About me

I grew up on the move. My father was in the United States Air Force, and I travelled all over America with my parents. Wherever we stopped, I made friends, but my constant companions were always my books, my pens, my notebooks and my imagination.

I was seven when I wrote my first short story. 'A Funny Day in Germtown' was all about a germ who went to school and played kick-ball, just like you'd expect a sentient micro-organism to do.

I tackled a play next, writing an Alice in Wonderland-type story about a schoolgirl who slips on a wet floor just mopped by the school's janitor, and ends up having a dream full of adventures. I don't remember waving the play under my teacher's nose, but I must have done, because the next thing I knew, my classmates and I were auditioning for parts, I landed the lead role, and we were suddenly deep into rehearsal.

Next: A novel. Combining science fiction with my childhood passion for dogs, it was about a space-travelling family with 13 super-intelligent dogs. Each dog was a different breed, and they were each the star of their own chapter, taking it in turn to rescue their hapless owners from their latest inter-galactic pickle. The St. Bernard fetched everyone out of an avalanche on a snowbound planet, and the Chihuahua was just the right size to squeeze between jail bars with the key it had pinched from the pocket of an eight-eyed monster.

During my adolescence, I managed to go some way towards becoming a "successful writer of short stories, plays and novels" - which is what I put in my high school yearbook as my ambition. Since then, I've worked as a journalist, an editor, and a web content editor. I've written more short stories, a smattering of poetry, and completed a novel, Soulmate. Along the way, I've acquired a husband, two children, and a lovely (but very untidy!) house in an Oxfordshire village. And I keep writing. Largely thanks to National Novel Writing Month, I have nearly completed a first draft of a second novel, In Your Dreams, largely written in stolen moments, some of them in the bathroom (see cartoon) while I run a bedtime bath for my children.

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Cartoon: Debbie Ridpath Ohi of Inkygirl