About Me

Yes the obligatory about me page, something I managed to completely overlook. I posted both my review policy/manifesto and about this domain page but managed to forget this one.

I decided to start with the basic information before expanding.

My name is Lesley-Ann, I am a single woman who lives with her elderly parents. I have one sibling, a brother, who is married with three boys. I am a devoted, but sometimes exhausted, auntie.

As a young girl my dreams for my future were simple, I was going to work as a secretary (advancing to becoming a private secretary/assistant). I was going to drive a small compact car, either a VW Bug or a Mini Metro, I can’t rightly remember which one I wanted away back then and in my spare time I was also going to be a writer of romance novels.

So, there it was, how I mapped out my life. I began self-teaching myself to ‘touch type’ on a child version of a manual typewriter. Something widely available in the 70’s, it was red/pink if I remember correctly. I got a full sized manual typewriter as a teenager which I still own to this day, more than two decades on.

I loved to read and have done so rabidly since being taught how to. As a child I read Nancy Drew books, Sweet Valley High, Horror/Scary Stories (spiders/monster under the bed, general scary kids books), and many TV/Film Tie-in novels.

I began reading romance novels in my early to mid-teens. Originally with the tamer Mills and Boon type books, remember this was the mid 80’s where couple kissed and bang the next page a baby is born. No sex/spicy content. My aunt was a big reader of M&B romance novels and bought 2 to 3 titles a week on Thursday/Friday when she got her weekly wage. She could read them in a couple of hours (like myself) and then her novels were passed onto me. She wasn’t one for keeping any of her books, once she read it that was it, onto the next. Many times she would say that there is always more books to read so no need to hold onto hers once finished.

This attitude is not one I inherited, I admit to being a hoarder when it comes to my books. Hence why I own so many. There are some which are kept for sentimental value alone, I have a shelf of romance books, all paperback sized but with hard covers and dust jackets which date back to the 1960’s and were from a book club my aunt belonged to. She kept these books and I ‘inherited’ them when she passed and now 20 years on I still own them and they hold pride of place on my bookcase.

I don’t know if I will ever have the self-control and guts to actual write that novel and submit it. But meanwhile my love of the genre has not flagged, in fact it has grown, if that was at all possible.

In my early teens I found myself battling incapacitating back problems which resulted in spending over a decade wearing a surgical back brace. I left school at 16 after 4 of the worst years of my life, to be honest!!

Although my *ahem* career plans didn’t pan out I still hold out hope that someday I might actually write a book (or novella) or basically anything in the romance genre and have enough nerve to actual submit it somewhere. Until that day dawns I content myself with reading as many books as possible and sharing them here on my blog and elsewhere on the web.

I contracted, or however you get it, Rheumatoid Arthritis just around the time I turned 30, get present that was. I attend hospital, do physical therapy daily, and have a steady diet of disease modifying medicine and other medication which I have to take daily. As well as medication for Fibromyalgia which the Rheumatoid Clinic  at the hospital diagnosed.

So this is me!! Welcome to my world.