How a holiday to Fiji and a chance Howick Street discovery got David inspired

Having re-read the 1970s classic Watership Down on a holiday to Fiji last year, local author David Stanley returned home inspired - and started looking at the animals around him in a new way.

"We have these magpies that come to our garden every day and feed and that just got me thinking, what's the magpie's view of the world?" he said.

"And that led me to come up with this fictional story of a clan of magpies and their struggle to survive."

When he found, just by chance, a book on the biology and behaviour of Australian magpies at Howick Street's BooksPlus, it seemed to Mr Stanley that everything was lining up.

"That [the discovery at BooksPlus] really solidified the idea, so I used a lot of the writing from that book to work out how magpies interact or behave or bring up their young," he said.

"So a lot of that's covered in the story of the book."

The resulting young adult novel, Cordelia's Song - which is planned to be the first in a series of three works - is now out and Mr Stanley is proud of what he has created.

"It all came to life in one night," he said of the story.

"I sat up at night and just wrote out the chapter headings, the flow of the story, and by the morning I had pretty much the whole thing conceptualised.

"But obviously it took probably four or five months to get the whole thing written and then you've got to get it edited and then find a publisher.

"So it's taken considerably longer, but probably only in total eight months, I reckon, from go to whoa."

The name "Cordelia", he said, would be familiar from Shakespeare's King Lear.

"She was the daughter that didn't want to lie and so was rejected by her father as a consequence.

"But I just like the name Cordelia.

"So she became the young magpie that grew up with an ability to see a little bit into the future; to have this sort of premonition skill - a bit like her father.

"I don't know if magpies can do that, but there you go, that's how the story works.

"The book is really about a valley in NSW where five magpie clans co-habitate within their individual territories, but they're invaded by a clan from outside and that causes a revolt.

"They try to take over and there's a rebellion that happens.

"As a consequence, Cordelia gets injured and ends up in the back of a ute and is taken to western NSW, quite a long way from where she's been brought up; she's still quite young.

"And the second half of the book is really about her struggle to survive on a sheep station, which is a bit alien to most magpies.

"She's lost her memory, so she's got to put all the things back together to work out how to get home again."

Mr Stanley said he has written many academic articles and books, but "I have always liked stories and teaching and I think writing fictional stories is an interesting way to pass the time".

"It's part of our tradition of storytelling," he said.

"I just quite like the idea of getting an idea on paper and seeing where it goes."

A busy writer, he will have another book, what he describes as a "fictional story about Bathurst", out later this year and has already written the second book in his magpie series.

"That's called Cordelia's Heart and that's with the editors at the moment," he said.

"And the third book, I've written the first chapter, and that's called Cordelia's Spirit, and that will be the end of the three books for Cordelia, I think."

His aim, he said, is to tell a story "that's going to captivate people and keep them interested".