Hello and welcome to Psychic Teachers. I'm your host Samantha Fei.

I'm Deb Bowen.

And we are so excited to have you with us. We have one of our all time top amazing fantastic

and great authors on the show with you all today. Deb, do you want to tell us all about our mystery author?

Samantha and I are a little excited folks. Can you tell we are just so honored to have with us this week Paula Rakston.

Paula was born and dorset in England and she grew up in Wales after the age of five.

She was a mountain child. She spent these idyllic days in the hills with a pony, a dog, her brother, and something she calls a sugar cube sandwich which we're going to ask her about.

And they used to spend their days hiding and outcropping observing people in the distant valleys and made up stories about what they saw.

Left home married divorced worked as a travel agent, secretary, English teacher, stud horse groomer, and goat her and this year eternal Wales settle down with her beloved raised her children off the grid in the mountains for 10 years and wrote her first books in this amazing landscape.

The witch's daughter was her first novel followed by 17 others. She now lives in her foot and writes she says in a cantilevered writing room at the top of this curious creaking Victorian property.

Isn't that just wonderful. So welcome Paula. We are so honored that you are our guest and we just have lots of questions for you.

Well, what an introduction. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here by the wonders of modern technology and really pleased to have a chance to talk to you.

We are too. Before we dive into your book series, could you just start us off by sharing with us in our listeners a little bit about your writing process.

Okay, I don't think it's changed much over the quite long time I've been doing it now. If you mean my actual day to day process, I think because my work more or less coincided with having children, it's been, first of all, I wrote when they napped or I wrote when somebody else took them for a walk and then gradually as they began to go to school, I wrote school hours and now they've left home and I'm still writing school hours, it's sort of stuck.

And it's very much a working day. So I walk the dog and then I get to my desk and I stay there till lunchtime have a short break and then I go back and carry on until summertime.

So it's very mundane actual schedule.

No, I love that and I agree with you that when you find a schedule that works, you stick with it. Are you always at the top of your house writing or do you write kind of wherever the mood strikes you.

I used to write anywhere, but I find more and more that I can write better in my chair. I know that sounds a bit stupid, but it's because if you spend, well, you'll know if you spend like three or four hours in front of the computer, you very quickly develop back and neck problems.

If you're not carefully set up and I look back now and think I wrote one entire book in a car because I wrote it in stints when my youngest daughter was at playgroup. So she'd be there for like two or three hours stints two or three days a week.

And rather than drive backwards and forwards and lose the time I just stayed in the car and wrote and I think now that would probably cripple me.

So yes, I come up to the top of my my creaking old house and I'm in this little writing room right in the slope of the roof. It's in the attic effectively.

And it is can to leave it. There's a sort of bit of it that juts out a bit like the prow of a ship over the road below. So it's a strange.

...