It is a fact that my writing life began as a childhood dream, and the training ground for this childish notion was to read. To delve into and absorb the imagination of others, and to dream that I, too, could one day enter that magic world of the creative writer. 

My formative years were the open lands of eastern Australia. It was from here that I looked towards a mountain range, a distant line on the horizon, under a sky so blue that it dazzled the eye, and wondered in my childish imagination, what lay beyond, for there had to be a different world out there. Of that I was certain.

I expanded my world and it was to books and the love of what was in them, that led to a career, and where better for an aspiring writer than into the world of public libraries? For here there were books, and the knowledge within them, stacked side by side, and so it began...

I scribbled. I observed, and I listened. A fiction writer was emerging, a metamorphosis was happening,  slowly but surely. I travelled. I wrote and published articles about those travels and all the time I kept reading, watching and thinking. Years later, the transformation to a writer happened. It was short stories that came first, those snapshots of life, and I had a lot to draw on. A floodgate of ideas and words came to me. It was the breaking of the drought, an experience so similar in my mind to the physical events that occur with such regularity in the Australia of my birth. 

My debut novel was Crying Through the Wind, based in the West of Ireland where I lived for a time. Familiar Yet Far followed.  Set in the outback of Australia, it is memory and imagination at work here. Memory is as important to the fiction writer as the imagination. Homecoming is the next book in the series and I will finish the long story, a journey in itself, with The Candle Burns Low.

As I write I know that the writing is the easy bit. The skill comes with the rewriting; the attention to detail; making every word count; plots, and the characters that arrive out of nowhere. 

Perhaps writing is one of the most seductive of all the creative arts for words take hold in the mind and lodge there like gremlins wanting to be freed. To write is to live, a uniquely human experience.