Julia has spent most of her life living in Cambridgeshire, England - atmospheric and the perfect inspiration for ghost stories. She devoured horror stories as a teenager, including James Herbert and Stephen King in her list of favourite authors, moving on to Clive Barker and Peter Straub. As a child she would watch anything that even vaguely looked as if it may be scary... so perhaps it is only natural that this is the area her writing tends to wander into - even if she don't always intend it to! She taught creative writing classes for over ten years, whilst writing screenplays, novellas and experimenting with short stories. Her tastes definitely err towards the dark side – her favourite painting is Salvator Rosa’s L’Umana Fragilità and her music collection includes Holst, Orff, 30 Seconds to Mars and Linkin Park. ‘Dreaming, Not Sleeping’ was her first short horror story to be published, and she also writes supernatural mysteries (The Saviour Series) as Beth Kelan.