Let’s start with a few biographical details: I’m a northern girl at heart, born and bred in a little town at the foot of the Pennines, on the cusp of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The landscape I grew up with is wild and bleak: think ‘Wuthering Heights’, Simon Armitage and Ted Hughes, and you’ll get the idea. Then, in the mid 1980s, I went away to university, back in the long ago era when fees were free and there were means-tested full maintenance grants – and so my geographical experience extended to take in Birmingham for the next twelve years.

Back in 1996, I’d emigrated as far as Surrey and was teaching English at a secondary school in Esher. By this time, I’d written my first novel (which I fully intend to dust off and publish at some point in the not too distant future) and had also written what I then thought was a stand alone work of teen fiction called ‘I’ll Be There For You’. Since this was long before the heady era of easy self-publishing on the internet, I printed off a couple of hard copies of my YA offering and set about finding willing victims to consumer test it. (These days they would be known as Beta readers.) The story proved to be wildly successful in the sense that one girl passed it to another to another, and so on, until parents were turning up for Parents’ Evening and casually remarking that they’d “read the book” and enjoyed it. Alas! I was too scared and too busy to start sending it off to publishers – and then I found myself taking a long time off work to give birth to and raise my two sons (now 18 and 15), so the manuscript sat gathering dust until November 2017, when I decided it was time I set about publishing it myself.

Since then, I’ve published two sequels to ‘I’ll Be There For You’ (all available on Amazon as the ‘Sarah and Steve’ trilogy), as well as two novels for adults, set at Birmingham University in the 1980s, the first two volumes in a YA fantasy series (‘Dreams and Shadows’) and two contemporary novels which probably best fit into the ‘chick-lit’/’rom-com’ category.

Update: My rom-com novels (‘Shopping for Love’ and ‘A Perfect Arrangement’) are now published under the name ‘Daisy Jenel’. I’ve also updated the ‘Sarah and Steve’ trilogy – mostly the formatting as when I originally published these eight years ago, I didn’t realise that the first paragraph in a section isn’t supposed to be indented. We live nd learn. I’ve also published again for the first time since 2019. (What can I say? Life got in the way.) My new YA series is entitled ‘Steps to Love’ and focuses on step-siblings Zach and Cassie. For anyone who’s getting the ‘ick’ at the mention of step-siblings, the two protagonists only become related through marriage at the start of the series. I think I’d find it ‘icky’ too if they’d grown up together as brother and sister. Books 1 and 2 (‘Steps Together’ and ‘Steps Closer’) are available now on Amazon – so far, with 100% 5* reviews.

I’m still part of a local writing group, which has enabled me to get instant feedback on my own writing as well as critiquing others’ work, and I’m also a member of three book clubs. For anyone else who’s a would-be writer, do read as much as you can – not so you can copy other people’s ideas but because it helps to experience a range of genres and writing styles as well as helping you escape into another world for a while.

If you’d like to know more about my books, or consumer test short stories as and when I write them, feel free to browse this site. You can also follow me on instagram @what_ya_gonna_read.