WELCOME ..

..to my website. Thank you for popping in. Here are a few words about me, my writing and my blog.

About Me

I live in the UK, in West Sussex, with my second husband.  I have a son, a daughter, and four  grandchildren and, like most writers with another life, I juggle time between two magnets.  I am mostly always cold in the UK - and constantly crave sunshine.

About My Writing

It all started young, at about nine years old, when reading Anna Sewell's Black Beauty made me cry and Mole's Castle by Elleston Trevor made me laugh and it dawned on me that I wanted to be able to write like that myself.

My first novel was started shortly afterwards with a pair of identical twins as the main characters.  I have now forgotten the rest of the cast - and what was happening to them all when the novel petered out after a few chapters.

Time passed and, apart from a continued love of reading, and English being my favourite subject at school, that early symptom of the writing bug seemed to disappear.  Then, in my twenties, I started the first of a succession of correspondence writing courses.  Later with my fledglings fledged and easier day jobs, I began several years of fun with a local writing group.  What started as a workshop article for the group was accepted by She magazine, and became my first published piece.  Several more articles and short stories followed, and at about the same time as those small flourishes of success, two significant things happened that drastically influenced my writing life.  Encouraged by the tutor at my writing group, I embarked on a novel and within a few weeks I discovered that my father had also started his.

As a successful businessman my father was a problem solver.  As a caring and sensitive family man, he was the one that everyone turned to with their problems.  But there was one problem that he couldn't solve - and so he wrote a novel about it instead.  And then he set off on the well-trodden path of trying to find an agent and/or publisher.  At the time of his stroke in 1987 he was in the process of a complete re-draft.  But his stroke was severe and he died after a short spell in hospital.  During those few days he asked me to take over his novel.

Fulfilling that promise became an elongated nightmare that I eventually abandoned and, in the hopes that I could compensate for the profound belief that I had failed him, I wrote Dear Dee.  You can read more about the background to the novel and a sample of the opening chapter by clicking here.

As Dear Dee became an ongoing project in varying degrees of progress, life went on and the years rolled by.  For five of them I worked for the John Lewis Partnership at their head offices in Victoria as Assistant Editor on The Chronicle, a fortnightly newsletter/magazine for the employees in that branch.  That was a lot of fun and gave me the discipline for deadlines. After our move to Sussex, life and new and different day jobs intervened and my writing, and my confidence in it, dwindled.

Then came retirement, and the excitement of reviving and nurturing that writing bug.  Plans and resolutions were all 'shunted' off course somewhat by our car accident in October 2012 - the consequences of which appear elsewhere on the blog. Ultimately the dream is to be engrossed in the writing of another novel - and just to see where it goes.  In the meantime just writing every day again would be good.

About My Blog

I am afraid there is no particular theme, just a collection of rambling musings - but please feel free to roam around, and hopefully you will find the odd nugget of some interest!