A little bit about me…

I am a writer, a dreamer, a photographer and a rabid left wing woke snowflake feminist.

So I was born in Staffordshire. To be exact, I was born in Burton on Trent, notable for its high number of breweries. I grew up reading novels and spending a lot of time with sheep. I was lucky enough to have a mother who was addicted to science fiction and a father who was fond of long country walks so I grew up with my head in the stars and my feet on the ground. I still like sheep. Also beer.

After studying maths at university and training to be a Cobol programmer (!), I became a writer instead, working in academia and finance and finally in travel, which allowed me to develop my love of photography and become a member of London’s Royal Academy of Arts.

I began writing novels to get the weird people in my head to go somewhere else. I like whodunits, science fiction, fantasy and horror, and am a huge fan of graphic novels. I now lives in Oxfordshire with a fine selection of cats, fulfilling my teenage gothic fantasies by moving into a converted chapel with a real fireplace – and gravestones in the garden.

I enjoy reading, travelling, cooking and yoga. I also write roleplaying scenarios in my spare time; my poor PCs have recently been forced to play American frontier sharpshooters battling aliens and vampires (though not at the same time) and medieval French monks fending off demons and the envoys of Lucifer. My go-to comfort dish is a big plate of dumplings, my number one cocktail is a Manhattan and my favourite polygon is a triangle, though I have a soft spot for concave rhomboids

So, outside of the novel writing, I still generally work as a writer, specialising in finance and travel. I was previously a journalist and TV presenter for Bloomberg before becoming press and PR director of a $1 billion US hedge fund for 18 months. That turned out to be the worst period in history for hedge funds, and the police and the regulators raided the office so not my best career swerve. I retired wounded and decided that perhaps writing fantasy was a safer career.

If anyone is interested, I have a degree in Maths from Bristol University – and half of a diploma in silversmithing from UCE University because it turns out that making the ladies’ version of the One Ring is a lot harder than you would expect.