Writing for kids while trying to mind them

Kathryn Lamb is the author of Boywatching and the Help! series: Help! My Social Life is a Mess! Help! My Family is Driving Me Crazy! and Help! Let Me Out of Here! Her most recent book, Girls are from Saturn, Boys are from Jupiter was published last week. She has a fictitious diary of a teenage girl due out in April and her How to be Cool will be published next August.

I have six children aged between three and 11, so finding time to write is quite a challenge. I have been known to write in the middle of the night, which isn't so good.

Sometimes I resort to bribery - bribing the older ones to take care of the younger ones while I write. They are a great help though. My youngest child likes to sit beside me drawing while I write and my four-year-old sits at the electric keyboard and plays "Author Music". Sometimes we go to my parents' house, where I'm locked away in the study so I can work and my parents mind the children. I'm hoping to get someone to come in to help while I do the next book. The kids are very good, but by the time I finish working the house tends to look quite extraordinary, and by then I'm not in the humour for doing it. So it would be nice to get someone who could do a little bit of housework as well.

I've been writing for Picadilly Press for three years. Before that I had been working as an illustrator for the same publisher. I started life as a cartoonist, so I write from that point of view; I think about a character and how to draw him or her in words, so there may be a lot of caricature. The books I write are generally aimed at the 11- to 13-year-old age group. They are light-hearted and, I would imagine, more likely to appeal to younger teens. They are supposed to have a theme of common sense and advice, done in a humorous way - sort of self-help literature for teenagers.

I choose subjects for my books for different reasons. For example, I had read an adult self-help book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and I enjoyed it. I thought it had some good points, but it was very serious. So I decided to write a version of it for young people, and to inject a bit of humour. I discovered one or two things I hadn't realised in the process of writing this book. For instance, in general, I found that boys tend to take an approach to life which is more geared towards action, and I incorporated that into the book.

I find that teenagers almost all hate books on recommended reading lists for school. Many of them devour teen magazines and the book I'm bringing out next centres on a 14-year-old girl who reads a lot of those magazines - and it makes a bit of gentle fun of her. I think teenagers have a good sense of humour and see the funny side of the things they get up to.

I've a book coming out in August called How to be Completely Cool - though I'm not sure I know much about that! But it has given me the opportunity to do all sorts of silly drawings. I suppose I see it as a funny subject and hopefully it will appeal. I love it when I hear that something in one of the books has made someone laugh. I'm always hoping the jokes actually work and will amuse people.

The difficulty about writing is simply the sheer amount of work I have. Juggling six children and writing, I find I'm completely exhausted a lot of the time. The constant shift in mental attitude you have to adopt moving from author to mother and back is hard; in fact, it's inclined to be quite confusing for the brain . . .