MY STORY

For those of you that have read my books, liked my posts, and generally just been fabulously supportive on my writing journey, I decided that it was about time I told you a bit about myself. This is of course presuming you want to know haha!
Well, like all good stories I guess I should start at the beginning…I was born and raised in Southampton, England… and many years later I am still here!! I guess travelling all the time with work has meant that having firm roots at home is extremely important to me, and I love my life by the sea with my husband (James), two children (Olivia 15, Lewis 13) and two dogs (Jack and Lola).
At 20 years old I was waitressing at a local hotel whilst at university studying to be a Computer Programmer (yawn!). I had finished my first year and done quite well, but I already knew that the job I was studying for really wasn’t for me, so when a regular customer offered me a job looking after, and flying on private jets at Southampton airport for a company called Osprey Aviation… well rightly or wrongly I promptly left Uni and took to the skies!
For the next three years I had the most amazing time, but when the company were facing financial troubles it was time for me to move on, and to join the airline that I would stay with for the next two decades, and more…
The idea for The Osprey Series was born on crew-rest one flight, when I was thinking about the amount of characters I met, and the stories I heard in the galley at 3am over a cup of tea. Anyone who is crew will tell you that we are a very open bunch and rarely hold anything back!
The idea grew into a new hobby, writing, nothing serious, just a source of amusement for myself as I wrote my friends into the first story. On each subsequent flight I did I would include one or more of the crew into the chapters that I would write on my layovers, sharing the link with them to follow… and by the time I had finished it I had 250 readers spurring me on to get it published.
Four years and four books later, The Osprey Series and its spin-off ‘Ditched’ are being read by cabin crew around the world, who I hope recognise themselves in the pages, and by people who just love the world in which we live. I feel so lucky to have had the life I have had, the experiences and friendships that are so unique to the ‘flying family’, as we call ourselves, and I love that I can share just a taste of this with those who aren’t part of that world.
Sadly in 2020 Covid-19 sent our industry into a nosedive and I was one of tens of thousands of crew worldwide to be made redundant. The year in which I saw so many of our family struggling with the new paths they had to navigate spurred me on to write my latest novel - Life Diverted. To me this is a gift for them all, so that we never forget how we were affected.
As I write this I don't know if life will take me back to flying as a career, the world is still a very strange place, but one thing is for sure... I will always write, and I have many more stories to tell!