The first story I wrote sold to the BBC's Morning Story and for many years I wrote short stories for radio and also scripts for DC Thomson's picture story and photo story papers such as Mandy and Blue Jeans. I was also doing play and book reviews for the BBC. It wasn't until the youngest of our four children was in the sixth form that I cut ties with the editors I knew and loved and gave up a steady income in order to write a novel. I decided to serve my apprenticeship writing for the delightful Rainbow Romance series published by Robert Hale. I was overjoyed when they accepted my first attempt and this led to three more novels. Then, just as I was beginning to feel at home, the Rainbow Romance series was discontinued and I was left wondering what to do. Luckily for me part of one of my Rainbow Romances had been dramatised for a television programme about romance. A Mills&Boon editor had been on the programme and when she was `headhunted' by Robinson to help set up a new line of commercial women's fiction, she remembered me and commissioned me to write for the Scarlet imprint. I managed to write three novels for Scarlet before, guess what, Scarlet bit the dust and I was homeless again. My Rainbow Romances and Robert Hale novels were all written under the name of Clare Benedict and can still be found on library shelves and on Amazon.

It was time to change tack. There was a time when Newcastle was one of the richest cities in Europe and yet there was dire poverty. Those contrasting worlds worried me and drew me in. I wrote three chapters of a regional saga set in Tyneside. On the strength of these chapters I found an agent and a publisher, Headline. The only thing they didn't like about it was the title I'd chosen. It wasn't `saga-ish'. So my first Headline novel was published as A Dream of Her Own. The sixth of these novels, A Safe Harbour, is set in Cullercoats at the time the inshore fishermen were having their livelihoods destroyed by the new steam trawlers. This is dear to my heart as my husband is from a fishing family and our first married home was a three-hundred-year-old cottage on the cliff top. At the time of writing this I'm working on my eighth saga and, thankfully, Hodder/Headline are still going strong.