Like most authors, I’ve wanted to be a writer since I first learned to read books to myself. I do recall a distinct moment – I would probably have been around nine or ten – when I finished a school library book, sitting on the reading rug in my classroom, and closed it to find a photograph of the author on the back. For the first time, I really understood that the books I loved had been written by a real person. Being an author was an actual job. Maybe it could be my job? From that moment, I dreamed of being an author myself; someone who got to write stories every day.

In a box in the loft, my mother has copies of the many ‘books’ I wrote as a child. In my teens and twenties, I continued to put pen to paper – short stories, poems, the first three or four chapters of a novel that would founder and be left in a drawer – but it wasn’t until 2013, the year I turned forty, that I decided it was time to put up or shut up. If I was ever going to write a novel, I had to sit down and finish it rather than just keep talking about doing it ‘one day’.

With a lively three-year-old son, an insomniac one-year-old daughter and a job teaching English in a secondary school, it wasn’t easy to find the time to write. But I was determined. Late at night, once the children were asleep, and sometimes at the weekends when my husband was home, I would find pockets of time to write. A month before my fortieth birthday, I got there. A very rough first draft of a book about five mothers on maternity leave that I was calling Things We Had in Common.

Much as I loved teaching, I still dreamed of the day that I’d be able to write full time.

Though I was proud to have written a whole novel, I had absolutely no clue what to do with it next. I read lots of advice online, bought a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook for 2013 and sent out a synopsis and the first few chapters to six agents. One of them got back to me almost immediately and asked to see a full copy of my manuscript. For the next three weeks, I was floating on air. I thought I’d made it.

When the reply came, it was a pass. Although the agent liked the premise and my writing, the novel itself needed too much work for her to offer to represent me. I came back down to earth with a big bump. Then I read her email again. Alongside the ‘no’, she’d given me some detailed advice about what the novel needed and she’d been really encouraging about trying again.

I got back to work. Took a ‘Self Edit Your Novel’ course online with Jericho Writers, read books on creative writing, pulled the whole novel apart and put it back together again with all I’d learned. This time when I sent it out, I researched the agents who I thought would be a good fit for my book and came across an agent called Jessie Botterill who seemed to be looking for fiction like mine. However, when I tried to find her online, she’d moved to a publisher called Bookouture. A ‘digital first’ publisher. As a complete novice in the publishing world, I had no idea what that even meant, but I sent my book in through their submissions page and – within two days – I had an email from Isobel Akenhead, a former Bookouture editor.

One of my most enduring memories is getting that email. I was in the staff room on a free period, marking books at my desk, and had taken a break to scroll through my phone. Seeing the email from Isobel saying how much she loved my book felt like all my Christmases had come at once. We spoke the very next day and, by the end of the following week, I’d signed a contract for three books. 

Though it was hard to juggle teaching with writing, it did mean I got to share my success with my students. I received the email with my first cover just before I was about to teach an A-level Literature class and I opened it with them. Seeing the cover that had been chosen for my debut – now called The Undercover Mother – was another huge moment and it was wonderful to share that with them.

In many ways, I’d achieved that dream of other people reading the stories that I wrote, but teaching is a demanding job and it was really tough to manage the workload with writing. There were times when I had both a book deadline and exam marking in the same week and I’d be up into the small hours to get everything done. Much as I loved teaching, I still dreamed of the day that I’d be able to write full time.

My sixth book, My Husband’s Daughter, was a turning point. Released in 2020 during the middle of the pandemic, I had no idea what was going to happen with it. Early reviews were good and I crossed my fingers that maybe this would be my first book to make it into the Amazon UK Top 100 chart. When it started to climb, and climb, I refreshed the screen so often that my thumb started to ache. Friends were tagging me online, cheering me on and my editor rang me just so that we could cheer down the phone line! Reaching number 8 in the UK and number 4 in the US was beyond my wildest dreams. My Husband’s Daughter went on to become a USA Today bestseller, be stocked in Barnes & Noble in the US and has sold over 160,000 copies to date.

I often think of that little girl cross-legged in her classroom dreaming about being an author.

Even more importantly for my life, the success of that book – and the books that followed in my subsequent contracts with Bookouture – meant that I was in a position to make writing a full-time career. In July 2023, I hung up my board pen and closed my teacher planner for the last time. After twenty years as a teacher, it was a huge step and there were many tears on that final day. But it was the right decision. I will forever be grateful to Bookouture for giving me a career that I love and for enabling me to realise a lifelong dream.

In my mind, I often think of that little girl cross-legged in her classroom dreaming about being an author. Sitting at my desk, planning my next novel, I’m so happy and grateful that she got there.