amalwriter

I don’t need an alarm clock, my ideas wake me.

Ray Bradbury

If only writing was like painting a fence; you start at one end, work consistently, stop when it’s done and step back to admire your completed work. Unfortunately, writing is the opposite of fence painting, it has no definable timeline and is a lonely endeavour. So what drives me to do it? The ideas. The ideas won’t go away, they demand attention and a voice.

The stories are the vehicles that carry the ideas to the audience. Behind the entertaining plots, there are thought-provoking questions that the audience will take away with them. One of the strongest themes that runs through all my stories, is the parent-child bond, how it drives so much of what we do. In Populus, Kain’s mother makes the ultimate sacrifice for humanity but at the expense of her daughter. In Corvus, three very different parent-child relationships drive the plot. In The Lucky Penny, the parents come to a gruesome end and the focus shifts to the sibling relationship. I have been a full-time mother for twenty-five years and the complexities of familial relationships and their impact on so many critical decisions are fascinating to me.

Prior to this, I worked for a number of years in Financial Technology following the completion of Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science. However, I continued my childhood passion of writing short stories throughout my years of working in IT. It was my childhood spent absorbing Star Trek, Star Wars and all the Hollywood westerns that sparked my love of cinema and especially those genres. I hope that love shines through, and my experiences as a mother and woman-of-colour brings something fresh to the genres.