Recently Renee Price from Create It Kids asked me “How do you pronounce your Surname?”
It’s a Dutch surname that’s pronounced “Gizz-Burz”. The G is soft as in Go.
When my Opa (grandfather) came to Australia, immigration asked what his name was, and they wrote is as Gijsbers. It’s meant to be spelled with a y and an umlaut, however immigration spelled it with an i and j.
My father came to Australia when he was three and doesn’t speak much Dutch, I can’t speak any either.
Let's start at the beginning with my first book, Swallow Me, NOW! Back in 2012, I joined a number of challenges, including the Chapter Book Challenge. This was a challenge in March to write a children's chapter book, junior fiction, or middle grade book. The goal was...
February was a big month for reading with 11 books, bringing my total so far to 18 books for 2026! This month there were audiobooks, picturebooks, novels, novellas, and a junior fiction thrown in too. Here's what I read: Belle's Secret by Victoria Purman - if you've...
Back in 2012, I participated in the first Chapter Book Challenge. This was one of the first writing challenges I did when I got back to writing fiction. The goal was simple, to write a draft of a novel for children in a month. I wrote a story where a kid named James...