the official website of Allan Frewin Jones

I caught the writing bug when I was about nine years old, and for several years my writings were inspired by children’s fantasy books. My favourite writer at the time was Alan Garner. He probably still is. I spent hours in my bedroom, scribbling away while sensible kids were out enjoying themselves.

I continued to scribble away through my teens, occasionally sending books off, and getting polite and kind-hearted rejections. Time passed and school turned to work, and I thought it was time to take getting published a little more seriously.

Long story short, I eventually found a Literary Agent who liked my stuff. A few months later, in 1987, “The Mole And Beverley Miller” was published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Over the next few years, I wrote more books and got them published, at one point having to use a pseudonym “Steven Saunders” for some books, because I was writing more quickly than the original publisher could get them into the shops.

Things trickled along quite nicely, me writing in the evenings and at weekends, and working full time during the rest of the week. Then on 2nd January 1991, I was made redundant, two days before my wedding to Claudia. I used my redundancy pay to buy a Word Processor – the forerunner of modern computers, and at the time little more than a glorified typewriter. (Up till then I had written my books in longhand and then typed them up – now I could write straight onto the machine and make changes much more easily.) Claudia’s job kept us afloat, while I tried to get my writing career up and running as a paying concern. (By November of the same year, I was making enough money to become a full-time writer).

About this time my agent was contacted by a Packaging Company. Packagers come up with ideas for book series and offer publishers a “full service” deal – meaning, the publisher will be provided with (say) six written and edited books – the Packager will find writers and organize time schedules and deadlines and all that stuff. All the publisher has to do then is to hand over a fee and organize the printing of the finished books.

I wrote some books for a series called The Mystery Club. Because these books were written by several different people, a collective pseudonym was needed to help ‘brand’ the books. In this case, the name was Fiona Kelly, even though of the five writers working on the series, two were male – including me.

The next thing to happen was that a publisher read my work on this series and asked me to write a different series for them – which turned into Hunter & Moon Mysteries. About the same time, the original Packager asked if I’d like to work on a series all on my own. The packager was an American living in London, and he had an idea for stories about a 10 year old American girl and the trouble she had coping with her older sister. Being male and English, it seemed really obvious that I should write a series about a 10-year-old American girl, so I agreed – and this is the series that became Stacy And Friends.

While this was going on, my Agent came up with an idea for a mystery/supernatural series based around a group of English archaeology students. We presented this to another publisher, who loved the idea, and this resulted in the 8 Dark Paths books.

I was also writing more stuff for the Packager as well, a few more Mystery Clubs, a spin-off series called The Mystery Kids, Midnight Library and other odds and ends. Then they came up with the Talisman series, and I was asked to write all of them. Next to arrive was a teen police series – and I was asked again if I would write all of them – and this came out as Special Agents – but this time the publishers fancied trying a different name on the cover, so although all the books were by me, they were released as written by Sam Hutton.

Then something really cool happened! The Packagers showed me a rough storyline idea for a book called “The Seventh Daughter” and asked if I would like to write it. By a wonderful chance, this was exactly the kind of thing I had always really wanted to write, so I jumped at the opportunity. The concept was taken around various publishers – and Harper Collins in New York loved it. They wanted three books, and I said yes, please! After all, that meant I was finally getting to write a Fantasy Trilogy – exactly what I had dreamed of doing when I had started writing as a small boy. This became The Faerie Path series. One compromise I was asked to agree, was that it would be published as written by “Frewin Jones”. It being a series aimed at female teenagers, the publisher thought making it less obvious that a man had written the books would help with sales.

The series did so well, that I was asked to write another trilogy based on the same characters. At about the same time the publishers were being shown a quite different series, a historical series set in Dark Ages Wales and involving the adventures of a 15-year-old girl called Branwen. The publishers thought that this would make a great follow-up to the Faerie Path, if a bit of magic could be added. I was really intrigued by the project, and I added a big dose of the supernatural as well as making plenty of other changes when I came on board. The publishers loved it and asked for four books. I got writing. In America the series was called Warrior Princess, in the UK Destiny’s Path.

At the same time, I got a call from an editor I had worked with about ten years previously, telling me about an illustrator called Gary Chalk who had come up with a wonderful idea for a series of children’s fantasy stories under the general title of “The Sundered Lands”. (In the USA, the series was called “The Six Crowns”). She thought he needed to collaborate on the books with a writer, and arranged for us to meet. I called him on the phone to arrange a meeting. “How shall I know you?” I asked. “I’ll be wearing a chrysanthemum,” he said. We met up a week or so later. “Where’s the chrysanthemum?” I asked, not seeing it anywhere obvious. “Up me bum!” he replied, and we became friends from that moment onwards. We plotted the six books together in lunatic, hilarious and frantic all-day sessions in his converted farmhouse in Bas Normandy in France, then I’d go away and write them up while he stayed put and did the drawings. The perfect partnership!

I should mention Adam Blade’s ‘Beast Quest’ series at this point. Again, this was a concept dreamed up by the Packagers I had been working with for years. The aim was to create a series that would find the Holy Grail of children’s publishing – books that an eight-year-old boy would want to read. In brief, the series became incredibly successful all over the world and is still going strong, with scores of titles and spin-offs. I was quite busy with other work at the time, but I found the time to write about thirty books in the series over the years – including a recent quartet of Beast Quests called ‘New Blood’.

Eight years ago, my wife Claudia and I ‘retired’ to Cornwall – something we had been dreaming about for twenty years. Part of this ‘retirement’ involved us taking over a Pet Supplies business in the Pannier Market of the Devon market town of South Molton. Although the Pannier Market only opens on Thursdays and Saturdays, preparing for it kept us quite busy, and writing took a back seat for a while.

But the writing bug bit again, and I started putting together the ideas that became The Feathered Tree – of which more in the Blogs.

I’m still feeling the teeth of the writing bug, and new ideas are coming gradually to the boil. Watch this space.