The links in my stories

I started writing 'properly' a few years ago, and it shows in my first fumbles. I then began e-publishing last year, and that too showed my illiteracy with information technology. There are bits of headers and footers that slipped into my cut'n'pasting that acutely embarrassed me, but that is the way of the world.

My first work was drawn very heavily from my own life, and set in places that I knew well, simply because that was what I knew. A safety net, in other words, of the lazy kind that left me needing to do no research. In the end, I realised that I had a need to explore two issues that were important to me, and they became the two themes that run steadily through the books and stories that make up the Sussex Border Stories.

The first theme is one of love, family, friendship and acceptance. So many of us end up living or all too often dying with none of those that I felt I had to redress the balance as best I could. Some people have commented that I have written angels into my story, but I don't agree, because I have done my best to give them al a credible back-story, which is often rather painful.

The other issue I wanted to explore was the way transition is different for every person. Those of us cursed with this little monkey on our backs would love life to have gone the way it is so often described in wish-fulfilment fiction: a seamless change, instant acceptance, stunning good looks. That is never going to happen, and neither is the magic spell, nor the alien nanobots, nor the lightning-bolt-powered bodyswap, We are where we are, and we must simply make the best job of it we can.

And so I wrote and am writing as many different experiences as I can imagine, and telling them mainly in the first person so as to concentrate the reader's vision on the central character. That led to another problem, for I wanted my characters to interact, and apart from support groups and other organisations, there are few ways trans people meet up as part of their normal lives, and to have so many such people all living in one small area would not have been credible.

That in turn meant I had to come up with a way or ways of linking them together, which resulted in the tragedy that was the life of Melanie Stevens. If you are going to read my work, please start with 'Something to Declare' and then follow it with the title story from 'Uniforms'. It will make sense to you that way.
Something to DeclareUNIFORMSSomething to Declare

I am a sad old woman, in that I actually care about fictitious people that were invented purely by myself. At least it keeps my fingers busy typing them.