When I was almost five years old, my whole family received a vinyl record for Christmas—except me. My parents thought I was too small to get one, and I received a colouring book and pencils instead. Don’t get me wrong. I loved my present, as they knew I would, but I felt left out, the odd one out in a family of eight. My father, however, was quite sensitive and offered to 'share' his record with me. I still remember it. A purplish-coloured cover with a man on the front. The a

Tell us about your writing career (how many books, when did you start writing, did you do any courses, won prizes? – anything interesting) I always wanted to be a writer. It was a dream as a kid as I loved getting lost in a book. But then life happened and I lost my dream along the way. Then in my early thirties, when I craved mental stimulation while looking after two toddlers, I thought of writing again. I took a course on Writing for Children as I thought I wanted to write

Tell us about your writing career I stopped working as a beautician when my husband’s job moved us around a lot and our children were small. During this time, about 2011, I signed up for two GetSmarter writing courses. I always wanted to write a book but I didn’t know where to start. Eventually I took a year-long supervised writing course to complete an 80 000 word manuscript. This manuscript, Shadow Flicker won the ROSA Strelitzia award in 2017. I published another book, A F

Tell us about your writing career (how many books, when did you start writing, did you do any courses, won prizes? – anything interesting) I have always wanted to write, but after I left school I decided I didn’t want to end up as a starving artist. So I did something sensible and did an accounting degree. As I headed towards retirement I looked to writing as a second career. About two and a half years before I retired I started writing. I wrote a 50k word novel just to see i

Tell us about your writing career (how many books, when did you start writing, did you do any courses, won prizes? – anything interesting) I wrote my first Regency romance, The Dashing Debutante, during my long university holidays. After travelling the world, I settled down to write my second Regency romance, Lord Fenmore's Wager, which was inspired by my time living on a country estate in England. I then published two chick lit novels, The Truth About Clicking Send and Recei

The Romance Writers Organization of South Africa (ROSA) will release Sweet Songs of Summer, on 20 May 2021. This is my first time being part of an anthology, and I promise you, it is not easy to write a love story in 15000 words! Not for me, anyway. I love long, long stories as you will know. I wrote Choices, the first story in the On the Sidelines Series for ROSA's anthology which was supposed to be published in 2020. When it was cancelled, I self-published Choices so when

If you, as an author, you may have been asked the same question many times: How do I become a writer? The answer is not simple, but it should be. You become a writer by writing. But—and there is always a but—, it is not as easy, is it? Some people might have been writing for years with no one knowing about it. I call them the closet writers. Others might jump feet first into it (like me), and first had to learn how to write crap, before they can become a good (or better) writ

Can you believe it that we've reached the end of our #AtoZBlogChallenge for April 2020? This brings us to Z and with it Zillions. A zillion is still a number I can't get my head around. Okay, I must confess. Most numbers confuse me. Maths had never been my strongest point. I do know, however, that zillion must be a really big number. My husband usually ends all his letters (yes, I still got those!), faxes, emails and messages with "...millions and billions and zillions and q

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” William Shakespeare Have you ever thought about this well-known passage from Shakespeare? To be honest, I'm not a big Shakespeare fan (guess I remember it too well from struggling through high school literature exams). Well, I never understood the meaning of it until today. Apparently it means that it doesn't matter what your name is, you will still be the same person. Or something like that

You know during this isolation period, you have all these questionnaires on social media like "What does your surname reveals?" and stuff like that. Some are complete bollocks but I think boredom lets us play along. One question had me thinking, however, and that was: "What is my favourite reading position?" I had to think about it because I'm so used to read wherever and whenever I can, I never thought about my favourite reading position. I may still sound like Dr Seuss but

I know many authors who have a specific playlist when writing. I don't. In fact, I like to write in silence, but it is not always possible. I don’t mind the howling wind outside or the patter of rain on the roof next door. Those are soothing sounds and natural. It’s the manmade ones I’m not so keen on. Of course, it depends on where I write, because in a public place you don’t have much choice. There you may have to compete with background music, people talking, announcements

Am I the only one who feels despondent these days, wondering whether you should carry on with this crazy life of publishing your books? Maybe it is just that today was supposed to be our last day of the 21-lockdown, and now it has been extended to the 30th of April with rumours of another two-week-lockdown. All because of people's stupidity by not staying at home and isolate. Or I may only feel like that because when I woke up this morning, I had to deal with Facebook posts o

You know when you had something, and you didn't realise how good you had it until it's gone? Yes, almost like freedom of movement and shopping when you want and all those over things we all crave for now. What I miss most now is my own writing space. I had this amazing study a couple of years ago but then we downscaled for a year before we became nomads. How I miss that space! That's where I've written most of my books and it had been my happy place. In another blog, I will t

That’s the big question, isn’t it? But, before I answer that, let’s find out what KU is. Kindle Unlimited, or KU, is Amazon’s subscription service specifically for books, audiobooks, and magazines. There are more than 150 million subscribers who have access to over 1 million titles (or probably more by the rate books are getting published). KU works like a virtual library but, before you say, “awesome!”, let me remind you there are several other virtual libraries like Bibliot