Welcome. One and All

So I've decided to start a my blog where I can post about my writing journey as well as the books as I love.

So...a little bit about me. I have loved reading for as long as I can remember. From my wonderful mum reading Black Beauty to me when I was little, to be being handed my first copy of Pride & Prejudice when I was 12 years old (I say first because I know have no fewer than 5 copies of it!). Standing in line at midnight for the last Harry Potter, and staying up until 4am to finish a trilogy in a weekend.

Books are enormous part of my life. They are my escape from life. I love my kids and my husband, of course, but a few hours living as a Bookseller in Scotland, or a teenager in a post-apocalyptic world, or a middle class woman in the eighteenth century is a welcome break.

And I have loved writing for almost as long. I can remember the exact moment it started. Picture a little nervous bookworm, just 10 years old, sat in English class. We were given a creative writing task. A picture. We had to make up a story about what we thought was going on the picture. It was a woman crying. Everybody else wrote around half a page to a page of the terrible things they thought could have made this woman cry. Such as she dropped her popcorn at the cinema (legit what someone wrote). I wrote a 3 page description of a love affair gone wrong (I watched far too many rom-coms as a child...who am I kidding I still do). And that was it. Write I did. All the time. My house was filled with the beginnings of epic romances, but I never managed to finish them.

But then I decided I just needed to sit my arse down and get it done. I'm currently 58,000 words into the first draft of my novel. So hopefully this is the one that goes the distance.

Tell me it's not just me that got Hercules in their head then.