Ramblings and musings

I have always loved reading books. When I was a child I used to read my favourites (usually about horses or the countryside) over and over again. Growing up, my whole family borrowed books from the mobile library, which used to call every month in the more remote Herefordshire villages and hamlets such as ours. When its visits were in school terms, our mother changed our books for us. I never lacked books to read, and I feel very lucky to have had that privilege. And when I wasn’t reading, I was telling myself stories as I played.

Having to go to school stopped me playing outside or reading at home, and I didn’t enjoy it. But I loved learning, especially the sciences, so when I got to the sixth form and focused on those, school improved. I studied pharmacology at university in London, which led to my first career in scientific research. A very short one – I knew soon it wasn’t for me – before I became a schoolteacher. 

After a decade living and working in Cambridge, I moved to Derbyshire, where I had some other jobs before returning to teaching and becoming a headteacher in East London. 

There isn’t a blueprint for what makes a writer, although I guess that some of what I’ve told you here, if you’re someone who wonders about what makes a writer, is unsurprising. You might have nodded with recognition as you took in some of the facts; avid reader, book-privileged childhood, and even school-teaching, given that I am writing novels for children and young people. 

But I’m glad I don’t believe there is a blueprint, because otherwise I might have been put off seeing myself as a writer, not matching up to the blueprint somehow, and have not persevered with writing. I’m writing determinedly now that I’m retired from teaching – that is when I’m not working in my local library, staffed entirely by volunteers in order to keep it open, and working out my stories when I’m walking in the countryside. Do you hear the echoes of my childhood? 

I’m writing this first blog on my website as I’m getting ready for publication of my first novel, which I started writing almost exactly four years ago. Perhaps I’ll write a blog some time soon about that journey. I’ve doubted the book occasionally, and much has happened in my life in that time, so that sometimes I’ve even forgotten about it for a little while. But here we are, the book and me, nearly at our destination, and I’m apprehensive and excited. How will it have travelled? 

I hope you’ll want to read What we have in common, and that you’ll like it.It will be published in a few weeks, and details of the launch will be on my Events page, and I’ll blog about it.