Last year, I made a decision that I wanted to go camping a lot more than I had been. When I was a kid, our family used to camp a lot; we saw some amazing and wild parts of Australia, places I'll never forget. So with all that in mind, I bought this little ripper (which is now called Dusty Rose, after all of your input! I also call it the office) and started to plan a route up in the north of WA.

Guess what? On Monday, my fourteenth novel went to print. Who would have thought that eleven years after Red Dust was published, I'd still be tapping at the keyboards and playing with my imaginary friends?

Having been a farmer for twenty years, I can tell you what the reality of drought is: it’s dry, dusty paddocks, with little or no grass. It’s dams that have nothing but mud in the bottom; sheep or cattle getting stuck as they search for water.