I am often asked where the idea for Anne Droyd came from. The spark of an idea came not creatively but from thinking about the practicalities of selling a new book in a highly competitive and saturated market.

I focussed on what has been popular across the decades and what was popular with me when I was a young person.

I raided the fiction of my own childhood. The Famous Five series has a formula to it, I thought, and the books are still massively popular today. Why? Because kids love adventure stories in which the children are the heroes.

American television scriptwriter Kenneth Johnson had said that if you want to do something outrageous and unbelievable you must mix it and, indeed, surround it with everyday people and normal situations.

He had done this with his TV adaptation of The Incredible Hulk. In the series, the Creature that David Banner becomes is the only science fiction/fantasy element in it (as opposed to the original comic where there are many fantasy ingredients). David is a lonely man seeking the cure to his affliction, always on the move, and surrounded by real people in real towns with real problems, ranging from alcoholism, child abuse, drugs, disability, to organised crime and corruption.

So I took a leaf out of his book, as it were.

The children’s soap opera Grange Hill demonstrated that kids love stories that deal with their everyday lives, while the existence of super heroes like The Bionic Man/Woman, Spider-Man, The X Men, and perhaps most famous of all, Superman, prove that young people love to dream about having special powers.

And so, with all of this to draw on, I devised a foursome of child characters who would balance one another out in terms of personality and ability. Two boys and two girls: a compassionate sensible one, a practical materialistic one, a scruffy thinker, and a one with special powers and very much an alien.

I decided the superhuman character would be the hook of the piece and that it would be wise to break with tradition and have it one of the girls.

I distinctly remember wandering around the real Century Lodge in Farnworth, Bolton (which was very near where I lived back then) on a sunny afternoon in 1996 and thinking, ‘She’s an android. I need a good gimmicky name, something that is easily marketable, something that will hook the casual browser, while at the same time appearing at first glance to be an ordinary name.’

It struck me that I could make a name out of the word ‘android’. At first I was going to make one of the boys be the robot and perhaps call him Andre or Andy. But all of this had been done before and was far too obvious even for me.

As I’ve said I made one of the girls the robot. ‘Andr-oid,’ I kept saying. ‘Andrea Oid. No, that sounds stupid.’ Finally I hit upon ‘Anne Droid’. It had the normal name Anne and the word ‘droid’, which told you what she is. I just needed another way of spelling the surname and thought of other names that sounded similar.

Boyd, Ackroyd, Freud. ‘Yes, Freud,’ I said out loud with a tingle of delight. ‘Like the German writer Sigmund Freud. I could call my character “Anne Dreud”.’ But I had one major problem with this: children would more than likely pronounce it ‘Anne Drood’, not realising that the ‘eu’ is pronounced ‘oi’. So I had to settle with the spelling ‘Anne Droyd’.

I can remember telling my friend Anthony about the name. ‘I’ve got it,’ I said, ‘I’m going to call her Anne Droyd.’ His reaction was immediate. He rolled his eyes and groaned, ‘Ugh, corny.’

I acknowledged that it was indeed corny, but most children would enjoy being in on the joke. I gave the character of K9 in Doctor Who as an example. K9 is a robot dog, and his name is derived from the word ‘canine’. Most of my generation, when we were children, enjoyed getting the joke. ‘Oh yeah,’ they would say with sudden realisation, ‘K9, canine!’, even though most adults saw it straight away and grimaced.

At this stage the story was simply titled Anne Droyd.

Before it was plotted as a novel I imagined it as a six-part television series of the style produced by Children’s BBC. I wrote the Episode One script by hand in pen and ink on an A4 writing pad.

Influenced by The Famous Five and Stig of the Dump, the first episode saw brother and sister Gezz and Luke arriving by train from their city home to stay for the summer holidays with their grandparents. They are greeted at the station by Colin, a scruffy eccentric who lives in the village.

After settling in, the three children go to play on a nearby wasteland and it is there that they witness the arrival of the Professor and his creation Anne. The Professor, realising he has been seen, follows the children to their den. While he is trying to keep the youngsters calm, he activates a homing beacon in his pocket. The episode ends with Anne breaking her way in to the den.

After penning this, I learned that television companies rarely buy ready made stories in script form, and that it was more common for them to commission an adaptation of a successful children’s novel (Again, this is a safe bet for them. A best-selling children’s novel has an established audience anticipating the TV series). Becoming disillusioned with the whole business, I gave up on Anne Droyd and shelved the script.

That’s not to say I gave up on the idea, though. Often I would think of extra plot lines and titles for subsequent books. I’d always felt that ‘Century Lodge’ would be an excellent title for a story.

It implied a ghost story or something to do with time, perhaps a time paradox or a crossover point between dimensions. I fantasised about a range of books regularly: The first one would be called Anne Droyd, the sequel would be Anne Droyd and Century Lodge, and so forth.

I spent the remainder of the 20^th century honing my skills as a writer, submitting articles to non-profit-making fanzines just to get the experience and have the reward of seeing my name in print. I also wrote for semi-professional magazines Eclipse and Classic Television, and even went on a television programme to present a small feature about the BBC’s treatment of the old Doctor Who series. Dream come true, or what!

Little did I know it then, but Anne Droyd was about to be taken out of her drawer and be reinvented as a children’s novel.