About

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Along with writing and travelling, my passions include:

Hiking, for immersion in nature

Reading, as I am a lifelong learner

Yoga, for grounding and sanity

Family, for that sense of belonging

Friendships, for community

I appreciate a clever wit, as laughter is the best medicine

I live for the feel of sand between my toes and the spray of the ocean on my face

I enjoy beautiful gardens in appreciation of my mother's love of horticulture

I lift mine eyes to the night sky in homage to my father, for whom astronomy was but one of many interests

And any chance I get, I love to release the spirit of the dancer that lurks deep within me

Fifty is a liberating decade, where one has toed the line of conformity long enough and you become empowered to live life on your own terms. For those lucky enough to grasp it, freedom comes in different forms and for me, it was the decision to finally put pen to paper and start writing. A chronicle of that journey will appear as a blog post at some point, but this has by far been the most enriching, frustrating, liberating, difficult venture I've ever undertaken, making earning three degrees, raising two children and uprooting the family every six years seem like child's play. The exhilaration and naiveté with which I tackled my first novel have long since gone and though the road has been a long, and at times, thorny one, I have three novels to my name and no regrets.

I would not describe myself as well-read, as in my youth I focused almost exclusively on historical fiction or non-fiction. With a desire to haul myself out of my comfort zone, I organized book clubs in neighbourhoods in which I lived, the members unaware they were part of a self-made focus group to understand what made a book a success. What I learned was that the best discussions were not necessarily about the book itself, but rather the tangential conversations that arose out of the discussions. In essence, a good book is not only what's between the cover but one that makes a reader examine themselves and the the world around them.

Major influences on my writing style are the mid-20th century British authors Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Stewart, M. M. Kaye and Victoria Holt, whose brooding novels of mystery and adventure were enhanced by transportive descriptions of settings in distant lands. More modern influences include Kate Morton and Jane Johnson, but one of my favourite authors of all time is the masterful Spanish writer, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, whose gothic novel, Shadow of the Wind, set in the atmospheric old quarter of Barcelona in the 1930s, has earned its place in the annals as a modern classic. Taken from us much too soon, may he rest in peace.