Right from childhood, writing was my number one hobby and my favourite form of escapism. But for quite a lot of my early adult life it had to take a back seat while I pursued a career in Medicine. The first book I wrote when I was still a medical student was a coming of age type novel for teenagers. I took it to some writing workshops and was encouraged to try and find myself a literary agent.
In the same year that I started working as a junior house officer I was taken on by an agent but to my immense disappointment no publisher agreed to take on my book. I kept writing in my spare time and decided to start training in what had always been my favourite branch of Medicine ? Psychiatry.
My next book was for the younger pre-teen age group and amazingly it found a publisher. Unfortunately nothing much happened in terms of sales and it was allowed to go out of print after a couple of years. I had my career in Psychiatry to focus on which was more than enough to keep me occupied and I found myself specialising in Child and Adolescent work.
It was a few years later when my agent put me in touch with a book packaging company called Working Partners. After a successful try-out, they hired me to write some short animal books for younger children. I was one of many anonymous authors contributing to one of several series, each of which was packaged under an invented author name and sold on to a publisher. The series I had contributed to was sold to Macmillan Children?s Books where my particular titles were noticed by an editor there, who asked if I would be interested in writing a series of books directly for them.
I wrote my Mermaid Magic series followed a year later by Fairy Dust ? both of which sold successfully ? and this was the start of my 12 year author-publisher partnership with Macmillan. Initially I juggled the writing with some out-patient work in child psychiatry but when my publisher offered me a seven book contract I decided to take a sabbatical to test out being a full-time writer. That was 10 years ago.
Since then I?ve also married and had 2 daughters (aged 5 and almost 3) and now I am happily juggling the writing with being a mum.
My latest children?s series ? My Super Sister ? about two sisters with superpowers, has been inspired partly by watching the onset of the sister relationship between my two daughters. I say ?partly? because I?ve always liked writing about families, having grown-up pretty much as an only child (my half-sister wasn?t born until I was 12). Indeed I spent many hours during my somewhat disrupted childhood fantasising about what it would be like to have a sibling and in particular a sister to share things with. (At the time it didn?t really occur to me that it would have very much depended on my relationship with the sibling in question.)
Which brings me to one of my favourite things about being a writer ? getting to invent the ?people? in my books and getting to decide exactly what happens to them. In My Super Sister I?ve had a lot of fun creating what I hope are two believable sisters who (despite their superpowers) have a ?normal? sibling dynamic that my readers will be able to relate to. Hopefully the end result is a book that is both entertaining and emotionally satisfying, both for readers out there who do have sisters as well as the ones who don?t.