MY SITE
Hello
It's not easy having a parrot as your constant writing companion.
Like me, she loves stationery and she adores books. Sadly, she only wants to chew them and I spend much of my precious writing time wrestling them away from her.
I don't always win.
Even having a quiet drink, she muscles in!
The Facts...
I was born in Somerset one February many years ago (in fact in a whole different century, which makes me incredibly old), and brought up just outside Midsomer Norton, where I lived until the early seventies when my family moved to Singapore.
A few years later we relocated to Cornwall, but before long we were off again, this time to Amman, Jordan.
Having returned to the UK, I finally left Cornwall for the Midlands, and I graduated from Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montford University) in 1985.
With no clear life plan ahead, I spent a year teaching English in Sudan before settling in London where I still live and work.
The Fiction...
For as long as I can remember I have wanted to write books. Even at the age of six I would apparently refuse to go to school without first writing a story!
I penned my first "novel" (albeit a short one) at nine, and got my first official rejection from a publisher at eleven. It seems my Enid-Blyton-Boarding-School rip off was not to see the light of day.
Undeterred, I carried on, amassing more rejections as I moved from plagiarising Enid Blyton to my new favourite author, S.E. Hinton. Reading her books, The Outsiders in particular, had a huge effect on me and while I hadn't yet found my own voice, it cemented in my mind the desire to write teenage fiction.
Finally, my first novel, Mohan Alone, was published in 1988. This was a huge milestone, fulfilling something that I had dreamed about since early childhood, even if it turned out not to be life-changing: I was disappointed to discover that I couldn’t give up my day-job (which at the time was a brief stint in a wig factory, I seem to remember).
My next novel, Secrets, came out in 2002. In between that time, I was lucky enough to get a series of non-fiction books published,
covering topics from the supernatural to space (a huge passion of mine ever since).
I'm still writing now with my most recent projects being a children's adventure series and an adult fictionalised memoir dealing with the cheery subjects of parental old age, dementia and death! You know what they say, when life gives you lemons....
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