She has sold more than a million books and written over 70 different novels but Jenny Oldfield still has the writing bug.

It's no wonder she can smile broadly as she sits at her comfortable home in Bridge Lane, Ilkley and reflects on a career which has taken off over the past 20 years.

Her enthusiasm is endless. The children's author is currently working on her latest masterpiece Silver Cloud and at the same time is already writing the other two books in the trilogy. For good measure she is also working on a new series.

"I always have two books on the go," she said. "I'll be writing the outline for one whilst finishing off another. At the moment I am writing the outline for the Silver Cloud trilogy and mainly working on a new series called Totally Tom."

Writing to tight deadlines and working on different story ideas is not a challenge for the former teacher, who has juggled motherhood with three different jobs and still managed to work on her books.

In the early days the demands of daughters Kate (23) and Eve (19) as well as her teaching career added to the pressures on the emerging author.

"For the first eight to ten years I was always combining writing and teaching, it wasn't overnight success like JK Rowling has enjoyed with Harry Potter. Writers are not very well paid," she said.

"Most of us have very lean times when we start out. When I started I was living in a one bedroomed flat in Birmingham with no central heating, I was teaching, cleaning part time and doing all sorts of jobs, I was quite poor but I didn't care.

"My children were very small and they would come to work with me. I look back at it with rose tinted specs now. It wasn't until the mid 1990's that I finally started thinking it was paying off.

"In 1994 I decided to pack up teaching and see if I could make the same amount of money just from my writing. I was very nervous in case it didn't work out."

But Jenny had nothing to fear her writing and reputation went from strength to strength as her books were made into children's television programmes.

Renown for creating the mischievous siblings in her books the Home Farm Twins, the stories were transformed into two television series by the BBC.

"I was at home and the phone went and my editor told me they want it, I just thought fantastic! The books were already very successful and this was great," she said.

The books had been based on the village of Nesfield, near Bolton Abbey, where Jenny often goes cycling.

Nesfield was brought to life in children's imaginations across the country, despite the setting for the BBC drama being in Rickmansworth, London, overlooking the M25.

Jenny was given a consultancy role throughout the filming and was able to view the scripts and make suggestions on parts of the filming.

"The books were set in the Lakes and Nesfield and the BBC filmed it in London. It still looked very real, it was where they filmed Black Beauty," she said.

"In an ideal world I would have liked it to be set in the lakes and mountains. From the stories they did it really well and kept it humourous.

"The BBC interviewed 60 pairs of twins and the two they chose were just way above the other children. The dog called Speckle was based on my border collie Meg and they used a very similar dog."

Jenny had her first Home Farm Twins books published in 1997, the ideas for the books came partly from her love of animals, she has a horse called Merlin and a dog.

She said: "Children love to read about animals and I thought I would put some twins in with them. The idea to use twins came from the fact that you could have a double identity and someone could mistake you. There are twins in my mother's family as well."

Whilst discussing the antics of Speckle in the books and how everyday events make good material, Jenny's present dog Tess insists on thrusting her muddy riding boot onto my lap.

The author tells me that if she was writing a Home Farm book now these type of comedy situations would definitely feature in it.

Jenny's career as an author started when she had her first fantasy book, Tomorrow Shall be my Dancing Day, published by Heinmann at the age of 26.

"I was very lucky I was teaching at the time in Birmingham and I had a feeling that the books we were giving the children were not very modern and I thought I'm sure I can do this," she said.

"When I sent my first story off to a publisher they wrote back after ages and said that they did not think it would work and they were not going to publish it. However, they liked the story and said if I had any other work I should send it in. I did and my second book was accepted, so I didn't have to look around.

"I had been using a story based on modern dance theatre group and it was successful enough for them to commission two more books and then I started to do different stories.

"It wasn't like I had to send it to ten publishers, if I had thought about how hard it is to get a book published I might not have done it."

The former Ilkley Grammar School English teacher finds that lots of her ideas come from children

"I travel round schools a lot and I ask the pupils things like what are your favourite names or what is the naughtiest thing you have ever done. I write stories with them and use them in the stories, they are always asking if I am going to put them in my books.

"The children ask me about my books and in terms of criticism they tell you straight out what they do not like, sometimes I even run ideas past them and if they don't go down well, I don't use them.

"I find that once you have the characters the stories take care of themselves. With an animal theme or horse theme I have never run out of ideas."

Research is an essential part of writing a book and for a new series she is working on, called Totally Tom, she had to become a skateboarder.

"I needed to find out the jargon of skateboarders so I went and spoke to a lot of them and they came out with a whole different language with words like wicked and narli."

The new series called Totally Tom is a male version of her successful books You're a Disgrace Daisy, which are being considered for an animated children's programme.

Jenny's latest release Silver Cloud is presently hitting the shelves and to research it she had to travel to the deepest depths of the USA to interview some real American Indians.

She said: "I wanted to do a trilogy on native myth and it was just fantastic looking at the lost culture and at the tribes. Their spirituality is very important to them and I used this in the Silver Cloud books as the character has to carry out three challenges to save his village, the first is to find a diamond from the deepest mine.

"I studied the history of the tribes in Colorado, they are all on reservations now, which was quite sad. It is very different from my other books ."

The author travels to the Rockies for a month every year to concentrate on her writing, it was there that she first created her Horses of Half Moon Ranch series.

"I go to the Rockies and hire a ranch and I get lots of ideas from there.

"There is so much space it has pine trees and snowy mountains and you go along a 15 mile dirt track to get there," said the mother-of-two.

"There are lots of horses there and they have all featured in my books."

Jenny writes both adult and children's fiction and receives lots of fan mail in the form of letters and e-mails everyday and always tries to reply to them.

For the budding writers asking her advice on how to get published Jenny tells them to keep persevering.

"I wouldn't like to be starting out now, the number of people who make it I think is less and less despite JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson," she added.

"No one will take a risk. I would say to people trying now to just keep persevering and not to be put off."