What are your earliest memories of being attracted to writing?
It does go way back because I was forcing my little sister to be part of Christmas Nativity plays when we were very young.
In Primary School I would write stories, in particular I wrote one story which went for at least 7 pages. I loved reading and I was interested in Maths and Science as well, but I was always writing.
At Secondary School, I would write plays which were basically rip-offs of Oliver and Annie, but I did convince the teachers to let me have access to the hall to rehearse and I pulled a group of classmates together to act in these plays.
I think we did get to the stage where we were able to perform at least one of the plays at lunchtime on a Friday, although mostly we ended up fighting with each other and things didn’t go anywhere.
Did you get support at home or at school?
Largely I think I was indulged but not really supported. My parents wouldn’t have seen writing, or the arts, as something you could have a career in.
At school there wasn’t much support, there wasn’t a lot of extra curricular activity. I went to Girl Guides so I would be part of doing sketches for the campfires, storytelling and things like that, but I also liked the outdoorsy things as well.
How did your interests develop?
I think I was torn in two directions, writing and theatre and science, and science won out, because you could see how you could get a job, a career, by studying science.
I do need to say here that I had shocking handwriting, so I don’t doubt that didn’t help matters. If my handwriting had been better people may have encouraged me to write more. It was a blessing when my dad got us a home computer and that meant I started learning about coding and computers generally.
Eventually I stopped writing for a while because I ended up doing Environmental Biology at University.
You stop writing completely?
I must have still had a hankering for writing because I kept diaries for a while, although I threw them out after a major life event when I was around 30.
Somewhere around this point in time I did a correspondence course to learn to write. This was pre-internet, you paid a certain amount of money and the organisation which offered the course would send you a box with all the information, the lessons and little booklets. These would explain how you go about writing short stories. They would teach you structure, and how to set up your character’s goals and how to work on setting up a story arc.
They would send you exercises to do. I do remember writing a story about the night my Grandmother died, and there would be pre addressed envelopes and you would send your work back to them and then it would be returned with corrections.
I used to dread opening the envelope when they were returned because they would be full of red pen corrections and changes and critical comments, but it was all very secret with no real objective of doing anything with it.
How do you get back into writing?
I went into teaching, I was a biology teacher, I was married and at around the age of 32 my marriage broke down. I went through a divorce, and I decided to take a sabbatical. I had worked in teaching long enough to do that, so I travelled around the world on my own for two years.
I started sending emails home from my travels, there was no blogging or social media as it was pretty early on in terms of the internet. I had 20 or 30 people on my email list and I would send out an email telling people what I was doing. It was a bit like a travelogue.
I was working on fantastic projects with Dolphins and Whales, I was a ski instructor for a while and I went bungee jumping and just having a wonderful time. But I was also healing myself from the break up of my marriage.
What happens to those emails?
One of my friends kept those emails and she thought they were funny, and when I returned she suggested that I should look to publish them.
I did send it off to some online publishing outfit and they thought it was awful. They were looking for memoirs and they gave it a scathing review, they annihilated it, so that manuscript is languishing in a bottom drawer somewhere.
Do you keep writing after that setback?
That was pretty devastating, but shortly after that, I was in a new relationship with a man who later became my husband, I was writing in my spare time and after we got married, he got a job in California. We moved there and I decided to take writing a lot more seriously as the reward for giving up my teaching career. And so writing emerged as something I was committed to doing.
