Snapshot of Life Before Writing

I was born in England to a military family and spent most of my childhood in South-east Asia. By the time I was sixteen I had lived in a dozen different places.

“Life was a nomadic existence between Malaya, Singapore, Hong Kong and Brunei - an exotic, tropical childhood.”

“With sister, Jane. I’m the plump little blonde one on the right.”

“Cake and eat it, too?”

At the age of nine I was sent back to England to school, in the tradition of British families living in the east. It seemed a cold, bleak, grey time after those colourful years in the East. Twice a year I made the gruelling journey out to South-east Asia with my sister, Jane: for Christmas and for the Northern Hemisphere summer holidays. All other breaks were spent with an aunt and uncle in England.

“Long, long journeys in those days. More than thirty hours from London to Singapore and I used to throw up all the way. Luckily Jane was a good traveller and had the presence of mind and sleight of hand to be nifty with the air-sick bags.”

After school, I worked in London’s fashion industry for three years before a chance meeting with an Australian photographer had me moving to Melbourne and starting a whole new life in yet another continent.

Life as a Writer

I have never undertaken any courses or gained any qualifications in creative writing or related subjects. A journalist once called me an “interesting exhibit for the case: Creative writing is an unteachable, inherent talent versus creative writing can be taught.” (I wasn’t sure how to take that)
I prefer to think that if I can do it, anyone with enough enthusiasm and determination can do it too.

A fertile imagination had me weaving stories from the time I was five years old.

My earliest surviving story.

Translation with corrected spelling:

Sunday March 8th 1964
“Once upon a time there was a cat and she had a little kitten and she kept crawling and so they called her pepar. In the kitchen she spilt the milk after that she drank all the milk and after that she got in the fridge and eat all the fish and she had a snack and after that she went to sleep in the night she woke up and she found a place full of spiders and worms and centipedes and all sorts horrible things.”

I guess even at five I knew a bit of conflict was necessary for the making of a good story.

Only when my own children began school did I sit down to write seriously. By this stage I had moved to Queensland, and it was while living in the hills of the Sunshine Coast hinterland that I wrote my first book, Clementina. Later described by The Australian’s Christine Cremen as

“the costume Gothic aka woman-in-peril thriller meets the historical bonkbuster”

Clementina went on to be published in English, German, Russian and Czech. I then wrote three more Historical Romances: Tabitha, Isabeau and The Black Highlander. Isabeau was later recorded by Bolinda Audio Books (read by Richard Aspel)

Then I hit a wall. Divorce and a host of other problems left me wondering if I would ever find the inspiration to write again. But finally things began to pick up when Ian (my second husband) appeared on the scene and, together, we made the chance discovery of a near derelict but utterly romantic National Trust building in Maryborough, Queensland.

We embarked on a massive restoration project that took three years and plenty of blood, sweat and tears. My passion for the house grew as piece by loving piece Ian and I returned the house to its former glory. With this passion came new inspiration to write.

But this time it wasn’t fiction that interested me. I felt driven to write our story, the story of a woman, a man and the stately ruin they transformed into a home. A Grand Passion was born; my first foray into the world of non-fiction.

A Grand Passion documents the love affair between a fifty-something man and a forty-something woman who are both survivors of sad and difficult times. The fly in the face of almost every difficulty under the sun to take a risk – not only on each other – but on a ruin of a house complete with resident ghosts.

It’s a restoration, not only of a derelict house, but of two lives, two futures and an all but abandoned writing career.

A Grand Passion was released by Bantam in April 2007.
My latest work, The Swim Club was released in April 2008. It is a contemporary novel about a group of women, their lives, loves and bonds of friendship.