My back story

I am an Oxford-educated cougar living in Hampshire.  To supplement my erotica earnings I work part time as a secretary for criminal defence lawyers, am a landlady to foreign students, a portrait photographer and a freelance features writer. 

I like to think I'm respectable, opinionated, intelligent and funny, and at the school gate you wouldn't have me down as a kinky dominatrix who in her spare time writes about threesomes, lesbian sex and spanking. Some people wonder where, in a life full of sons, lodgers, meals, commuting and deadlines, I find the time, but there is always time for fantasy. Idling at traffic lights, stirring a sauce, scrubbing a loo - as any writer knows, if you have a fertile enough imagination, you will find inspiration anywhere. Write about anything, real or imagined.

People always ask what triggers my stories, particularly the erotica. Well, it can be a conversation, an anecdote, a tableau glimpsed through a moving window. Personal memories. A random thought (while scrubbing aforesaid loo), an imagined scenario. Writing is a wonderful way of escaping the world but also of enhancing your observations of it.

But it wasn't until I found myself a single mother at 27 and waiting for my knight in shining armour that I decided to try my hand firstly at Mills and Boon. Well, respect to romantic authors, because it isn't as easy as they make it look. I was rejected despite setting my novels in every exotic place I'd ever been to: Venice, Cairo and, er, Devon.

Finally one helpful editor spelled out that, as well as other faults, my sex scenes were, well, too sexy. Too explicit. Hell, I reckoned that if I could do explicit, then I may as be paid for it.