Pauline

I was born and brought up in a small village in Wiltshire. I relocated to the Leamington area several years ago following the break-up of my first marriage. Since moving to the area I returned to study, graduating with a degree in Applied Social Science in the late nineteen nineties. I currently work as a mentor in a local residential college for students who are disabled.

My passion for reading and writing began in childhood and has stayed with me throughout my life. My father introduced to me the classics, which ignited my lust for literature and my first husband kept the flame burning with his love of the same.

While still at junior school I wrote several ‘novels’, they just about filled an exercise book, for which I won several prizes.

As a working mother of five children, all of whom have now grown up and left home, it has sometimes been difficult to find the time to continue writing, but I have always done so. I have completed three novels, two of which have been short listed for national prizes. 

 Over the years I have been a member of several writers groups, but recently it hasn’t been possible to find one that met at a time convenient for me. I was, therefore, delighted when five people responded to my request to begin a group of our own. 

I am also a member of a reading circle, which meets monthly.

Pauline

Douglas

In this life, I came to Earth under a kitchen table in North London while my old (for children) mum and midwife sheltered from a bombing raid. I seem always to be a late arriver and developer.

I left school at 18. On my first day in work my training officer told me to get qualified, move around to other jobs and never trust anyone. Good advice - I tried to trust people once.

Trained, while working, as a figures engineer and moved to - Bedfordshire where I met my future wife - Lincolnshire where we lived under the flight path for Vulcans - Buckinghamshire where I helped create my children and also jobs, homes and amenities for others. Gained an OU degree, including TAD292. In 1992 moved to a new job in Warwickshire where I started working for myself in 1999 and began writing in June 2010.

Up to 2010 I had only written fiction in business reports. I set myself a target of writing a million words in three years. It has taken a little longer but target achieved January 2014. I have now started the hard part of self-editing and restructuring. Self-published a small book of short stories Ywnwab! in September 2013 to gain experience of the publishing cycle. Calvin contributed and helped me with my awful grammar and punctuation. Ywnwab! is available on Amazon.co.uk in Kindle and paperback versions. Just search Ywnwab! on Amazon.

I write fiction as The Allrighters, pushing my characters in the Cross family beyond normal boundaries into fantasies and the impossible, which I would like to experience for real instead of only in my thoughts and dreams. I prefer writing short stories. My Plan A is to put all my writing as best as I can together in about 20 books and put them on a shelf at home and as e books on Amazon before the Grim Reaper arrives. Hopefully, as a last big life job well done … may try to interest a traditional publisher to get the little irritating mainstream publishing monkey off my shoulder before I go.

Douglas
(revised 22 1 14 and 26 3 14)

Calvin

I was born and brought up in Earlsdon, Coventry.  Falling in the middle of a large family, I have six brothers and four sisters.  Always having had poor eyesight, I was registered blind in 1983 and lost all vision in 1997.  A graduate of Warwick University, I studied History and Politics.  When aged thirty-eight, I relocated to County Durham in 2000, where I worked for the local authority, running a resource centre for visually impaired people.  My first marriage of twenty-one years ended in divorce in 2008, and I returned to the West Midlands in June 2011 to marry Denise that September.

I’ve been Interested in creative writing for some years, and throughout that time I’ve been a member of one writers’ group or another.  Over the years I managed to win several local short story competitions.  While at university I had a small publishing success with an academic article on the Hundred Years’ War, printed in Herald of Europe, a historical magazine.  My first love is fiction, however, and I had a short story published in the award-winning Coventry Tales anthology. 

I am about to release my first novel, Turning-Point, in e-book formats, and I intend to try traditional publishing houses too.  I am currently working on The Escort, my second novel, Penumbra, a book of short stories, and a basic punctuation guide (title not yet decided).  I read widely (audio books/rtf files), and my darkest literary secret is an intoxicating desire for English grammar/punctuation books, the dustier and dryer the better.

Calvin Hedley