Living on an island that's only 45 square miles, in the middle of the English Channel, can have its drawbacks. But where the insular nature of the island can stifle creativity, it can also inspire it and then your mind wanders free above its confines! This is my first novel and I'm really proud of it, though aren't we all! I started out writing as a means of therapy for what was not going well in my life, once I started it was like a whole new world of self expression sat before me. I started writing poetry at first and had quite a bit of success in getting individual pieces published in anthologies. I was encouraged by friends to take my ideas one step further and tried my hand at writing short stories, which I enjoyed immensly. Then in 2006 my whole life changed, losing  a lot of close people from my life within an 8 month period made me reassess what I was doing and where I was heading and within it all, I took a deep breath and attacked an idea that had been buzzing round my head a year previously, which eventually became my first novel, the self published, SphereCity - Life Beyond the Dome. Its a futuristic story (I don't like the science fiction tag that it gets labelled with, as Sci Fi genre is very specific and needs to be quite technical to certain readers and scares away other potential readers) so to me its an adventure that happens to be set in the future The first part is picking up favourable reviews from all who have read it so far and although we are talking a small audience here, the feedback has been more than complementary and they are clamouring for the next installment, so now I'm striving to complete book 2 and hopefully by the end of 2009 it will be available.