I find the process of writing very cathartic, but the greatest joy of writing, for me, is the opportunity to help others who might be struggling.

In a word - everything. Mental ill-health can rob you of your identity, to the point that you become your suffering. My fans helped give me a new purpose in life.

My next set of books are to help those seeking to change their career, either through choice or necessity. The global pandemic has caused such financial suffering as well as physical suffering. Since my first six books help people with their mental, physical and emotional well-being, the next logical step in my YOU HAVE THE POWER TO SELF HELP series was to help people get back up on their feet financially and doing the job of their dreams. It also gives me a chance to use my 25 years of experience gained in commercial strategy and leadership.

Ooo - I love reading so I have lots of favorite authors and I'm quite nerdy when it comes to books. I like reading about international politics and philosophy, and I would say my favorite authors from those genres are Michel Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman, Immanuel Kant, Robert Jervis, Richard Astley, and Hedley Bull. I also love Stephen Hawking, Haruki Murakami, Malcolm Gladwell, Maya Angelou, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Flemming, and Agatha Christie. I love classical authors too, like Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Bronte. I guess looking at that list you could say that I have quite an eclectic taste.

People laugh when I say this, but when I'm not writing or with my children, I spend my time reading.

I used to only read books in print, but since joining Smashwords I am reading much more digital content. I'm mostly driven by my mood when it comes to reading, so I tend to search under different genres to find ebooks to read.

I start any new book or writing project by mind-mapping and then drafting chapter ideas. Then I go off and get stuck into my research. Sometimes this leads me down a rabbit hole so to speak, and I get lost in socking up knowledge, so I have learned to set myself strict time limits on research. Then I just start writing, mostly sticking within my chapter guides - I'm quite disciplined and organized, which I think you have to be as a writer. I don't edit as I go, I leave it all until the end. I generally do two edits. The first gives the book it's final structure and cuts superfluous text and then the final edit checks for continuity, grammar, and spelling etc. I broadly have the same writing process for fiction and non-fiction.

The story that most sticks in my memory is The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. It remains one of my favorite books to this day. I think it helped me to see a world outside of my sheltered catholic upbringing. In one sense, I think it helped me grow-up, as the book deals with quite adult themes. But paradoxically, there is a passage where one boy breaks-wind during a church service, that makes me belly laugh every time I read it, and I've read it many times. It's so silly but so funny.

When I'm reading for pleasure, I mostly use my ipad. When I'm researching, I tend to just sit at my desk on my mac and read.

My desk normally has one pile of papers where I stuff everything I have to do for the week, my inspiration board (filled with pictures of people who inspire me), my mac, and piles of books that I'm either in the middle of reading or editing. Oh, and most of the time, it's covered in post-it notes reminding me to do things.

Being a writer has been my dream for as long as I can remember, I would write poetry and articles as a child and send them to my local paper. Some were published. But somehow that dream got lost when I finished university and had a great job offer in London. Then as I climbed the corporate ladder, being a professional writer slipped further and further away. But I always kept writing as a hobby. Then years later, being a trauma survivor changed the course of my life, but it brought me back to writing. So out of the horror of those experiences came the opportunity to write again, and this time I wasn't going to let it go.