| Who am I? | Anne Rooney. I write children’s books. When I’m not doing that I write for adults, hang out in cafés, practise my saxophone and escape to Venice in Italy. |
| Who do I live with? | My two daughters, Lauren (17) and Luki (13) who read my books and tell me what’s wrong with them before the publishers get a chance to. We have lots of pets: inlcuding a tortoise, four chickens and a blue lobster. |
| Who dunnit? | The heron! We found a dead fish near our pond with a bite out of it. Detailed investigation of the shape of the mark revealed the heron was the guilty party. |
| Where do I live? | In an old house in Cambridge, an ancient city in the east of England. Cambridge is in the Fens — a flat, wet area of England over-run with eels and cabbages and not much else. |
| Where do I work? | Upstairs, downstairs and in Borders! I have a downstairs desk, an upstairs office and I work in libraries in Cambridge, London and Venice or in the Starbucks coffeeshop in Borders, where I can get books and coffee at the same time. |
| Werewolves! | ...are people who turn into wolves at the full moon – or wolves who turn into people when it isn’t a full moon. Other cultures have stories about were-jaguars, were-crocodiles and lots of were-other-things. |
| What do I like doing? |
Playing with my daughters; sailing our inflatable boat on the river; making snow-men and snow-animals (when it snows!); going to the beach; picnics |
| What’s my favourite...? | Read the answers, and suggest a new question! |
| Why am I a writer? | I love finding out about things, and if I find out something really interesting I get excited about it and want to tell other people about it. Being a writer is about the only way to do that and get paid for it! I like writing for children as they get more excited about things than most grown-ups do. |
| Why is the sky blue? | Light from the sun looks white, but it’s made up of all the colours of the rainbow mixed together. As sunlight travels through the air, the blue light bounces off the gases in the air. Blue light does this more than the other colours do, so we see the sky as blue |
| How old am I? | Forty five. But if I lived on Mars I would be only 24 because years are longer there. If I lived on Jupiter I would be less than 4, which is too young to work |
| How do I work? | On the computer, mostly. I have a desktop PC and a Macbook Air. But if I am in a café, library or train I write on paper with a pen. |
| How do I travel? | In my purple Ford Ka, called Obi (because he looks like an aubergine) and on my bicycle, which is old and blue and has a bell that looks like Elmer the elephant – lots of coloured squares! |
| How long does a book take to write? | Anything from a few hours to a few years — depends on the book |
| How long is a piece of string? | Anything from a few centimetres to a few kilometres. But a superstring is very short — even though it sounds like it should be very long |