I live in Northumberland; I'm married with two teenage daughters and for twenty years I've been an advertising copywriter. I have a clean driving licence, (apart from where I dripped nail varnish on it) and am not yet at that age where I've started to grow a moustache without realising it. How did I get into writing stories and books? Partly because of a woman's magazine and partly because of a man in a cravat who proposed in my sitting room. The magazine was Woman & Home and I won their short story competition (sponsored by Costa) in 2008, and the man in the cravat was the actor Richard Armitage in Sandy Welch's adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's 'North and South' for the BBC. Winning the competition gave me confidence; admiring Richard Armitage led me to one website in particular (C19) where I discovered plenty of fanfiction inspired by roles Mr A had played and had a go at writing one myself. Forty chapters later, having caught the writing bug, I was encouraged to try my hand at comtemporary fiction. I was following in fine footsteps - to date six others people who had that cravat 'moment' have become published authors - Rosy Thornton, Phillipa Ashley, Elizabeth Hanbury, Elizabeth Ashworth, Juliet Archer and Georgia Hill.