Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
I started my working life as a theatre director and playwright. Someone else had my name, so I took the Equity name of Julia Limer. I was nine months pregnant with my second child and stressed beyond measure directing my actor husband in a play at the Bush Theatre in London, when I realised that this life just wouldn’t work out.
So I went back to college and retrained as a graphic designer, which meant I could still be creative, but I could work from home and be around for my family. It went quite well, and I created a successful, flexible business, branching out into website design and illustration while also producing child number three.
The design work led me to an MA in Sequential Illustration at Brighton University, specialising in writing and illustrating books for children. I had some success with this, but no publication – my work got in through the art departments, but editors and beyond turned it down as being too dark. But I was undeterred: my love of narrative had been stirred up, so I went on to do an Open University Course in Creative Writing, developing my dark side writing fiction for adults.
Through this I discovered NaNoWriMo and novel writing, and after that, there was no looking back. I had found my form. CUCKOO was my second Nanovel, and, after working on it for a year, I sent it off to Simon Trewin at United Agents, who I had heard talk at a New Writing South event. He took me on (he likes a challenge) and soon I had a three book deal with Headline, and deals in Italy (Garzanti), Germany (Ullstein), France (Presses de la Cité), Holland (Cargo), China and Brazil
CUCKOO came out in hardback in the UK in March 2011. The paperback was published in November 2011. My second novel, Every Vow You Break, is out in March 2012, and I am currently (December 2011) embarking on the second draft of novel #3, also nurtured during NaNoWriMo.
I now spend my days writing at an untidy desk in a shed at the bottom of my garden in Brighton, with occasional coffee-shop changes of scene. This is the only website I work on now. Every now and then I pinch myself.
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