But…Gin,” he stared at me, gobsmacked, when I told him what I’d done, “reading stories is a quiet thing. Are you crazy? The kids will only notice the bobbing hula hoop.”
As other authors will testify, writing a book and having it published is the easy part. It’s the marketing that never ends.
We currently live in Pretoria in a huge old rambling house with gajillions of family members, including my ninety-year-old mother, and our four-year-old grandson, Rollo, who’s been diagnosed with ASD.
When I’m not writing, I’m partial to hula-hooping and adore pottering around in the garden, as well as making stuff out of trash and cement.
Three dogs, a hooligan cat and four fish complete our circus.
