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B- I've been creating stories my whole life. The first story I told in great detail was when I was four. My mom asked 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' And I wove her an entire story about how I was going to work at McDonald's, marry a school bus driver (I didn't even ride the bus nor go to school), live in an upstairs apartment, and have a horse and a cat (IN my apartment). The first story I wrote was when I was eight about a bunny on a picnic. And wrote my first book when I was thirteen a historical family drama told through diary entries inspired by Dear Mr. Henshaw. I took writing classes in high school. I was the editor for the literary magazine. I took writing classes in college, and wrote my second book in 2007. She never published any of her work because she always felt like her plots were a little too shallow. D tried to write a book many years ago but didn't finish it due to a profound lack of depth to his characters. In 2022, B and D got married and decided to combine their powers, shore up each others weaknesses, and finally become published authors. B brings a deep understanding of human psychology to create rich characters, a (mostly) attention to details, and ability to craft prose learned from years of study and practice. And D brings his analytical brain to develop deep plots and rich magic systems.

I have been writing since I was a very young girl, lying on the floor with my pencil and yellow paper. But it wasn't until a little over a year ago, after reading some very poorly written werewolf romances that I decided that I could do better. And here we are.

I’d wanted to write a novel since I was in my twenties, but for most of my life I never really believed I could do it. There was always work, family and everything else that gets in the way, and writing a book remained one of those things I thought I might do ‘one day’. When I reached my sixties, I realised that if I was ever going to do it, ‘one day’ had probably arrived. The real inspiration for *The Long Grass* came from two places. The first was a childhood friend of mine who had passed away a few years earlier. He’d had an incredibly difficult life and I wanted, in some small way, to pay tribute to him. He became part of the inspiration for one of the novel’s most important characters. The other inspiration was Far North Queensland. I spent time in Weipa in the mid-1980s, when the novel is set, and it was an extraordinary place. It was remote, isolated and sometimes pretty wild, and I witnessed some things up there that stayed with me for the next forty years. Eventually those two things came together. I began imagining a murder mystery in which the victims weren’t necessarily innocent, and the killer wasn’t simply a monster. I wanted to explore what might drive someone to kill, and whether understanding why they did it could change the way we felt about them. Once I had that idea, I finally had the story I’d been waiting all those years to write.

Since childhood I have always enjoyed writing. I then had a long career in journalism, including 21 years as a newspaper editor. When I semi-retired I thought I would like to be a little more creative and try my hand at writing books. I have written four novels under my pen name John Pendleton and now a non-fiction book under my own name John Cowpe.