The Fly In, Fly Out and Summer Harvest author answers our questions.
Describe yourself in three words?
Small, fiery cupcake.
What three things do you dislike?
Being condescended to. Being taken for granted. That feeling you get when you’re cosy in bed and it’s freezing and you really, really need to go to the loo but don’t want to get cold!
What three things do you like?
That awesome chilli-rush you get after eating a fiery Thai dish. Making people laugh. Walking through puddles while wearing wellies.
What would you like to think people can get from reading your books?
Hopefully a feeling that things can work out for anyone as long as they’re willing to take risks and not look for perfection in life.
What do you think your life will be like 20 years from now?
I don’t even know where I’ll be living next year, so 20 years from now? Hopefully I’m still healthy and relatively sane!
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Is excessively swearing a writing quirk? I’ve been told I’m rather vocal when I’m pottering away at my keyboard!
Where do you get your information or ideas for your books?
Everywhere! My own experience, friends’ experiences, things I read in the paper, podcasts, radio, pure imagination. In short, everywhere.
What do you like to do when you're not writing?
Travelling, cooking, spending time with interesting people.
What do you think makes a good story?
Emotion. It doesn’t matter the genre or the length of the tale, as long as it can hook into your emotions and gets you laughing, crying, angry and maybe feeling a little pants-happy as well, it’s a great story.
As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?
I wanted to be a historian. I ended up almost getting there too, before writing kidnapped me and took me on this wild ride.
If I were for sale the ad would say…
For Urgent Sale: Slightly neurotic author. Is house trained. Can sometimes get over-excited and has been known to bite. Will go to the right buyer who understands the species and who comes armed with an ability to carry long rambling philosophical conversations while liberally pouring wine or cups of tea. Must go to home with some variety of small fluffy animal, which will be necessary for patting and purring duties.
What is your life motto?
Don’t assume anything! A very wise friend of mine who had spent well over a decade as an expatriate in Saudi Arabia and who had supported her husband through surviving cancer three times gave me this advice and I live by it. So many of the world’s dramas come from miscommunication and could be solved by people asking questions rather than making assumptions.
What is your most memorable moment?
I have so many! Let’s go for a funny one. The one that’s currently coming to mind is being yelled at in a Saudi mall by a religious policeman who was wearing a purple robe and platform shoes (using a megaphone) while my friend Aisha was pulling faces behind his back, trying to make me laugh. (I should note that the reason he was telling me off in the first place was because he had decided my laughter was disrupting the mall’s morning tranquillity!)
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