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About
Me: I've always wanted to write - for as far back as I
can remember I scribbled relentlessly. At school (in New Zealand
where I was born and raised) and in particular during my college
years I loved the language and English classes, my long winded essays
and short story compositions being legendary. 'Susan possesses a
vivid and furtive imagination and if she applied herself to the
other subjects on the curriculum as diligently as she does to her
essay writing, a more pleasing overall grade would have been achieved,'
became the standard comment at the bottom of my annual report cards.
As
a young girl a variety of books kept me enthralled, from the
adventures of Enid Blyton's The Famous Five, (of which I still
to this day have the entire set) and The Secret Seven escapades,
to the intenseness of A Tale Of Two Cities, not to mention
any books about horses. But the two that probably inspired
me the most were, Little Women which I read and then re-read
a thousand times, and The Dairy of Anne Frank. Motivated by
Anne's closeted existence, I had this naive notion that when
I grew up I would retreat to a cottage in the country, become
a hermit and write romantic sagas about heroines lost in unrequited
love searches. But at that time fate had other plans for me
when my life took an unexpected (yet most definitely predestined)
turn at 17 and my once aspired to path became rudely relegated
to secret rambling in countless journals of a very young and
very frustrated wife and mother. |
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I
spent most of my 20's living in Scotland with my children and my
then husband, enjoying a somewhat unconventional lifestyle, yet
managing to travel throughout The British Isles and parts of Europe.
I kept writing - although for my eyes only and later, when my life
dramatically changed and I resettled in New Zealand and I became
absorbed with single-handedly raising my brood of beautiful children,
the epic type manuscript I was so desirous of attaining faltered,
lingered and faltered again. For a time I dabbled in modeling, reception,
even sold Real Estate for a while and it was during my long and
often lonely hours of open home service that my first serious lengthy
novel was penned.
After
attending a workshop at the Kara School of Creative Writing situated
in New Zealand’s Northland (which I can highly recommend),
I began to pen Slipstreaming. But a short time later with my mothering
skills redundant (my four adult sons were by then all off pursuing
their lives) I relocated from The Land Of The Long White Cloud to
the sunny climate of Australia’s Queensland and thought yes,
this is it, free at last to commit to that hermitic life in a cottage
in the hinterland and write to my heart’s content. But alas,
thwarted again when faced with the prospect of severe impoverishment.
So in order to pay my bills I needed to find paid employment and
decided if I HAD to work then at least it was going to be interesting
if not downright intriguing. And that’s exactly what I found.
Manager of one of the first legalized boutique brothels on the Gold
Coast of Queensland.
During
nearly six years at the brothel I managed to complete and publish,
'Slipstreaming'.
Recently
I have been fortunate enough to be able to retire from brothel life
to write fulltime and that’s when my new book, 'Hurry, Wife
Sleeping' was born.
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