I am told it was actually through writing that I learned how to read. At age three, I had a little notebook in which I liked to record my parents' and siblings' dinner choices for the day. Whether these menus were ever delivered, I really can't say. But I remember my family dutifully spelling out the meals they would have chosen were someone willing to prepare them. I love reading. I always have. As a child, the perfect school holiday was spent lying in a chair in the lounge room, a book for that day in my hands, with the knowledge that one bookcase of unexplored treasures stood behind me and another awaited on the landing upstairs. I was lucky to have books so readily available at home and a library down the street. I made the best possible use of both opportunities. My passion is writing. Short stories were my genre as a child, although the ambition for a novel was already there. "The trees grew thickly and were beautiful, with dark shining leaves," was an opening I remember creating at the age of eight or nine. It was then that I secretly decided I would be an author when the time came for me to go out into the world. I grew up in a small coastal town at the foot of the South Downs in East Sussex, England. A week after graduating from the University of Bristol, with a Bachelor of Laws, I married the English owner of a yellow Land Rover, whom I had met during my gap year in Australia. Within a couple of months, I had emigrated to Australia to settle in a small town in the mountains of northern New South Wales. Together we established a high quality timber furniture-making business, Mountain Top Timbers. When both living and working together proved a little too much, I turned my focus to teaching music. I currently teach woodwind at an Independent school on the NSW mid-north coast. I play the oboe in a number of ensembles, and, along with my youngest son, run the local Shotokan Karate Dojo. As well as a husband, I have three sons, three chickens, a pony and two border collies.