ABOUT ME
I’m not a fan of writing about myself. I mean, how much do you really want to know? What would my friends and family say about me? It sort of feels like writing my own eulogy, but here’s what I think people would remember about me. I love chocolate and old movies. I cry at least five times a week. I’m terrible at sports, and if I run, it’s comedy gold. I refuse to wear makeup unless I’m going ‘out-out’, and I own a lot of high-heeled shoes that I never wear. I have a deep-seated and irrational fear of spiders; even small ones. I’d take the countryside over the city every time, and if I ever won the lottery, I would buy a big house with a library in it and spend the rest of my days just reading and writing.
So that’s me in a nutshell, and if you want to know anything else, feel free to read on.
“To be a writer is wonderful, but to be a wordsmith: to bend words to one's will and invoke feeling with the stroke of a pen. Now that is a feat indeed."
- Lisa-Marie Ainley -
In my youth, being a writer was never on my radar as a career. Neither was being a teaching assistant for that matter. In fact, as an 80’s kid, my first choice was to be She-Ra Princess of Power, but as you can see from my headshot, that didn’t quite work out. Reading however, has always been a big part of my life. From the moment I could sound out those first tentative words, I have never been without a book to hand.
I didn’t take the academic route you might expect of a writer. I have been many things before now, including a florist, a pastry chef, seamstress, children’s clothing designer, carer, cake decorator and a cleaner. I love my job as a teaching assistant and it’s been my mission since I started, to inject passion and enthusiasm into my students English lessons. They regularly make fun of my excitement for books and call me ‘Book Nerd’.
I discovered early on that I preferred classic to contemporary books but it was Charlotte Bronte who really had me hooked. Jane Eyre remains to this day, my favourite book. As I immersed myself into the world of classic fiction, I began to notice many parallels between the issues faced by my nineteenth century heroines, and those faced by women today, particularly in my own culture.
I’ve grown up as part of the gypsy and traveller community and it’s a very traditional culture. One which is nearly always misrepresented in film and television and often in the books I’ve read. I wanted to put that right. I don’t write specifically about my culture, but when it does feature in a story, I represent it accurately. It’s my way of giving my people a voice, and it’s why I like to write characters who challenge the boundaries and expectations placed on them by society.
I love to explore the intricacies and nuances of the human condition. The invisible forces which drive our decisions and actions fascinate me: fear, anger, societal norms, desperation, love, need and cultural expectations. They all play a part in the way we behave as human beings.
My favourite thing about reading is the idea that another person’s thoughts, feelings and ideas are being spoken directly into my head. That person might be thousands of miles away or have been dead for hundreds of years, but their voice lives on in that book. The voice becomes immortal and speaks to me as clearly as if it were a person sitting right next to me.
If you could touch a person with your finger and pass on a feeling or a thought: have them experience exactly what you were feeling or seeing inside your head, we would call that magic wouldn’t we? Yet that very same thing happens in those little black lines of text and no-one bats an eyelid!
I want that. To speak to someone across miles and time zones, across cultures and centuries. I want to share my emotions, my thoughts and experiences; to write something that resonates so deeply with someone that it changes them forever. I want to conjure images, evoke feelings, shake loose memories of things long forgotten, change someone’s mind or inspire someone. This is the reason I write! At first when I started writing, I wasn’t sure I’d have anything to say. It turned out that once I put pen to paper, I couldn’t shut myself up!