With fact, fiction and diary writers stretching through generations on both sides of my family, it was probably an obvious response to say, as a child, that I wanted to be a writer. I never gave up on my dream, though. I've done a lot of other things between then and now and most of them have involved writing, but somewhere, in a very private part of my mind, I was always a lady novelist, sitting at her desk in  her inspirational country house (as most of my favourites seemed to), weaving fantasy and fiction from the threads of real life and relationships.

I knew from an early age that I was passionate about fiction and I read eclectically and compulsively. At university and through my twenties, I was drawn into theatre and ended up completing my BA in English and Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, via the Universities of Liverpool and Leeds. I returned to England almost a decade later as an experienced journalist and reviewer, magazine and book editor, having run a monthly performing arts journal, Theatre Australia, worked for many magazines and newspapers, Currency Press, the Australian National Playwrights Centre, the Australian Film Institute and NBN3 Television. But in time I began to want to be creative in my own right. Occasionally, while bringing up two small children, I tried to sketch out a story for a novel, but never felt I came up with anything meaningful.

The decade of my thirties saw me writing for television. First as a researcher, then Director of Development for an independent, London-based production company, Lifetime Productions, I wrote treatments for the televising of novels, devised factual and fiction programmes and series for TV, and wrote and edited numerous scripts for children's television drama series. This was closer to the creativity I sought, but I realised that the dialogue script - television, film, radio or theatre - was not a form in which I would excel nor which allowed me to express myself best. I wanted to manipulate the English language in descriptive writing; to evoke place and ambience, to capture nuance, to conjour up emotion and analyse thought process. I revisited my subject matter, but despite, or perhaps because of, personal upheavals, couldn't settle on theme, structure or characters of any depth.

In my forties I gave up on creativity, took myself out of "the media" and went out to explore "the message" I was most interested in - personal and family relationships. I worked as a researcher for voluntary organisations and wrote reports - which were praised for their readability and narrative coherence - on parenting and children's issues. By degrees I moved into a new topic, originally known as Family-Friendly Working and later as the new Labour government project on Work-Life Balance. I researched this area with the charity Parents At Work, Exploring Parenthood, the Royal Borough of Kingston, and academics from the University of London, Manchester Metropolitan University, UMIST and overseas institutions.

By default I became an expert myself and then, perplexingly, a consultant in this new discipline. My clients - blue chip, public, education and voluntary sector - appreciated my written reports which I tried to keep free of business and other jargon. Sometimes I managed to make shockingly real for them the impossible lives that corporate demands inflicted on their employees. It gradually dawned on me that some of the substantial themes I had lacked in the past were emerging from running training workshops, facilitating focus groups, analysing surveys and interviewing managers and executives about often very personal matters.

It was after my second husband and I had been through the extraordinary experience of adopting two small children from Russia  that I began to feel that my life had coalesced into consequential subject matter. And that I myself had probably achieved sufficient maturity to attempt to mine and shape it. During a lull in consultancy work I wrote three quarters of a highly autobiographical "novel". It was self-indulgent, unstructured and boring, but I had written over fifty thousand words. A year later I started again: this time I created properly fictional characters, constructed a plot of some complexity and developed a writing style for the narrator's voice. I wrote three chapters, asked a well-respected editor to work on it, and was dejected by the blandness that resulted when I followed her advice.

Four years later we had recently moved from South London to South Norfolk and I was about to be fifty. A friend persuaded me a week before the deadline of the Richard and Judy Bookclub "How To Be Published" competition, to enter my abandoned fragment. I had to find a remaining hard copy - all electronic versions having long since self-destructed - turn three chapters into the single one required, and write a new plot summary. Several months later and way past the advertised announcement date, Mike Barnard from Macmillan New Writing wrote to say that of the 46,000 entries, although not a winner, I was one of another dozen entrants he might like to publish and could he see the rest. As luck (or "the Life Force" as my heroine, Mo says) would have it, my husband had just landed a well-paid job which meant I could take a break from earning money. I wrote the subsequent nine chapters in three months, and felt that in the final third of the novel I had really learned to write. Within three weeks of submitting it, while I was on holiday in France, Mike rang to say they liked and would publish Blood and Water in September 2006.

I'm not sure exactly which category of fiction you would place Blood and Water in - hopefully "commercial"; definitely "women's". I'd like to coin the term "hen lit", as I aimed to reflect the reality of women with complex family and career lives, as a progression from "chick-lit". There's no explicit sex but lots of relationships; no crime, but it is a detective story; it's more thought-provoking than the average easy-read novel, but takes a lightly ironic view of the female mid-life crisis; and has a contemporary psychic element which enables me to blend fiction with historical fact.

I have now completed a second novel, Kindred Spirits, which takes the same characters into a new situation. It involves a more complex time scheme, mixing history and fiction to a greater degree than the first, but will still be an easy and compulsive read. It should be finished by this summer. I have outlines for several more novels in my head, some with the same family of characters, others that are not part of this series. At some point I'd also like to go back to my earlier experiences of theatre and tv and try to write a play, or television series, even a film script.

I have also recently finished Mr. Mikey's Ladies, a tongue-in-cheek look at a hairdresser who turns the lives of his clients into a magical musical for the stage!

I'm still working on some work-life balance projects with Working Families and its Balance At Work Consultancy - particularly ones I can do from home, like research and report-writing - but I hope I'm now in transition to becoming pretty much a full-time writer.

See how I'm getting on with my next novel on my writing blog, and leave me a comment.

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