On Twins (Reading For Australia Guest Post)

Linda De Silva of Reading For Australia invited me to write a piece on anything I wanted for her wonderful site, an initiative of the 2013 Kids’ Lit Quiz team to promote awareness of the competition. Naturally, I chose to talk about twins and how special they are, not just in general (although they are) but to me:

“I’m not a twin (I’ve asked my mum a dozen times so I’m pretty sure) but I’ve spent a lot of time writing about them. There’s the Troubletwisters series, co-written with Garth Nix, which follows the magical adventures of fraternal twins Jack and Jaide Shield. There’s my earlier series, the Books of the Cataclysm, about mirror twins Seth and Adrian Castillo. There were even twins in some of the Star Wars novels I wrote.  And now there’s my new series Twinmaker, which despite its title doesn’t have any natural twins in the first book, Jump (but there will be in book two, Crash.)”

Linda herself has twin boys, and one of them, Nick, gave the book a great review on the same site, for which I’m extremely grateful. He called it an “inventive, powerful story”.

I have three books out next year featuring twins: the fourth Troubletwisters novel Missing, Presumed Evil, Crash (aka Crashland outside Australia), and Blood Ties, the third in the Spirit Animals series, which Garth Nix and I have also cowritten. How long will my fascination with twins last? Until I stop finding them such a powerful source of inspiration, I guess. At present, there’s no sign of that.

(The image above, btw, was made usuing an iPhone app called “Twinmaker”. Nothing to do with me.)