I kept writing.

Me pretending to write whilst visiting the Jane Austen Centre in Bath. Photo by my sister.

Looking back, when I bought my first laptop and sat down hoping to write I was still numb and broken after years of coping with dreadful things. The helplessness of holding Mum's hand and seeing the fear in her eyes because she knew she was dying. The rage that I couldn’t do anything to save her. Anyone who has faced this knows about the isolating sense of life marching on all around you, whilst you're struggling.

Around my day job, I’d been training in shiatsu, a form of acupressure, because I wanted to help people. I gave it up. I was an iced-over river filled with jagged rusted iron, and I didn’t want that ice to melt because being frozen was the only thing holding me together.

Life had left me devoid of dreams. But eventually I bought that laptop. I had no idea what to write. I just sat there and started typing. I knew I had to sort myself out. Perhaps writing, the thing that had kept me going so long ago, could help me come through this.

I wrote about Vivianna, a wounded healer. No prizes for guessing why I needed to write that! I didn’t want to write about losing a parent, that was too close to my own experience, but I knew Vivianna had lost a loved one. The first scene was Vivi dreaming of her dead husband, who’d been killed by a dragon. Like me, this character had quite literally lost her ability to help/heal others, though that turned out to be the only thing we had in common. All I knew was that Vivi was a fighter, despite her fragility, and that she would face down a dragon again.

The next thing I realised was that she had a platonic male friend, a powerful mage with the ability to weave fire. The second scene I wrote was a big medieval-style banquet held to greet human ambassadors, in which Vivi’s friend created breathtaking fire sculptures that danced through the air without burning anyone. This character eventually became the novel's hero, Tallis Fire-Weaver.

In retrospect, writing about bereavement was a way to pour my pain onto the page/screen. I was trying to figure out how to ‘come back to life.’ But after a few scenes I was tired of writing about grief and not sure where that story was going. I didn’t return to it until after I finished my first novel.

Next, I wrote the book that would become EMPRESS OF STARS AND SHADOWS. It was easier because I knew how the story would go, though it changed from the one I remembered. I was updating characters I’d known since my sister and I created them, back when we were kids. I ditched some of hers and added new ones but kept my old pal Tira because he’s so ambiguous and fun to write. EMPRESS is a Fantasy-Space Opera hybrid (I plan to return to it soon because it needs a re-write).

First novel completed, and having studied numerous books on writing, I started thinking about Vivianna again. I re-wrote the original opening scene, where Tallis rescues her from nightmares about the dragon. I’d realised I didn’t want the heart of the novel to be about grief anymore. I wanted it to be about the sort of intense romantic love that’s worlds away from sappy Valentine’s cards because it’s fundamental to who you are. I knew Vivianna and Tallis had been lovers, but it hadn’t worked out, because he was haunted by memories of another woman whom he’d only known through the Dream Realms: Selena. The novel evolved, becoming Tallis and Selena’s story, with Vivi’s arc woven into it, and eventually became THE SOUL SIREN.

Writing the first draft scared me, because I didn’t know the story. It felt like careening down an icy slope, with no idea where I was headed. I freaked out when I realised it was going to have a mystery element: the task of catching a murderer is what brings Selena and Tallis together in their waking life. Yet I learned to trust my subconscious to make the right connections and reveal the story.

That book has gone through numerous drafts since then. It was the first novel that I took extracts of to writing conferences and it did get interest from Agents. At that point I wanted readers to ‘meet’ and hopefully love the characters in my novels, and like a lot of writers starting out I saw traditional publishing as the only way to achieve that.

I had requests to read the full manuscript but no offers of representation. I was told that my writing was good enough to get an Agent, but Fantasy Romance was too ‘niche’ a market: ‘too romantic to appeal to Fantasy readers’ whilst Romance readers would be ‘put-off’ by the Fantasy setting.

But I kept writing Fantasy Romance anyway. To me, there’s nothing more fun to write about. It has high stakes, so everything feels more intense. It’s Saving The World Whilst Falling In Love. As I write this in 2026, it’s exciting to see that Fantasy Romance/Romantasy is hugely popular with readers.

Whilst writing THE SOUL SIREN, I started getting ideas for another book. Of course, it also had dragons because dragons always make a story fun to write.