Like many a novelist before me, I didn't get to put the 'n' word on my passport without having done an apprenticeship first. After my first piece was published in 1995 I spent the next three years of my working life writing short stories and the odd article, for anyone who expressed any sort of interest in seeing them. I've notched up over a hundred so far, and though I write very few of them at the moment, I found it the best kind of training imaginable.

Though I've written for competitions, literary magazines and writers' journals, it's the women’s magazine market that has provided me with the biggest challenges. Because writing for the magazine market actually pays enough money to keep the budding novelist in stamps it is fiercely competitive. And when you're starting out, particularly so - for every dozen stories you send out, you'll be seriously lucky to get one accepted. My personal best was a story I wrote back in 1996, which went absolutely everywhere, and which I finally sold in 2002. Which proves two things; keep at it and you'll get there in the end and/or don't rush to give up the day job.

It's taken a few years and a small mortgage in postage, but I've managed to tick off most of the UK mags by now; Woman's Weekly, Chat, Take a Break, Woman, Fiction Feast, Best, Good Housekeeping, the Sunday Express magazine, My Weekly and the People's Friend, among others, as well as magazines in Australia and Norway. Though apart from a non-fiction contribution five years back, I've never made it into print with Bella. I'm still working on that one…
The stories you can read here are a selection of my published work in this area, chosen for the not-at-all important reason that they're just ones that mean something to me. My biggest success as a magazine writer remains 'Burden of Proof', a mini-novel I had published in Best magazine in 1999. At 8000 words it remains the longest short thing I've had published. If you'd like to download it, click here.