Ein kleine background information

I've always loved writing.

When I was very young, I used to make up my own stories having read every book I owned, plus half of the available books at the library. I'd even exhausted the stories that my Dad used to make up for me; I tired of the conventional very early on. Perhaps that is where I got it from.

Dad was a joiner by trade and an excellent one. He made several items of furniture for our home and made me a few things when I moved out into my own place, including a gothic inspired bookcase which he and I designed together. He also used to write, not novels or anything like that but poems, limericks and letters. Lots of letters. Not quite to the level that Spike Milligan did but a significant amount nonetheless.

So, he was a creative man. Clearly. Thankfully I inherited that gene.

When I was at College, I wanted to be a music journalist. I lived and breathed music, read the NME, Kerrang, Smash Hits and any other music publication I could get my hands on. I wanted to work on magazines and dreamed of interviewing up and coming singers and bands and how ace that would be.

I applied for the London College of Printing - the only way to get into magazines at the time as I'd decided against the other way, via newspapers, as that was way too slow and way too political. I wrote a piece for my application, completed all the forms and waited.

My college English teacher had told me, forthrightly, that my "piece" was dreadful and that there was no way I'd get in with that. "You need to start over", he said. Well, I didn't, and it was that I learned later, that actually got me the interview.

There were exams, tests and interviews on the day. All the tests I passed and the interview was going really well, with them raving about the piece I had written for my application until they asked how I would write Marvin Gaye's obituary.

I couldn't believe they could ask such a hypothetical question; I loved Marvin Gaye. Yes, you've guessed it, it wasn't hypothetical. Marvin had been killed by his father that morning. I won't bore you with how we had travelled on the coach overnight, that we hadn't picked a paper up or how I had not equated current affairs with my love of music but, hey! There it was: my dreams and aspirations gone in an instant.

Once that idea was shattered, I still wrote. Short stories to amuse me and keep hidden while merely listening to music. When I later went to work in Wales, away from all my family and friends, I wrote countless letters to everyone. I kept all the ones I received in a file which, let's be honest, had I saved them I might be rich now with all the secrets they contained and the opportunities for subsequent blackmail.

I then went years without really writing anything creative - emails in work and shopping lists don't really count, do they? Ten years ago, however, I met my husband. He loves words, grammar and teases me about how there's nothing I can't spell. We have learned many things from each other, and one of those things was the reignition of my love of writing.

We go on holiday a lot. When we were about to go on our very first one together, my husband bought me a travel journal and said that he hoped it would be full of "nerdish things".

Our travel journal was born...