I was writing a daily journal during 2003, and one morning a character called Ruth 'turned up' and asked me to write her story. I thought I'd try writing it as a novel, as a...

I well remember how it all started.   I'd had a stressfull few months at work, what with the actual job coming to an end, working six weeks of seven day/thirteen hour shifts and not act...

I had been writing for five years, mostly for my own pleasure but I did fling out a couple of (in retrospect) very weak covering letters to a couple of agents/publishers. I had to face it - I was a la...

There are many good writers but only a small percentage of them are going to make it to the shelves. To turn yourself from a good unpublished writer into a good published writer requires an enormou...

So, I was working the City (of London) and not especially enjoying it. I was offered a big promotion and had to move to the USA, and I took it. I moved to Chicago in the cold, hard winter of 2000. It ...

Nine years ago I gave up my job as a commissioning editor for teenage fiction to have my second baby. I had discovered that combining my career with a family life was harder then I had imagined, and d...