Hello, and welcome to my website. After nearly a decade of writing novels, and as I put the finishing touches to book number 9, I’ve finally managed to get myself online. Thank you to the fabulous Annie Pennington for getting this done for me, and for her many gentle prods about the fact that the site could not appear unless I provided some words for it.

I live in Cornwall, with my husband James (a school teacher), two chilled surfer sons and one high maintenance daughter. We are so settled here that it feels rather strange. We’ve moved around for years and years. In fact, since James and I met backpacking more than 10 years ago, we have lived in (quick count on fingers) eight different houses or flats. Our eldest son has been to three schools, and he’s only eight. And here we are, in a town in Cornwall with lots of friends and a busier social life than we’ve ever had, feeling very happy and with no desire to go through the ‘hello, we’re new round here’ thing, ever again. It has taken us all by surprise, and the boys have only just stopped saying ‘When am I going to my new school?’

The last thing I want to do is to sound like one of those columnists who bangs on about domestic life as if they were the only people ever to have had children. So, in brief, this is what my life is like: on the inside, I like to think I am poised, elegant and in control of everything. On the outside I am tearing around making packed lunches, flattening school uniforms with my hands in the hope that it will make them look ironed, doing last minute spelling and tables tests. Then, suddenly, they are all at school or nursery, and there are six hours, all to myself.

I sling my laptop bag over my shoulder and head into town, where I sit at one of my two favourite tables in a nice bland chain café (woe betide anyone who is already sitting there – they find themselves the object of my Special Glare from a nearby table until they leave) and write for several hours. There is a very expensive wifi connection which I can’t possibly justify using: this is vital for me, as if there was internet available I would spend half my working day messing around online. I’ve set a special alarm up on my computer, which means that at 2pm it makes an exploding noise which reminds me to go home so I can pick everyone up from school again.

And that’s my life, really. Occasionally more interesting things than looking after children and sitting in a café do happen to me, and those are the things that I’ll write about on this blog. Meanwhile, thanks for reading.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 7:17 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.