About me
The trouble with writing a potted biography is that you have to leave so much out. And once reduced to a series of dates and milestones, a biography can have about as much narrative tension as a plate of overcooked linguini. Particularly so in my case, because I lack most of the ingredients that make for an arresting read. As far as I know, I did not get separated from anyone important at birth, my father was not at any time a Russian spy, celebrated concert pianist or serial killer, I did not spend much of my childhood hopping globally from diplomatic residence to embassy to air force base (with all the attendant psychological difficulties that biographers so love to explore) and I cannot list grave-digger, arctic explorer, covert operations executive for GCHQ, fish filleter (anything to do with the fish industry, sadly), prostitute or taxidermist among my previous jobs.
I am, therefore, a publicist’s worst nightmare. And even more drearily, what I can tell you is that – yawn - I wanted to be a writer just as soon as I could hold a crayon, that I had one of those inspirational English teachers (Mrs Lees-Jefferies, are you out there?) who always told me I was going to be brilliant/famous/a credit to my parents as long as I remembered to use capital letters, parents that divorced during my early teens (affording me at least a degree of angst, privation and lightly off the rails rebellion, if not prison or the obligatory tortured soul), and a London SW2 birthplace, i.e. Brixton. So even if we did move to the leafy suburbs soon after, I can at least claim the sort of gritty beginning that is so fashionable these days.
But none of that is important. If anything is important in this sort of biography (i.e. one on a writer’s website), it is the process by which they go from being and doing one thing (in my case, grammar school, bank clerk, recruitment consultant, Open University student and trainee primary school teacher) to the thing they have always wanted to be and do above all else. By anyone’s yardstick, one of the luckiest and happiest positions a writer can find themselves in.
That’s how I’ve always felt about it, anyway. Which goes no way whatsoever towards explaining it. But concentrating on the facts for a moment, I can pinpoint the beginning of my writing career proper with some accuracy. It was when I had an article about being a mature teaching student published in the Times Educational Supplement, shortly after finishing a PGCE. Rather handily, I had also by that time left the recruitment industry, moved from London to Wales with my husband’s job (and him also, of course), and brought our three then quite small children along too. As anyone who had ever had three quite small children in their lives will know, it is often not terribly economically viable to move to somewhere where you know not a single soul, commence a poorly paid job and then hand over all your wages in childcare. Funny to think that had my mum lived round the corner, I might be invigilating SATS tests right now, instead of sitting here writing this.
As it was, I had a cheque for ninety pounds (hurrah! I had been paid for writing something!), a place on the register for some part-time supply teaching, and about five hours a week in which my offspring were variously at school, or nursery school, or asleep. I decided, therefore, that I would use those five hours. My plan was to make sufficient money from my writing that when the time came for my youngest to start nursery school, I would already be a proper writer, thereby rebuffing any suggestions from any quarter whatsoever that what I really ought to do was get another proper job.
So that’s what I did, and that’s how I got here. It took me nine months to repeat my TES success, breaking the drought with a story in the People’s Friend. Which paid me even less - the dizzy sum of fifty pounds. Since then I have written over a hundred short stories and articles, many for the women’s magazine market, some romantic, some literary, some raunchy…plus numerous pieces about writing itself, and a spot of journalism here and there for the Western Mail. And on the day my youngest child started school, I started my first novel, Julia Gets a Life. I don’t know if I’m still on the Cardiff County Council supply teaching register. I like to think I could still turn my hand to it if needs be. But they never ever called me. C’est la vie.