personal level. I loved everything about South Wales from its connections to my welsh granddad to its glorious summers to slate grey rooftops slick with rain to the misty fairyland of the valleys. My studies took in America’s Wild West, Jazz, Religion, Media Studies, Theatre, Gothic Literature, Women Writers, and a new, major influence – Transgression and Sexuality.
Just as I was discovering the wonders of academia, real life came crashing down about my ears. My mother was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer. Inside the year, she had passed away, as had my grandmother. It was a bleak period and I threw myself into my degree, rejecting the more emotional creative writing for academic study. For two years I immersed myself in feminist theory and the study of anything I found challenging and wanted to understand – pornography, S&M, transvestism, transgender and sexuality, subjects which developed in me a passion for otherness and a deep-rooted desire to promote understanding.
All the same, a year into my PhD, something didn’t feel quite right. I missed using my imagination and applied for and was awarded a scholarship to study for an MA in Writing at Nottingham Trent University. While ecstatic to write fiction again, I felt a sense of loss for my academic studies and the time I had spent as a lecturer at Glamorgan.
Set loose in a fiction writing environment again, I had a bloody good time meeting likeminded folk and trying to write in a structured, plot-driven format. Award-winning author and lecturer, Graham Joyce introduced me to the graft behind the craft of writing. He also enjoyed calling me a procrastinator – a red rag to a bull – and pushing me as damned hard as he could to take writing seriously.
Things clicked when I met my husband, Del. Not only did Del encourage me to take up writing fulltime, but he also introduced me to Nottingham’s Rock City, a world where I finally felt at home. Rock music had always been part of my life but I had never shared in the vibrancy and dark brilliance of the alternative scene. Celebrating difference, freakishness and absurdity, the tribes of goths, emos, rockabillies, punks and skaters sparked my imagination like never before. When I became pregnant with our daughter, Scarlet, Del and I moved into Ivy House, located a good distance from Nottingham. But the legacy of the city’s alternative underbelly stayed with me. The result was my first novel,
May 2006, Del suggested we attend a local writers’ event, the very first Alt Fiction. He was keen to hear Richard Morgan’s reading and I desperately wanted to meet Storm Constantine. Not only did we share a love for the alternative music scene but I was a great admirer of Storm’s short fiction magazine,
One of these precious encounters was with Ian Whates at Fantasycon 2006. I don’t know at what stage in the evening Ian and I started chatting, but we’ve been chatting ever since. Those who’ve seen Ian’s home library could attest to the fact that if anyone could juggle a successful writing career with running a genre publishing house in the form of Newcon Press, it was Ian. I was delighted when Ian accepted my short stories ‘Heart Song’ for Newcon’s anthology of women writers,
Something that came to the fore around this time was my reoccurring desire to ground stories in science and mechanics. An interest in steampunk led me to explore gaspunk in my 2009 BSFA nominated short story ‘Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married’ (
This crossover between SF and dark fantasy was never more evident than in my new book,
In the future, I hope to return to the worlds of Sore Earth and Renegade City. After all, a writer is only ever as good as his or her next book. Sitting at my desk in Ivy House, I’m still conscious of the flickering lights and creaking floorboards. The difference is the same darkness I once feared now fuels the strange little stories I write.