I've been escaping into fantasy worlds since I was ten years old. Writing is a release for me, a way of processing the world around me. I'm naturally a reclusive person and love nothing more than wiling away the early hours of the morning in my study at my keyboard, knowing London sleeps and the house is still.

I was born to Welsh ex-pats in the Netherlands, where I lived until I was eighteen (if you've stumbled across my maps, you may have spotted the Welsh and Dutch influences). After a four-year stint in Cardiff, earning my degree, I moved to London to study for my PGCE and fell in love with the place. Between wandering the Southbank with my husband as we fell in love, giving birth to my children across the Thames from Parliament, and finding our dream home, London is where my life truly began. I hope never to leave.

For years, I worked as a primary school teacher. I say worked, but in truth, I lived the career. Teaching is one of those jobs that consumes you, and while I found it intensely rewarding, I never found the time to write anything particularly meaningful. During the height of my career, my writing days had grown so numbered, I no longer considered 'writer' a part of my core identity. Mother, teacher, frazzled person trying to have it all—these were the words that defined me. After my eldest, who has autism, could no longer continue at his mainstream school and the arrival of my third-born, who is more whirlwind than human, I chose to press pause on my career and focus on my kids. It was the best decision I ever made.

With my evenings wholly mine again—no marking, planning, paperwork, assessments, and preparing resources into the early hours of the morning—I found myself writing again. Not just scrappy slips of half-cut thoughts, but stories. Actual stories. And one day, almost three years ago, I sat down and spontaneously began writing the epic fantasy that has been rolling around my head for seventeen years. I tried and failed to put it to the page when I was in my twenties, but this time, the story poured out. Possibly it flooded out. It certainly burst its banks. After 5 months, I had 470,000 words on my hands. Obviously impractical, but also so incredibly exhilarating. 

Unfortunately, even after three years of editing, cutting out POVs, and turning it into a trim 108K-word first parter to something more, it died in the query trenches (99 unsuccessful queries). I still hold out hope that one day, I might be able to publish it and write the rest of the series, but, for now, I've moved on.

Since The Storm Within, I've written two more finished novels. A standalone set in the same world, which ended up being a deeply moving piece for me, which I hadn't expected. It's far too niche to ever make it in traditional publishing, but I like to reread it now and then, as I ended up falling in love with the characters and the narrative voice of one of the POV characters, an autistic child who I wrote as an homage to my son.

More recently, I've finished another way-too-big epic fantasy book, this time clocking in at 250K words. Fractured is unlike anything I've ever written before, though—with it's sci-fi flavour spicing up the fantasy and it's potential for marketability (it's nowhere near as niche as my usual stuff). I'm really excited by this project, but it's going to need some serious cutting, possibly splitting in two. For now, I'm sitting on the draft, letting it settle for a few months while I work on another project.

My latest book started as just an idea for a junk food story, hurling all my favourite tropes at a sci-fi setting. Something to keep me distracted while I force myself to not look at Fractured for a few months. However, I'm loving the story so far, only 7 chapters in or so. I don't know if I'll pursue publishing with it, as I don't know the Sci-Fi genre very well, so I don't know if this book would fit into any markets easily. But it is fun to write.

So, that's me. Endlessly writing, dreaming when I get to call this my job and not feel like a fraud.