A children's author whose latest books are about dragon riding Fairytale Ninjas visited pupils in Royal Wootton Bassett to tell them where she gets her ideas.

Paula Harrison, who has penned more than 40 books, including bestsellers, dropped in at Noremarsh Junior School just before World Book Day as part of its reading week.

The aim was to celebrate and share the love of reading.

A delighted head teacher Hilary MacMeekin said: “Paula is an author that is a personal favourite of mine. Her Robyn Silver books are ones I used to read to my own children.

"It was a pleasure to host her, she had all of the pupils inspired by her books and the stories behind creating them. It was amazing to see all of the creativity flowing between the classes and the massive variety between all of the animals the children had chosen."

She added: "Events such as this create an environment where the children can feel safe to be confident and ambitious and it really came across in the school assembly during the question and answer session.”

The children fired all sorts of questions at her, including one aspiring future author who wanted to understand how he would go about getting his own books published.

Paula explained her books sometimes take just a month to write although big books can take much longer.

The author creates not only short stories, but longer more complex stories so that children from a variety of different reading levels can access her work.

One youngster asked how she came up with her ideas. She explained that it comes from a part of the mind that you are not in control of, almost like dreaming. She added her mind had turned to thinking it would be funny if an alien ship landed in the playground right at the moment and the how story would unravel from there.

Following the assembly Paula went into classrooms to do a series of workshops with the children.

Later they had the opportunity to receive some of her signed books.

Paula has a new book series called Fairytale Ninjas with characters Snow, Red and Goldie who are trained as fairytale ninjas where they long to meet unicorns, ride dragons and fight trolls!

Illustrated by Monica de Rivas, the books are published by Harper Collins and are aimed at children over five to teenage.