It’s nice to meet you. My name is Daniel, and I’m a writer. It’s been at least ten minutes since I last put pen to paper.

Bad jokes aside, books have been my friends and companions for as long as I can remember. I still remember exactly when I fell in love with reading.

I was ten years old, standing aboard the Sea Princess — an old passenger liner converted into a cruise ship — about to embark on my very first cruise. I was so excited I could barely sit still.

Things were a little different back then. There were no kids’ clubs or organised activities for children. Out of all the passengers on board, there were only six kids: three toddlers, one permanently grumpy teenager, my brother, and me. The average passenger age was somewhere north of sixty-five.

As it turned out, it was the perfect environment to discover books.

I had brought one novel with me: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I finished it, then immediately read it again. And again. Before we reached our first port, I had already read it three times.

At that first stop, we found a second-hand copy of The Horse and His Boy. At the next port, I picked up The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I read those books so many times during that voyage that somewhere halfway through the trip, I started resenting port days because they interrupted my reading.

That cruise gave me more than a holiday. It gave me a lifelong love of stories.

My dream as an author is simple: to write the kind of books that make someone else fall in love with reading the way I did.