When I got up this morning, there was a Spotted Gecko in my kitchen. He visits sometimes and today I finally found out how he manages to get inside – squeezing through the closed sliding kitchen windows. A veritable saurian Houdini.

Then I came into the study to switch on the computer and collect my stack of emails enticing me to buy watches, support scam con-artists, and increase the size of my penis (flogging miracles are they?). A little later, when I was vacuuming, I found a plastic glue bottle had been dragged behind the bookshelf and consumed. Most of the plastic container included. I have a glue-sniffing rat in the house who got a trifle carried away with its NewYear’s Eve partying?

I am now looking for a dead rat with glued up insides. Now that’s constipation.

I can hear the resident Crested Serpent-eagle over the house as I type. And the local cuckoos – known as the Koel after their repetitive, ringing call rather like a frenetic car alarm – are gearing up to the mating season at this time of year too. In spite of their noise, I favour their presence in our jungle-garden because they parasitize the introduced House Crow.

There was also a monkey on the roof this morning.

We are used to the urbanised and aggressive Long-tailed Macaques coming around occasionally to steal the fruit from the trees and the scraps from the rubbish bin if they can get to it, but this fellow announced himself with the explosive chek-chek-chek-chek of the Banded Leaf-Monkey, a much more elegant chap.

However, to have him crashing across our roof from back to front, thrashing through the trees in the front garden and then back again across the roof and down the other side of the house, scrambling across the bamboos to the mango trees before finally exiting up the hill to the golf course – that upset me.

Leaf monkeys are gregarious forest dwellers, and this one was highly upset and lonely. I suspect the troupe may have been broken up by the final clearing of a forest patch where a new housing development is going up nearby.

I wish people would think about what they do to the world when they have 6 kids. Trebling the world’s population has consequences.

My life has been described by one of my editors as “impossibly exotic” – although really it is not my life, but me, that’s the exotic. I’m the uprooted plant, the exotic who doesn’t belong, always living in someone else’s backyard…

I am a transplanted Australian, now living in South-East Asia. I have, as an adult, lived in four different countries on four different continents. I grew up on an Australian farm, I’ve worked in Malaysian rainforests, looked out on the ruins of Carthage from the windows of my study in Tunis and lived seven years in a house that backed onto Beethovengang in Vienna.

Now I live in Malaysia, in the state of Selangor, where I write fantasy fiction and work on projects that take me anywhere from mangroves to tropical islands, from a luxury resort to a tent in a peat swamp.

Welcome to my blog!