Gumboots and Pearls was self-published – which I suppose is a bit of a cheat. Q: How were you able to break into the writing industry? And once you’ve written one, even if it’s only half of one… well, the idea of writing another isn’t so scary. Half a book didn’t seem quite such a huge task, so Gumboots and Pearl, which is a wry look at how to be a perfect officer’s wife, was my first book. I baulked at the idea of a whole book but my neighbour said she’d write it with me. Apparently it was funny, it was well received, I was asked to write more columns and then it was suggested I might like to think about producing a book. I’d spend 8 years obeying orders so I did as I was told and wrote a piece about my fellow army wives.
One day she was short of some copy and asked me to write ‘300 words about anything and make it funny’. She asked me to help with the admin because that’s what I was really good at. A couple of years later we moved into a quarter next to a woman who edited a magazine for army wives. I left school to join the army (a ratio of 500:1 men to women and the chance of foreign travel being the big draw) and served for 8 years before getting thrown out when I began a family – which was what happened 25 years ago. Writing creatively happened entirely by accident. Furthermore I went to the sort of blue-stocking school where we wrote essays, endless essays on mind-numbingly dull subjects – flights of fancy were definitely discouraged. I wasn’t the sort of kid who penned stories for her sibling or friends nor did I write anything other than what I had to for homework. Q: When did you know you wanted to be an author?īecoming an author came as a real shock as it was never something I’d ever thought about until it happened. On a wet winter’s morning, imagining you’re basking in summer sun on a deserted beach on a Greek island is a pretty good escape from real life. Now I do it because I really love living in a fictional world where my characters can got to wonderful locations and in my head, I’m there too. Writing a novel seemed a good option, although at the time wrote my first book I wasn’t sure I’d be any good at it. Until the move to Ireland I’d been running a small publishing business from home but my partner’s husband had been posted to Alabama (she was also married to an army officer) so it was impossible to carry on and I was bored to sobs. Because it beats working for a living? No, seriously, when I wrote my first novel I was living in Ireland because of my husband’s job (he was an army officer), I had three small children and going out to work was simply not really an option.
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