We decided to feature some of our founding authors over the next week. We asked them all the same two questions:
- What made you become an author?
- Which one of your books would you like more readers to discover?
Here’s what Simone Leigh and Katrina Marie had to say…
“I’m English you see, and like most of the English, I pursued the dream of owning my own house. I went to university, got a ‘proper job’, mortgage, got married…. all of that stuff. Later, I ran my own business, pet-friendly holiday cottages, and that was fun for a while.
“And then, 2007 struck. Suddenly, everything stopped being fun and I found that, instead of being a home-owning, self-employed worker, I was a mortgage slave. I literally could not work hard enough to pay for it all.
“How did we solve it? Easy. We left the UK. I live in Spain. The climate is brilliant, the people are great, and property is a fraction of the price it is in England. So, it’s easy to live well on not-a-lot. The long and short of it all is that I was free to start writing, and I did.
“Meanwhile…I now lived full time in Spain, but my partner was still hopping backwards and forwards to the UK, sometimes for weeks at a time. And he was complaining of being ‘lonely’ (if you get my drift….).
“So, one night, I sat down and wrote him a little story, to ‘keep him company’. It was called ‘Charlotte Chastised’, and the title tells you most of what you want to know about the plot.
He loved it, and asked for more. So, I wrote more.”
“Wanting to tell a story, to make readers keep turning pages the way I turned them. Bullet started as a story I wrote at 18 but, years later, I took that germ of an idea and wrote a far much better book. My readers will tell you it’s their favorite book of mine and for very different reasons, and I’m always thrilled when new readers find it.“
