Biography

I was born in South Queensferry, near Edinburgh, in 1965 and daydreamed my way through twelve years at Queensferry Primary and High Schools constantly being told I was over-imaginative and full of nonsense. I worked in a bank for a bit after school, and I was certainly too full of nonsense to be any good at that; they all breathed a sigh of relief when I left to go to university.

After an MA in English Language and Linguistics at Edinburgh, I worked again for a while (supporting my boyfriend through his PhD). This time I was in the local studies department of Edinburgh City Libraries, making good friends and learning how to tackle historical research, although once again I was far from being the ideal employee; I remember sweating ball-bearings the one time I was left in charge of getting periodicals sent away to be bound up into volumes.

After a couple of years, I went back to Edinburgh university to do a PhD in semantics, made some more good friends, had a lot more laughs than you'd expect, and eventually wrote a thesis on a possible worlds approach to references to non-existent objects, which is exactly as useful as it sounds.

Like everyone else, in my last year I applied for academic jobs. I got one. Now it was really time to find out what it meant to be a square peg in a round hole. Eventually, a pal who wasn’t blinkered by having trained for nine years to do the job and then found out within months that she hated it, screamed at me (in the car park at the Showcase Cinema (you know who you are)) that there must be something I wanted to do. There wasn’t, I assured her. The only thing I had ever wanted to do was write novels. And since that was clearly an over-imaginative daydream full of nonsense, I was snookered.

What I did next was not a sensible career move and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Without a deal, without an offer, without even an agent, and never having had anything published except a letter in The Bunty, I resigned from my job (more sighs of relief all round) took on a bit of tutoring for the Open University and started to write a book.

The boyfriend (now my husband) whom I'd supported all those years before was paying back big-time.

The thing is, though, that sometimes things work out. I gave myself five years, and said that if after that I had got nowhere I would grow up, give up, get a job and save my pension. After a year I had a literary novel that you couldn’t give away with double clubcard points. After another year I had a woman called Dandelion Gilver, a Dalmatian and some missing diamonds. Three and a half years later, After the Armistice Ball was sold.

Life these days is pretty good. I live in the beautiful Galloway countryside, gardening, running, swimming (in the sea — brrr), writing of course. And no one has told me I have too much imagination for years and years and years.