MEET THE AUTHOR
B. Ware is the pseudonym used by Jo Stacey when writing children’s books.
Born in August 1976, Jo was fortunate enough to spend the first eighteen years of her life just a stone’s throw from Dumpton Gap beach in the picturesque coastal town of Broadstairs. She always feels most at home when she’s close to the sea, and loves nothing more than lying on a beach somewhere, lost in a good book.
An avid reader from a young age, Jo’s childhood dream was to become an author. Her love of writing evolved whilst she was a pupil at Upton Junior School (Broadstairs). At night, she’d often read by torchlight under the bedclothes – or scribble story ideas into old exercise books – when she was supposed to be fast asleep! During secondary school break times and lunchtimes, she’d collaborate with friends to write murder mysteries before acting them out in the playground. But in her final years at Clarendon House Grammar School (Ramsgate), Jo decided to abandon her fascination with words in order to pursue a growing infatuation with numbers.
It wasn’t until she home-schooled her children during the COVID-19 lockdown that Jo’s passion for creative writing was finally rekindled, and she wrote her first novel. Straight afterwards, she put pen to paper to complete the sequel. But with her children in mind, she then turned her hand to middle-grade fiction. WARNING: Magic Can Be Dangerous! is the first book she has published, under the guise of her alter ego, B. Ware. She’s now working on the second book in the WARNING series, which revolves around a dragon theme.
Jo currently lives in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire with her husband and children. But she hopes to one day move back to the seaside and make writing her full-time occupation.
ON WRITING HER FIRST CHILDREN'S BOOK
“A conversation on WhatsApp with my dad, step-mum, and brothers once sparked a book idea. My dad has always been awful at remembering names. He mentioned some random people who none of us had ever heard of, prompting one of my brothers to ask, ‘Who are these alternative relatives?’
I thought Alternative Relatives would be a great idea for a children’s book title and immediately came up with a loose plot where the protagonist used magic to change all of his relatives into better versions of themselves.
From that initial idea, the plot evolved, the title changed (I eventually felt Alternative Relatives was unrelatable to the age group I intended to write for), and WARNING: Magic Can Be Dangerous! was born.”
