ABOUT ME

 

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Writing novels has been my vocation for some years now, following on from a previous career as a chartered psychologist in the defence industry. I love the thrill of building a world in miniature; the challenge of capturing atmosphere in words; the uncertainty over where my characters will take me. I don't have a fancy desk or a book-lined office and I don't really have any rituals or requirements other than a handful of pens in different colours, a few notepads and a small, basic laptop. I keep those items in a box and work wherever I want – usually in front of the fire in winter and out in the garden in summer.

 

I live in Huddersfield with my partner and our two daughters, squeezing in my writing between school runs and dog walks (for our beloved german shepherd/border collie cross). Crammed in the other gaps of time are knitting, gardening, guitar-playing, dress-making. For a long time, family history research was a major hobby and I have written up my findings in 'A History of My Family' which is for sale alongside my novels on Amazon. I also assisted my Granddad in editing his memoirs ('A Wartime Boyhood in Huddersfield' by Russell Jones) which are also on Amazon.

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Reading is of course a great pleasure for me and I am working my way through all those classics that a writer should really have read. In my younger days, I loved D.H.Lawrence, Graham Greene and the Brontes. More recently I've been very affected by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's brutally excellent works, following which a restorative dose of wit, hilarity and intellectual prowess from Jane Austen has been necessary. Daphne Du Maurier, with her genre-defying talent, is a huge inspiration. As regards short stories, they are a form I just haven't been able to master writing, and don't often enjoy reading, but Roald Dahl does it brilliantly, and Saki is, in my opinion, the all-time expert. I read modern fiction too, usually at random or as recommended by others. Two of my all-time favourites are Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife and Emma Donoghue's Room. A book from which I experienced a lingering resonance was Kjersti Skomsvold's The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am – a beautifully observed and subtle tragedy. Susan Hill's A Kind Man had a similar effect – I love the elegance of her prose. Two stunning reads that kept me gripped from start to finish are Benjamin Wood's The Ecliptic and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale For The Time Being – both have that satisfying mix of high concept and strong plot.

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Sometimes people pay me the enormous compliment of asking for my advice about writing. My answer is always, if you are thinking about writing, just sit down and do it. Along the way you will benefit from reading widely and studying how other authors do it, but you won't know the lessons you are looking for until you stumble over the difficulties in your own writing – when you sense the pace is sinking, or you want a device for switching scenes believably, or conveying information without weighing down the story, or turning a wallowing bit of dialogue into something snappy, you can pick up any novel, flick through and see how someone else made it work. I've had countless Punch moments, reading someone else's novel and thinking, that's the way to do it! Also, it goes without saying really, buy a dictionary, thesaurus and a decent grammar book (The Grammar Bible is my favourite, and incidentally, charity shops are stuffed with such reference books priced under a quid so there is no excuse for not acquiring them – equally most things that require a large outlay of cash are completely unnecessary for writing). It's hard at first to make yourself sit down and just write, but the more you do, the more joy you will discover. Don't write to be published – write because you love it. That goes against the advice of one well known literary agent, who said in an interview I happened to read that she could not understand why anyone would write upon a topic not on trend or unlikely to fit with commercial expectations. The answer to that is, who the hell wants to write a story that everyone expects, or worse, that everyone else is already writing? Write about what fires you up inside and you will likely find, if you put in the hard yards of editorial pruning and sculpting, that it resonates with other people too.

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