About me
I was born in December1964 and grew up in Bristol, England. After a brief stint at Leicester University which didn’t work out, I moved to London in 1985 to study English Literature at the Polytechnic of North London.As a child I wrote prolifically, filling notebook after notebook with stories that mainly involved horses, and there were only two things I knew I wanted to do when I grew up write and travel.I stopped writing in my teens and twenties I guess life just got in the way. But I did travel. I spent a year and a half backpacking in Asia and Australia and came home aboard the Trans-Siberian Express from Beijing, in the days when you could buy tickets in Hong Kong for a song.Then I came back to Bristol and worked for another year and a half as a typist for the council, before taking off for Tokyo. I planned to stay for six months and ended up staying for two years. Not long before I left Japan I met the man who soon became my husband, and as we hung out on a Himalayan mountainside waiting for my Australian visa, I started to write again. Short stories mainly, but also some ideas for a novel which eventually became Another Time and Place. After two more years of living in Japan and not writing (but having lots of fun) I got a job as a receptionist for a company in Sydney. With little to do and a desire to look busy, I began to write, and finished the first draft quite quickly. It was two more years before I had something like a novel, ready to send out. I’d like to be able to say I was lucky to find an agent quickly, but the truth is the book was rejected by dozens of agents. There was definitely interest, but ultimately no takers. I had a son in 2000, wrote a draft of another novel, then in 2004 I went back to the first one and rewrote it. Substantially it was unchanged, but the detail was better, more polished, and the characters were more rounded.We moved back to England in 2005 and in March I came across Macmillan New Writing. By August I had a contract, and I was bouncing off the walls for weeks. I’m now working on another novel which is set in Bristol, Sydney and Thailand. It’s going well, but only happens in term time. �
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