My mother likes to boast that I was reading at the age of three. I'm not sure if that's strictly true but my childhood memories are mostly of being indoors with a book of some description. I distinctly remember having a Ladybird copy (English young children's books) of Dracula so I think my tastes were set quite early. Like a friend once said, while other young girls wanted to be ballerinas, I kind of always wanted to be a vampire.

I grew up in Belgium and went to a multi-national school before moving back to England to get my first degree. Microbiology and Virology... what was I thinking? Naturally I didn't do anything with it, in fact the thought of real life was off putting enough that I went and did another degree straight away. Medical herbalism this time, much better although it was in my final year of this degree that I redisovered writing. Not sure why I ever stopped because once I started again it became a compulsion.

Once the second degree was finished I was stuck, I didn't want to practice herbalism, I wanted to write... only write. So I got a job in a health food shop and that was the first in a long line of short term jobs to pay the bills while I wrote. Some of them were brilliant though. I met some of my best friends ever when I was a barista in a coffee shop and I got many wonderful books and ideas when I worked in a sex shop... okay not technically a sex shop as we didn't sell porn but still an adult 'toy' shop. During this time I lived with my sister which was also brilliant but made me incredibly lazy. It took nearly five years before I actually wrote a full length, complete novel.

Moving to the other end of the country to live with one of my best friends, and I would go as far as to call her my muse, really kickstarted the novel writing and now I have several that are complete, although again it took me a while to actually start sending them out. I don't know if other writers feel the same but they're my babies and rejection is extremely painful.