“Cassie Georgiana Odysseos has the potential to become a champion swimmer. However, both her training and comfortable life is interrupted when her father Paz, leaves home, and Cassie’s mother Penelope, sends Cassie and her little brother Timmy to stay with elderly Mike and Peg Calypso in Ithaca, a village without a pool. Finding a small bronze box, the magic entry to Neptunia, Cassie is asked by Miss Iris Laertes, a previous Olympic champion to carry an important message to that city of water. What happens then combines fantasy and reality …”

This novel is based on 2 ideas:

1. What an effort it takes to become a champion athlete… or to succeed in anything else for that matter.

2. Some of the more fantastic adventures in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’.

The concept for this story was written some years ago, but it is only now that the final draft was written and published by www. fivesenses. com.au

When I first started writing about the perils of climate warming, no publisher was interested so I put this ms aside and continued writing others with more ‘trendy themes’.

So let this is a lesson for all emerging authors who can’t find a publisher to take your ms.

Tuck them aside, and bring them out some time in the future when submission editors have caught up with you.

And that reminds me:

It was suggested by a writer friend that the last three books I wrote for young readers must be self published. Or at least I had paid to have them published. Or agreed to sell so many thousand copies before the books were taken on.

None of these are true. I have merely been fortunate enough to find a publisher who likes what I write and for this I am deeply grateful. Thank you Roger Furness of fivesenses.com.au to have so much faith in me.  Not that there is anything wrong with self publishing. Anyone who had watched the ‘different shades of grey’ phenomenon would surely agree. But it is still a lot easier to find a publisher prepared to tackle a lot of the hard slog.