It’s my birthday this week. I’m such a big kid when it comes to birthdays. While trying to work out how I could shamelessly squeeze my excitement into a blog, I realised it was 25 years ago this week that I officially embarked on my journey toward becoming an author.

I don’t know how long I’d persistently been telling my mum and dad that I was going to be an author when I grew up. I’d also told them that, for this to happen, a typewriter was absolutely (yes, absolutely) essential. On my 13^th birthday, it arrived. I was going to spend my life creating and writing stories. It felt like the most natural thing in the world for me to be doing (and still does). Of course, back then my vision wasn’t complicated by reality. An author wrote a book, that book got published and then the author wrote more books. Ah, the simplicity.

And here it is – my now faded, discoloured, not even sure if it still works (and I’m not risking trying!), electric typewriter down from the attic:

I tapped away on that typewriter for hours. It wasn’t the quietest of machines, and I only found out years later how it used to drive my mum and dad insane with the repetitive clunking vibrating through the ceiling every night and every weekend. I subjected my poor parents to that through the next five years of my school days, through uni (I still lived at home), until I eventually packed my bags and took my trusty typewriter to my very first flat when I embarked on my teaching career.

I produced a lot of work over the years as I tried to hone my skills and discover what type of writer I was. I spent most of my teenage years writing plays and sketches and performing them in the local church hall. I wrote a children’s novel, and a series of children’s books. I tried my hand at short stories in-between working on novels – horror, sci-fi, crime and romance were all genres I sampled. Sometimes it feels like it’s taken a very long time to find my niche. But as I wrote my first paranormal romance when I was 17, I think I’ve always known. The journey between then and now is a whole other story.

I still find it scary to think 25 years have passed since I unwrapped that present. My initial thought was that 25 years on, I still haven’t made it. But by saying that, I’m wrongly intimating the same for every other author out there who hasn’t signed on the dotted line yet. It’s during moments like that, when I put myself down, that I need to revert back to a time when I didn’t need a book deal or pay cheque to convince myself I was an author. Back when the only proof I needed was what I’d written on a blank page. More than that, it was my desire to keep filling those blank pages even when I didn’t know if they’d ever be read.

And that leads me on to the real purpose of this blog…

If you’ve been stalking this blog or following me on Twitter, you’ll know I’ve recently embarked on submissions. I’ve started getting Blood Roses out there and it’s Beguiling The Enemy’s turn this week. So as part of that, I’ve got a chapter of Beguiling The Enemy available for anyone who’d like to read it (please be over 18!). All you have to do is contact me over the next few days via my email on this blog or alternatively DM me, and I’ll send you the chapter as soon as I can. It’s 100% Kane and Caitlin, so if you enjoyed my New Voices entry, you’ll hopefully enjoy this too.

I’d love to hear from you.

xxx