I was born in a village called Flixton, in the Trafford region of Manchester. My parents moved to the area from Yorkshire (via Australia) with two daughters, then had me and my brother. There were no girls around, so I grew up racing bicycles, climbing trees, and generally being a menace. Growing older has not necessarily made me wiser.
It was Dad that got me into sci fi. We would sit and watch the original Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Space: 1999. He bought me a pair of binoculars, teaching me birds by day and stars by night. I watched space shuttle launches and old recordings of the Apollo missions. I was fascinated. I still am.
Having two sisters almost a decade older led to me knowing about romance and sex far younger than is probably proper. I devoured their library of Mills & Boons books. In fact, I read everything that I could get my hands on, from Shakespeare to encyclopedias. Then I read The Hobbit, and a whole new world opened up for me.
This consummation of genre – sci fi television and fantasy novels – continues to this day. I’m a paradox who’ll happily stand on a station platform and wave at the steam trains as much as wander the exhibits at MOSI and Jodrell Bank.
However, it was sci fi that brought me to writing. Farscape, and the death of one Captain Bialar Crais. Devastated, I poured my grief into a short story. I’d no idea was it was called until I discovered fanfiction.net. I posted it up. I got reviews. Now, I didn’t know it, but I had ADHD and good reviews are little hits of dopamine to ND brains. It was addictive, and the more I wrote, the more I fell in love with writing.
I was deep in a fanfic when a friend told me that it was too good for the internet. She encouraged me to “scratch off the serial numbers” and write it as original fiction. I don’t think I have a copy of that novel anymore, but it never got published. Though the editor at Angry Robot said that he loved my voice and I should keep writing.
I did, and I had several novellas published through Champagne Books. Then my mental health tooks a swan dive, and I stopped writing for almost a decade. It SUCKED. In many ways, I’m still recovering from that breakdown, and life hasn’t helped – I’ve dealt with becoming a carer twice, a divorce, the loss of a very good friend, and the death of my dad.
Yet it does help to write. It’s part escape, part putting on the screen what I can’t articulate. I’ve always been better at writing words than speaking them.
That said, starting over has brought me out of my shell. Getting involved in fandom again, in playing board games, in joining a musical theatre choir, and in being dragged into D&D by the effervescent Todd Stashwick had all contributed to rebuilding my shattered confidence.
Onwards.