I first fell in love with reading category romance at the age of thirteen when I was working at my first job in a charity shop where I volunteered on Saturday afternoons. Sorting through a collection of pre-loved books I came across a cover featuring a beautiful heroine and a tall, dark, handsome hero. The book was Susan Napier’s In Bed with the Boss. I started reading under the counter that instant and have never looked back!

Over the next ten years I read romance intermittently amidst whatever literature I was studying, first for my GCSE’s, then A-Levels. During this time I also had the fortune to meet the man who was to become my husband poring over a copy of Much Ado About Nothing. I then went on to study English Literature with Classical Studies at Reading University. I loved it all; from Homer, to Shakespeare to Philip Larkin.

After I graduated and finally had the chance to read off-syllabus again, I returned to the emotional intensity of Mills and Boon – too often underestimated. I took a job as an administrator and deputy registrar of marriages, and started to try my hand at writing romance when time allowed.

I was surfing the internet one day when I came across an advertisement for a course run by Modern author Sharon Kendrick at a castle in Scotland. I couldn’t resist signing up, and I owe my success in reaching publication entirely to that decision. Aside from hundreds of useful tips, when I told her I was writing a couple of thousand words a week in my spare time she told me that if I wanted to do it, I had to make time and that I should be writing that many words a day. A simple piece of advice – but the best I’ve ever been given. Because I realised that if I wanted it enough, I needed to approach writing like a job and not like a hobby.

So I did. I made time to write every day, and somewhat naively set out upon what (contrary to everything I’d been told), I thought would be a straightforward journey. It wasn’t, it was an incredibly tough challenge involving writing and re-writing every night and weekend, a lot of frustration and patience. But, when on the 7th March 2008 I got the call from Mills and Boon to say they wanted to buy my book, I jumped so high in the air in delight that I hit my head on the doorframe, and I knew in that instant it was the best thing I’d ever decided to do, and that things would never be the same again.

I now continue to live in Guildford with my husband, and am delighted to be joining as a Modern author myself ten years after reading my very first Mills and Boon.

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