Here's a bit more about me...

Everyone always wants to know what makes a writer tick.  I've never been aware of any 'ticking' although I do make a kind of creaking noise when I move suddenly, but I've been putting that down to my age.  So, I can't enlighten you as to what makes a writer make any noise (other than the creaking), but I can give you a small insight into how I came to be where I am today.

Firstly, I was born, which is always a good move, if you want to become famous.  I hear that being constructed out of scaffolding and old tin cans never really caught on (it worked for Jude Law, but not anyone else that I know of).  This happened in the ancient Roman town of Exeter, in Devon, which was considerably less ancient then; we had cars but still tended to duck when an aeroplane flew over.  An uneventful childhood provided me with no fuel for writing whatsoever, despite my best  teenage attempts at trauma I passed smoothly into adulthood.  I was, at this time, writing like an addict, trees trembled when I picked up a pen  and I apologise now for the deforestation of Sweden; I was young, I couldn't help it.   I had to write.

Three novel-length practices later, I forayed seriously into the world of Being a Writer.  I'd written a novel about a ghost - it had real words in it, proper punctuation and everything and, as we all know, all you need to be published is to write a book. (Ha, that was a joke-thing there, high ironic sarcasm - the fact that I need to point this out tells you everything that a lot of people believe about Being a Writer).  This book, astonishingly, was not the huge success that I imagined, in fact, publishers turned it down!  Can you believe it!

Meeting up with a likeminded (and, at that time, equally unsuccessful) writer, turned me into a partnership.  Linsey and I wrote scripts.  Knee-slappingly funny (and sometimes face-slappingly awful) times resulted, as Thames TV became, firstly mildly, then almost fetishistically, interested in us.  We were Being Writers! Our script was polished and burnished so intensely that to look upon it was to risk blindness, and it slid frictionlessly into the 'being commissioned' status.  Whereupon Thames TV lost its franchise and was replaced in the scheduling.  Boo hoo, begin again.

All this coincided with a forcible relocation from my lovely sunny South Somerset home to the windswept wilds of North Yorkshire, there to take a break from writing in order to bring up a pack of unruly savages - surely these were not the innocent babes to which I had given birth?

Vienna, an unruly savage

Alas, this was the case.  And, I struggled, Reader!

Finally, the savages were tamed, with a mixture of unlimited chocolate biscuits and regular whippings, and I felt once more able to return to the world of Being a Writer.  Closeted in my little room, with its view of the pockmarked half-acre of garden and wearing only unsuitable hair, I wrote.

The children brought one another up.

Vienna remained a savage, sadly, and we have no choice now but to poke food under her bedroom door twice a day.

Her sisters, Fern and Riyadh have taken to travelling the length of the country by train (illustrated right) in search of a normal upbringing.  Having a mother who is Being a Writer can be hard on a young girl, and their neglect has manefested in their wearing of odd clothes and refusing to enjoy the music of My Chemical Romance, despite desperate maternal urgings.

And so, I worked.  Finally I was writing!  Competitions were won!   I nearly became a Lit Idol!  I was on more short lists than Toilet Paper!  And then I joined the Romantic Novelists' Association (hereafter known as the RNA because my T is stuck), met likeminded people and found out all about the great world of e-publishing.

I submitted my novel 'Reversing over Liberace' to the delightful people at Samhain.  And, they liked it!

My son William struggled to understand this.  But since he's only just been weaned off chocolate biscuits and onto real food, I discount his opinions of my Being a Writer.

William, struggling to understand

And now, there is no stopping me.  I can do this forever!  And so, I urge all you nice people out there who've made it as far as the bottom of this page, to buy my really quite funny and interesting books.  They're about real people who have to go to the toilet, and get snotty colds and end up kissing the wrong people, and things.  When I say the wrong people, I don't mean they end up kissing the milkman or pensioners, well, not unless that was who they were aiming at, but no doubt you get my drift.

And as for the rest?  I'm still living in North Yorkshire, with an ever-increasing family. We've got dogs (see the homepage for their disreputable images), cats who only manifest in photos as black streaks of movement like monochrome poltergeists, guinea-pigs and a rat.

Tom, my eldest son has been forced to live on a railway station ever since the dog got his bed, and he hopes the family doesn't increase any more because he's just got used to that bench...

Well, if all that hasn't put you off getting in touch then nothing will.  So why not send me an e-mail?  I'd love to hear from you.  Alternatively, if you want to hear my ramblings on a regular basis, why not join my mailing list?

All you have to do is click this big, fat purple button - it's that easy.