This week am thrilled to have Julia Lee as my guest, author of The Mysterious Misadventures of Clemency Wrigglesworth, a gothic tale of skulduggery and derring-do, shortlisted for the Booktrust Best Books Award 2014 and longlisted for the 2014 Branford Boase Award for best debut novel.

Julia knew she wanted to be a writer at age five, although she didn’t know anything about writers then except they got to make up stories all the time. She loves the sea, chocolate Hobnobs, and books. And more books. She's fascinated by all kinds of wildlife from micro-organisms to mammoths. Plus she's really good at whistling. Julia writes at a desk of transparent glass - but insists that’s the only vaguely magical thing about her.

1) Uh oh, it’s the zombie apocalypse. Which author (living or dead) do you want riding shotgun?

I’d like two, please. Ernest Hemingway – let’s see if he’s really handy in a tight spot or if it was all macho nonsense. And Jane Austen. She’d make killer remarks about it all. And I’m sure she would be handy in a tight spot. She’s got form with zombies.

2) Look, I got a time machine on eBay! Where do you want to go? (Said time machine may possibly malfunction and leave you there. Possibly. It was *very* cheap.)

So hard to choose. Medieval times when forests covered much of England? But I’d like another time machine to accompany me, loaded up with duvets and antibiotics and toothpaste and pizza alla napoletana. Though it would probably turn up somewhere/when else. Never buy cheap!

3) What’s your favourite thing about writing for kids?

I get asked questions I can actually answer, like ‘What was your best pet ever?’ and ‘Do you know Jacqueline Wilson, ‘cos we really like her books?’ Answers: 1. My cat before last was the Best Pet in the World, no contest, and 2. No.

4) A witch has cast a spell on you (sorry about that) and you’ve woken up as a character in a children’s book – what’s your special talent or power?

I’d be Dickon in The Secret Garden. I’ve always longed to have a special affinity with wild animals, to gain their love and secrets. Not just have them give me disparaging glances and saunter away...

5) What’s the scariest or strangest thing you’ve ever done?

I’m a natural coward so the strangest and scariest things happen in my books rather than in real life, and I can make it turn out ok!

6) What’s something you wish you’d known about writing when you started out? What’s something you wish you’d known about publishing? 

Writing: No one’s going to discover your rare and special talent by stumbling over it in the dark. You have to stop being shy and put your stuff out there. Take the risk.

Publishing: How crucial timing is, and therefore luck. If your book lands on an editor’s desk just after they’ve acquired something similar, even if they love yours more, they won’t buy it.

7) What would your daemon be?

Don’t think I haven’t already spent a lot of time wondering about this one! At the mo, I’d say a Red Panda. They are small(ish) and red-brown and much crazier than the kind of panda you’ve actually heard of. 

8) My books don’t have dragons, but they do have... kidnappers, psychics, knife throwers, cruel aunts and wicked uncles, heroic girls and resourceful boys, quite a few dogs, cats, chickens and horses, and a Shoemaker Extraordinaire. Just normal stuff...

That is some excellent advice about writing! Julia's next book, The Dangerous Discoveries of Gully Potchard, is out this August and revisits some of the same characters as they get caught up with a fiendish gang of kidnappers. Mayhem ensues! You can find Julia on Twitter, her website and on Goodreads.

This week I'm delighted to have the award-winning Katherine Rundell as my guest. Her enchanting, whimsical novel Rooftoppers has been shortlisted for numerous prizes including the Carnegie, and is fresh off winning not only the Blue Peter Book Award, but also the Waterstones Prize (see a smiley Katherine below, in orange, with her trophy!). 

Katherine is a Fellow in English Literature at All Souls College in Oxford; her research is in Renaissance literature and she also teaches a bit of feminist theory. She wire-walks, and loves heights. Her first book, The Girl Savage, is about a girl growing up half-wild in Zimbabwe, where she spent her childhood; Rooftoppers is about a gang of children living secret lives on the rooftops of Paris, and a girl searching for her mother, chasing snatches of music across the city. 

1) Uh oh, it’s the zombie apocalypse. Which author (living or dead) do you want riding shotgun? 

John Donne, who is the subject of my doctorate, was a ferociously clever man - he'd be brilliant company and I think he'd have good strategies for evading the undead. Or Beckett, I think, would be both wily and fighty - and, as he went down, he would say things like this: 'No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.' 

2) Look, I got a time machine on eBay! Where do you want to go? (Said time machine may possibly malfunction and leave you there. Possibly. It was *very* cheap.) 

I'm torn! Going back to the sixteenth century to meet Donne and Shakespeare would be glorious and would also make my research project *much* easier. But it would have to be the future, five hundred years from now. I hope and believe we'll be free from institutional sexism and racism, and also that those skintight zip-front silver jumpsuits will at last have come into fashion. 

3) What’s your favourite thing about writing for kids? 

