Over seventy something years I've explored more different avenues than a taxi driver; I've worked as a travelling photographer, supervised youth in church programs, explored time and resource management, traced family trees, reported the news, sold everything from flowers to fridges and taught both scriptures and sales – even dived in wrecks for sunken treasure and there's no doubt left in my mind ... I was meant to be a writer!

Creating paintings of our great aussie gumstree or designing fantasy theatre backdrops brings me pleasure, but it can never compete with the joy of creating fictional characters or recording the lives of real heros ... that stretches my mind and enlarges my soul! ...writing and publishing my 93 year old mother's memoirs in 2007 taught me more about the hardships and heros of The Great Depression than any lesson I ever sat through in a classroom!

As a writer I have access to the fastest and cheapest travel in the world! Who else but writers and their readers can experience the icy chill of artic blizzards one minute, the sparkle of greek islands the next? We writers truly live the wins and woes of every character we create - if my regency maid feels her heart thump at the unexpected visit of her true love, my fingers mirror hers as she hurries to smooth out the wrinkles in her gown; when my rotten villian sets out to frustrate my handsome hero, I'm pulling for BOTH of them!

If having six children, twenty seven grandchildren and seven great grandchildren is the bread of my life, writing is definitely the honey ... I need both to survive!

Judith's contributions to the Carindale Writers' Group workshops include:

The Gift