Readers tend to know the headline facts — the word count, the Pantser confession, my Muse, the Writers Forum award, and the cold-dead-fingers sign-off I trot out at the end of nearly every talk I give. So I thought it might be fun to dig a bit deeper and share some things that don’t usually make it into the official bio.
1. I Was Born in London to a British Father and a Swiss Mother
My father was still a dental student at the time, which is a detail I rather like, because it means my entire existence technically predates his actual career. My mother had been working on an au pair visa when they met. When her visa ran out, she returned to Switzerland. He used the rest of his student grant to buy a ticket and followed her to ask her to marry him. They were happily married for 59 years.
My right to Swiss nationality was not recognised until I applied for it at age 30. Since then, I have been a dual Anglo-Swiss national.
I’ve never quite known what to do with those facts except to mention them occasionally and watch people’s faces as they try to work out the timeline.
I have spent well over half my life living abroad (Germany, Cyprus, and more than 30 years in Switzerland). I believe this has given me a greater appreciation for other cultures and greater flexibility in dealing with people from other countries.
2. I Spent Over Three Decades Doing Something Completely Unrelated to Writing
Before I lost my mind and decided to become a writer, there were thirty-plus years of an entirely different life. I won’t pretend that life was wasted — if anything, it’s where much of my raw material actually comes from. But it does mean that when people assume I’ve been doing this since my twenties, I have to correct them gently.
Those thirty-plus years were spent as a software engineer, where clear writing and thinking are paramount. Although I wasn’t writing fiction, I was still writing, honing my skills in getting things right and explaining them clearly.
And of course I was reading extensively: science fiction, high fantasy, dark urban fantasy, horror, and all ports of call in between, not to mention science (quantum theory, cosmology, genetics, etc.). Those, too, have been the grist for the mill of my writer’s mind since then.
3. I Genuinely Don’t Plan Anything
This comes up if you’ve read more than one of my posts, but I don’t think people quite grasp the scale of it until they hear it properly.
I don’t outline. I rarely know the endings in advance; if I do, it’s because I have no idea how I’m going to get there. I give myself a prompt or general idea and find out what happens by writing it. Every single time. It still occasionally alarms people who assume there must be some hidden master plan I’m not telling them about, especially when they hear that 23 of the books exist in the same narrative universe.
There isn’t. At least I don’t have one. I can’t speak for my Muse, though…
4. My Twenty-Minute Stories Sometimes Become Entire Novels
What starts as four or five hundred words, dashed off because the Muse struck and wouldn’t leave me alone, has more than once quietly grown into something the size of Shuttlers. I never see it coming. The story keeps needing more of itself until, somewhere along the way, it stops being a short story and becomes something much bigger.
Mind you, Annalisa also had a role in it (see my post on where Shuttlers came from).
A similar thing happened with Paranormal City, except that it started out as an anthology of interlinked stories. It was only later, when I came to revise it for a new publisher, that I turned it into a fully fledged episodic novel, with interlinking sections between the individual tales to create an overall story arc.
5. I Say ‘Yes’ to Almost Every Talk I’m Asked to Give
The WI, the U3A, Rotary Club, Fenland Youth Radio, podcasts — if someone asks me to come and talk about writing, my instinct is to say ‘yes’ before I’ve fully thought through what it means for my schedule. I’ve never regretted it once I’m actually there, but I have, on more than one occasion, regretted agreeing quite so readily the night before.
There you go: five things slightly off the well-trodden path of my usual bio. I’m sure there are more, but the Muse is currently insisting I get back to actual writing, so this will have to do for now.