Kids are brilliant readers; they carry their favourite books close to their hearts, and they invest the world you've written with details of their own - a lovely kid once told me her favourite scene was when Sophie and Matteo waltz on the rooftops; which doesn't actually happen. And the books I loved when I was about 10-12 shaped my vision of what bravery and kindness might look like. 

4) A witch has cast a spell on you (sorry about that) and you’ve woken up as a character in a children’s book – what’s your special talent or power? 

I'd like to live in Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci series: in real life I'm quite scruffy but I'd like to be a nine-lifed enchanter with an immaculate dress-sense. 

5) What’s the scariest or strangest thing you’ve ever done? 

As you might know - because I bang on about it ceaselessly - I love climbing and being up high. I've been on the rooftops of about half the Oxford colleges, and a few beautiful buildings in London. And just recently I flew circuits in a tiny two-seater bi-plane in Zimbabwe - it was old and the wind came in through the cracks, but I was knocked breathless with the joy of it.

6) What’s something you wish you’d known about publishing when you started out?

I wrote my first book at 21, and if I'd been a bit older I think I would have been less startled and dismayed to find out that publishing is very much an industry, and has imperatives of its own. I love the actual writing, and I adore meeting the kids; but the PR bit can be hard. One of the reasons I love climbing beyond the eyeline is that I love to be invisible and see without being seen, so self-promotion was always going to be a fraught business. 

7) What would your daemon be? 

I get asked this quite a lot on school visits - I find it's almost impossible not to sound grandiose or vain or David Brent-ish! I'd love to say a bird, but I'm not a good enough person for a bird yet: probably, realistically, some kind of squirrel. 

8) My book doesn’t have dragons, but it does have... feeding the birds whilst tightrope-walking high above Paris in the moonlight. 

So jealous, one day I will climb the roofs of Oxford colleges too! That sounds magical. If you'd like to find out more, you can look up Katherine on Twitter.

If you follow me on Twitter you might have heard me getting rather overexcited recently about a fabulous new mentoring scheme. Well, after a bucketload of behind-the-scenes work by award-winning and lovely author Kerry Hudson and others, I'm thrilled to announce that The WoMentoring Project is now up and running! Here's why I'll be taking part...

I've never had a mentor. At least, not in the wise-bearded-person Dumbledore sense. (I'm still holding out for a pet phoenix though.) The first time I had something published - a funny article in my university magazine - I simply threw it up there and hoped for the best. A little later, working on a travel magazine, I once again learned by doing, writing articles on everything from spa hotels in Arizona to bonfire nights in England and many other topics I had no clue about. It was scary at times, but I just winged it furiously. When I wrote my first novel, again, I simply sat down at my computer and bashed it out.

But that's where my lone wolfdom ended. Due to the wonders of the interwebs, I found critique partners, writer friends, and cheerleaders online, and all those people taught me so much about both writing and publishing, and made the journey far less daunting. Having gone it alone for so long, I really can't overstate how brilliant it is to have someone support and advise you along the oft-potholed writing and publishing road. 

Lucking into the super-friendly kidlit writing community meant amazing things happened: A bestselling author offered to read my first novel and show it to her agent - all because she liked the first page I'd entered in a competition. Nothing came of it, but I will be forever indebted to her for boosting my confidence. I won critiques from various writers for both my queries and pages, helping me improve as a writer in leaps and bounds. And of course, I found my brilliant critique partners, without whom my book would be a mess of plotholes and lurking adverbs. Even after I had interest from a publisher, numerous published authors were kind enough to share their thoughts on contracts, agents, publishers, and all manner of behind-the-scenes tidbits that you simply can't find on the internet.

All of which is to say: Mentors are brilliant things. I may have not had an official one, but all the kind advice I received helped me immeasurably. And now I'm extremely happy to be returning the favour. So if you're a fledgling writer wondering what to do next, I hope you'll give The WoMentoring Project a try. It just might be the boost you're looking for.

Are you a fledgling writer or illustrator who identifies as female? Looking for a friendly face to guide you up the writing and publishing tree? Then read on...

What is The WoMentoring Project?

The WoMentoring Project offers free mentoring by authors, agents and editors to up-and-coming female writers who would otherwise find it difficult to access similar opportunities. We have no budget, it’s a completely free initiative and every aspect of the project - from the project management to the website design to the PR support - is being volunteered by a collective of female literary professionals. 

I want a mentor! How do I apply?

In an ideal world we would offer a mentor to every writer who needed and wanted one. Of course this isn't possible so instead we've tried to ensure the application process is accessible while also ensuring that our mentors have enough information with which to make their selection.

Applicant mentees will submit a 1000-word writing sample and a 500-word statement about how they would benefit from free mentoring. All applications will be for a specific mentor and mentees can only apply for one mentor at a time. Selections will be at the mentor's discretion.  

All illustrations done exclusively for The WoMentoring Project by the super-talented Sally Jane Thompson, one of the mentors!