I began writing this book when I was 21 years old. I was encouraged to start by my first husband, Daron Robinson; I suspect he wanted me out of his way and having me busy with a book was a convenient way of doing it. A friend of ours, Kevin Slade, insisted that if I was going to write I would need a computer and a word processor.

So I ended up with a Commodore 64 and I can’t remember the name of the Word Processing program, boy that really ages me! The program was awful; it had no descenders, so when it printed out the g’s, y’s, p’s, and q’s, were all above the line. It was incredibly messy and unprofessional looking.

The computer had a bad habit of not saving, even when you tried three or four times to save your work. I lost chapter four so many times, I just about tore my hair out, but I ended up rewriting and polishing that chapter so many times that it was just about perfect, and then I never used it!

As I continued to work on the story the computers improved and so did the word processing programs. My first marriage ended and I married my second husband. My sister in law Kathryn Sutherland (second husband’s sister) contributed a computer and a better word processing program. It was very comforting to have something reliable to work with at long last.

Even though the story wasn’t finished, I was encouraged to submit what I had done to publishers and agents. A couple of reactions were worth mentioning. Many wanted money to review it. I paid one person to do it, in the understanding that they would help me find a publisher afterwards. I do not recommend that anyone does this. I ended up getting my money refunded. The review was useless and the publisher to whom I was recommended was a vanity publisher of the worst kind.

Another “agent” was only interested in what I looked like and whether I would be good in bed or not. That was humiliating. There were plenty of rejection letters, but the one from a writers co-operative in Tauranga, now defunct, was the worst of all, telling me that my writing was truly terrible and that I should give up now. I kept that letter for a long time and then finally destroyed it because I didn’t need that kind of negativity.

You have to be strong to deal with the rejection and I wasn’t. I put the book down many times never meaning to pick it up again, but I always did.

I learned that New Zealand publishers need subsidies from the government to publish New Zealand books and so they are unlikely to publish science fiction books.

Having said that I got pretty close to being published by the good graces of one Steve Yeomen, whose kindness and belief in me have never been forgotten.