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I live in Northumberland; I'm married with two teenage daughters
and for twenty years I've been an advertising copywriter. I have a
clean driving licence, (apart from where I dripped nail varnish on it)
and am not yet at that age where I've started to grow a moustache
without realising it.
How did I get into writing stories and books? Partly because of
a woman's magazine and partly because of a man in a cravat who
proposed in my sitting room. The magazine was Woman & Home
and I won their short story competition (sponsored by Costa)
in 2008, and the man in the cravat was the actor
Richard Armitage in Sandy Welch's adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's
'North and South' for the BBC.
Winning the competition gave me confidence; admiring
Richard Armitage led me to one website in particular (C19)
where I discovered plenty of fanfiction inspired by roles Mr A had
played and had a go at writing one myself.
Forty chapters later, having caught the writing bug, I was
encouraged to try my hand at comtemporary fiction. I was following
in fine footsteps - to date six others people who had that
cravat 'moment' have become published authors - Rosy Thornton,
Phillipa Ashley,Elizabeth Hanbury, Elizabeth Ashworth,
Juliet Archer and Georgia Hill. | 