​I have been writing children’s fiction for a while now, but then one dark and stormy night, it occurred to me that I had other things to say which did not come under fiction. These other things I have to say came under a completely different category than the fantasy-thriller for young adults. I would hazard a guess that it is probably more personal than any story. It is some of the insights, learnings and understanding that I have acquired in my life-journey and which makes me - me.

​As it is Christmas and coming up to New Year, when typically most people think it is a time to make new resolutions, to create a possible new game plan for themselves, make changes to their life, make changes to their bodies, make changes to their mental perspective. Typically we do these things to improve our life, typically we wish to nudge it closer to the life that we think we should be living, and mostly aspirationally speaking, closer to our inner dreams for ourselves.
 
So onto the self-help book available in kindle now, and in paperback in the new year.
 
I have always been interested in the mad world of adults where rational decisions often seemed to be made irrationally, or at least so it seemed to me as a child. This curiosity turned into more than an interest when I not only noticed that most adults behaved this way, but I did too.
 
It was a desire to escape from my pre-ordained destiny that set me on the path to search for something that works in helping me avoid it. On a personal level, I don’t wish to lie on a psychologist’s couch and have the ‘techniques’ applied to me when if ‘one can be truly honest with oneself’, you will find the gifts within that truth and honesty all by yourself.
 
This I can do. Anyway that works for me.

That’s said rather tongue in cheek, because you don’t ‘just’ write it, it takes an idea, quite a lot of planning, a deal of knowledge and the advantage of being both a writer and an artist so you can illustrate it yourself too.

​The knowledge to write the books from my many years as an ‘Early Years Professional’ before I started writing – in other words I owned and ran a nursery for children aged between 3 months and 7 years for most of my own children’s early years – as well as ran courses for the local further education colleges. Initially training as a primary school teacher after the indulgence of my English Literature and Fine Art degree, and then finding myself still surprised and mildly protesting at being sucked into a career in finance and management, when I had my own children, I rebelled. Kids were fun, finance and management were not! So for over ten years, I immersed myself in ‘fun’ – as well as becoming a one-woman tornado of training and teaching and nurturing everyone from the fifty-somethings who had decide to come back to work as a nursery nurse, to the few-month-old-somethings needing their care. It wasn’t all fun, of course – and as anyone who’s run a business knows, there’s an awful lot of management and finance involved in any of them, including one revolving around kids! But it was also a hectic, fun and uplifting time – and taught me so much about people.

Porlock. That tiny village near the Bristol Channel should indicate the subject of my new novel, The Second Person from Porlock.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet who changed the way poetry should be read. A revolution in how it is understood. It has been said that his theory of the imagination has led to the establishment of English as an academic subject for university study, and I am inclined to believe this. Yet his life was chaotic. He was an opium-sodden wretch, he was deeply selfish, he deserted his wife. A multi-layered character. Greatness mixed with degradation.

You can’t just write about him. I composed a sort of riff about his life. This was a real pleasure for me. The starting point was a strange, ambiguous comment scrawled in a copy of “Kubla Khan” in the Old Library of Jesus College, Cambridge, his college and mine.
​
Who wrote it? A mystery. We meet two fictional characters, one searching for Coleridge, the other for himself. There is a touch of the supernatural in this, reflecting both his poetry and his life.
The book is published by Fairlight Books.

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