As soon as I could hold a pen and my father had taught me to write. I was about 5 and made illustrated stories about animals, flowers, witches, fairies and people

Pippi Langstrumpf – Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren when I was maybe 8. From the first page it confirmed that my decision to never grow up and to do my own thing in life was the way to go.

It was the first Christmas after Michael had died and I wanted to be away from what had been our home and on my own, so I looked after my friend Anna’s cats at her place in the hills above Knysna.
One late afternoon I sat down to update my diary when, out of the blue, the line 'We all felt it that day on the farm…'jumped into my head. I carried on writing for 3 solid weeks, I hardly slept or ate. I was on a blissful high of connectedness to everyone and everything, the cosmos and myself. Most of the time I just watched the words flowing out of my pen filling page after page with buried emotions, memories of all kinds and revelations about my journey as Gunda sans Michael.
For nearly a year the text was just a special part of my diary until I showed it to some friends who said other people might also be interested in reading it.
So the idea of a book was born. Having self-published conventionally before I had a stitched and glued made-out-of-real-paper book in mind.
And then, again out of the blue, I came across Nathalie an acquaintance from an animal communication course. We had coffee and she said ‘I want to make an ebook but I don’t have a script’, to which I replied ‘It never crossed my mind to make an ebook but I do have a script.’ My gutfeel just went YAY, this is meant to be.
So Nat and I got together and created a book. It was tremendous fun taking barefoot photos on an icy Knysna day, discussing fonts and sample chapters surrounded by dogs, cats and holidaying kids and drinking countless cups of ginger tea to fight off the flu.
Michael never had a funeral. He didn’t want one. The Stars Beneath My Feet is my way of saying ‘good bye’ to him and letting the world participate in celebrating the wonderful, creative, bigger-than-life human being he was.

It has often been said that writing is a lonely process. I disagree. When the words are flowing I feel connected in every way. The universe embraces me for being myself – the essence of Gunda, creating something unique, contributing my bit to the expression of life. It’s the most extraordinary, exhilarating, enriching experience and I always wish it would go on for ever

I’m working on the ebook editions of my books Yet Another Day in Paradise and Zebra Horizon
Yet Another Day in Paradise is about the creative, chaotic sometimes tragic lives of a bunch of eccentrics living at the Pelican Island Yacht Club, who are making their dreams come true – or not.
Zebra Horizon is a novel about a German teenager’s adventurous journey into adulthood during her exchange year to South Africa in the middle 70s.
And a while ago, going through all the folders and files on my laptop, I found 270 pages of Mathilda II, a story I began to write in 2006, which I had totally forgotten about. Mathilda II (working title) is the sequel to Zebra Horizon.
In Mathilda II, Mathilda is back in Germany finishing her schooling. All she wants in life is to rejoin her South African boyfriend as fast as possible but Denzil, who is doing his bit for the Struggle – or is he? goes incommunicado.
Mathilda, mightily pissed off, leaves for Paris and works for Monsieur Gaspard, a wealthy philanthropist with a penchant for paintings and out of the ordinary cuisine.
Mathilda has an encounter that blows her clean out of her Birkenstock sandals and leads to the question – what is love all about?
That’s how far I got 8 years ago. I have no idea what’s going to happen next. At the moment I am doing research about France and South Africa in 1977.

I have an idea. I write down what comes up. I follow the story as it unfolds without interfering too much. Zebra Horizon was going to be a book about Michael’s and my life with our animal companions on our smallholding off the grid in the bush. And about building a house from local materials without electric tools but a goodly bit of lateral thinking. I started with how we first met – when I was an exchange student and he my host father – and in the end I had a book about Mathilda’s year in Africa.
I always first write by hand. I love the feel of my pen and my hand gliding across the paper, the little sound that makes and watch the words appear on the page.
I write whenever I feel inspired, which can be at any time of the day or the night for half an hour or 12.
The only time I had a dedicated desk was when we were living on our smallholding. After that it was the dinette on the boat, our only table in our camp under the milkwood trees and for the last 2 years on my lap in the bush or a table seating 14, depending on where the flow of life took me.
I always carry a notebook with me and have one next to my bed; I often dream sequences of my stories.
When the muse isn’t sitting on my shoulder I type my handwritten stuff onto the computer or I do research for my books. Doing research is one of my favourite pastimes in life – it takes me to all sorts of places and people. The Isidingo cast and crew were an invaluable source of information for Zebra Horizon (which was mainly written in Michael’s dressing room at the SABC). Were there movie houses in Soweto in the 70s? – No, we went to Lenasia. How do you strap a baby to your back so that it doesn’t fall off? – Ma Agnes gave me a practical demonstration.
For Yet Another Day in Paradise I needed someone familiar with the sailing world for the cover and fellow yacht club member and sailor Lawrence Moorcroft, who was one of the artists involved in the Asterix movies when they were still drawn by hand, did the art work for it.
An important part of the process is to sit still or walk in the woods or gaze at the stars – for stories to be born somewhere deep inside me.

I read. I spend as much time as I can in the wild. I paint – like mad for 3 months and then I stop for a year – or more – or less. I love to explore – places, people, different cultures, subcultures