Everything we do has to be a journey these days. Yet although I use words as my craft, I'm struggling to describe my writing life as anything other than a journey.

The earliest I remember when my imagination and the written word collided was at infant's school, so I must have been about five or six years old. My favourite lesson of the week happened on Monday morning when we sat and wrote our diaries. Rather than a factual account of what I had done over the weekend, my entries spelled out in childish letters two days of imaginary events far removed from my early 1970's upbringing in a semi-detached house just south of Birmingham.

I discovered these diaries recently whilst clearing out the loft. They rested amongst stories I had written, in neat fountain pen, full of the incredible fantasies of a young mind. Later, there would be a book, set somewhere in that fabled land which was America, featuring a bunch of wild ponies, which must have fascinated me as a pre-teen. I remember laboriously typing it up on our creaking old typewriter, the 'o's and 'a's filled up with solidified ink, tippex crudely covering typos, all roughly stapled together. I read it again. It was terrible.

All through my adult life I've never stopped writing. From the young girl to whom America may as well have been another planet, I've developed a passion for - some may describe it as an addiction to - travel. I must have at least fifty travel journals up in that loft. The earliest describe wet family holidays in Wales whilst still a child, which began every day with 'got up and had breakfast', along with other more intriguing nuggets such as 'saw burning field again.' What a life I must have led.

Over the years I've tried and failed many times to become published, but not to be deterred when my life became not quite so full of day job I wrote a novel. 'The Boomerang Effect' has been almost three years in the making. I'm hoping it's an improvement on that book about ponies.