About Me and My Inspiration For Writing Darkly Dreaming

I was born in 1975 in Liverpool, and grew up in West Wales. I did my degree at the University of Glamorgan; I studied Behavioural Sciences, but pestered my poor lecturers until they let me include Creative Writing, which was the best bit of my degree as far as I was concerned- didn’t feel like work at all.

I met my husband in work almost thirteen years ago. Despite my rules to never mix work and pleasure, or date divorced men, especially not men with children, and despite initially disliking him, we fell in love. And despite swearing I would never get married, we got married a couple of months after my thirtieth birthday. He hated where I lived, and I hated where he lived, so we compromised and moved to the seaside town of Barry, and we now live in the house that was Honolulu Heights, the B&B in the BBC3 series ‘Being Human’.

We live in our famous house, which receives more visitors than we do, with my two cats: one is old and smelly with memory issues, and the other is stupid and clumsy- very uncat, but they are both very sweet. I work for a South Wales charity, supporting homeless teenagers, and my husband and I are foster carers.

What Inspired Me?

I’ve always had a vivid imagination, and loved writing; I was always going to write- life just got in the way. Over the last few years I found myself grinding to a halt – losing my joie-de-vivre. I kept imaging life if I won the lottery. Eventually I realised I just needed to write. I’d been dreaming about vampires, and I noticed the dreams flowing into a story. So I started scribbling a bit here, typing a bit there, once I got back into practice, Rae’s story just flowed, and I’ve loved every second of writing my novel.