During my mid-teens I wrote romantic stories all the time but when I was 16 I received a rejection letter from a women’s magazine. I was puzzled because I hadn’t submitted anything to them, but my mother had. This meant she had been through my private things and I was devastated by such a betrayal of trust. Despite the fact that the magazine editor had praised my writing and encouraged me to continue, for the next 40 years I hardly wrote anything more creative than a shopping list.
In the mid 90s I started to write poetry then took some creative writing courses and after having a memoir of my time during and after cancer published, have now settled into my favourite type of writing – stories for women about relationships, life and love. Having said that, I'm currently working on a novel where the protagonist is a man! I'm not quite sure what genre it fits into but I guess it's still a story that mainly women might read.