About
The Girl Who Started on Page Six
The memory of selling my first self-published book made me cringe for years. Much later, when I could finally smile about it, I realised that imagining storylines, writing, illustrating and producing books has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Before I started school, I invented bedtime stories for my toys and learned to draw, read and then write.
I was eight years old when my brothers and I held a stall with our friends who lived up the hill from us. When our neighbour's dad, Mike, bought my book and burst out laughing, I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I had numbered the very first inside page as page six. I knew proper books didn’t start their numbering right away. They had things like copyright, dedications and forewords. I had put that book together with a great deal of pride and even more confidence. Producing real books meant needing to know my times tables. Multiples of four suddenly made maths a whole lot more interesting and relevant.
My first traditionally published children's book was accepted ten years later while I was still a teenager. I spent a good portion of my teens scribbling away with a pen and a ‘stuff book’ where I wrote… stuff! There were formal writing opportunities too. At sixteen I was the editor of a youth group newspaper, and at eighteen the sub-editor of the national NZ Baptist newspaper. In my late teens and early twenties, I spent a season writing serial stories for an international airline children’s inflight magazine, while a steady trickle of my children’s books continued to find their way into print. Writing has been the common thread through everything since, taking whatever shape was needed depending on the role, circumstance or opportunity. This has ranged from creating resources for organisations of all sizes to the daily routines of my years as a parent, primary school teacher, teacher-librarian and Baptist minister.
A change of lifestyle eventually brought me to the construction industry, where for the first time I had a nine-to-five job that didn’t absorb all my creative energy. It did, however, find a use for my maths skills, my love of logic and my appreciation for a good spreadsheet. Around the same time, my husband Andrew and I started Kererū Publishing, a small not-for-profit producing books and resources for Christians in ministry and personal spiritual journeys. You can see what we get up to there at [link].
But it is the power of story that pulls at me the most, weaving through everything I write, whether fiction, spiritual writing or something in between.
These days I have a faithful writing companion in Babs, my daughter's cat, who has appointed herself my unofficial alarm clock. She takes her job seriously, arriving at 5am sharp to make sure I don't miss a moment of my early morning writing time. She truly seems to think that by pushing against my back with all four paws, she has the power to physically move me from my bed. You may already have spotted her in my author photo. She has a habit of turning up in my writing too.
And so, here I am. Caroline Bindon, a storyteller who is still just as curious as that eight-year-old with the stapled book and just as ready to share the next chapter with you.
On the journey,
Caroline
A Flick Through My Photo Album
