Hi Sharon. I am really thrilled to be a guest on your lovely blog. Thank you so much for having me.
I have been writing in some form or other for my whole life. With a librarian for a mother and a father who died young it seemed only natural to commit my thoughts and feelings to paper and I have never really looked back. I have always been a keen diary writer and written children’s stories for over twenty years.
I left Somerset for London at 16, founded & ran my own consumer P R agency representing a range of international brands including many years with my favourite - Ladybird Books. I sold the business and trained as a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders & hosted a phone-in show on Radio Luxembourg.
A husband, five children and a few years later the Thum family moved from London to Bray and I took up writing fiction seriously. As well as writing with Gaynor I now write and review children's books and am a regular guest on BBC Radio Berkshire’s Book Club programme.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing journey?
I have been writing children’s fiction for over twenty years (a novel for each of my five kids) but had not submitted anything for publication until I met Gaynor and we wrote the cozy mystery Riverside Lane together. Working with Gaynor, and the success of our first novel, has given me the confidence to submit some of my other work and The Witches Punchbowl, magical realism targeted at middle grade readers, will be published in 2018.
Gaynor and I, writing under the pen name Ginger Black, are mid-way through our second adult novel together – more of that later – and I have embraced the middle grade fiction market by launching a children’s book website featuring story telling blogs and book reviews (Julia Thum).
Beyond writing and reading, I keep myself busy caring for my family, working for a fabulous charity that takes disabled children out on the Thames, kayaking, yoga and walking my English Bulldog Rumpole who is the unofficial third member of the Ginger Black writing partnership.
How did your writing collaboration come about?
Gaynor and I met a few years ago through our kids. We found we had a shared interest in writing fiction though she was a busy newspaper journalist at the time and I had just finished twenty years in consumer PR. It transpired that our early careers had been a series of sliding doors with us moving in the same professional circles but never meeting along the way. I’m glad we missed each other though, because when our paths finally did cross it was at a time we both felt ready to jump in at the deep end and give novel writing a go. Riverside Lane is the result.
