ABOUT ME AND WHERE I
LIVE
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Home is in Salisbury, a cathedral city in
Wiltshire, England. I was born here and apart from a couple of years in South
Wales and some months in neighbouring
Hampshire, I've lived here all my life. It's a beautiful place with some thousands
of years of history around it. People have been living here since the Stone
Age; the original Salisbury was built on the top of a nearby hill, the site of
a Neolithic causewayed enclosure that became an Iron Age hillfort, a Roman
fort, and later a Saxon settlement. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, we gained
a motte & bailey castle and subsequently became a small town. A cathedral
was built, and by then the hilltop was pretty well filled to bursting point. Due to overcrowding, a lack of wells and
church/castle politics (some things never change), the present city of
Salisbury - and the cathedral - were built in the early Medieval times. The
old street pattern is still there as laid out by the early town-planners, and
adds a certain something to the mystique of Salisbury's infamous
one-way-street system. Five rivers meet at Salisbury (we used to be called
the Venice of England!), but as much by luck as judgment, we rarely have
flood-problems in the city itself. Of course, that could change with Global
Warming... On a personal note, I'm a divorced mother
of one son and grandmother to two boys. My son, daughter-in-law and grandsons
share the house with me, along with three large dogs and sundry fancy
goldfish. We have no cats as yet, since my elderly Giddy died several years
ago. As soon as the dogs are too old to chase fast-moving kittens, we will be
on the lookout for a likely pair of kits needing a home. All of us humans love to read and the house
is full of books of all kinds; SF, fantasy, historicals, who/whydunits,
paranormal, mystery - and any combination of the above (basically, I write
the kind of stuff I like to read). I also have stacks of history and
archaeology research books, as well as tomes on virtually everything from the
arcane to zoology. Our musical tastes are as wide as our reading choices;
Gregorian chants to medieval dances to folk to heavy metal to the classics.
Not that keen on the Beatles or Grand Opera, though. I’m a member of the Medieval Heritage
Society, a re-enactment group set in the 15th Century. This enables me to
indulge in my favorite hobbies; dancing, needlework and sewing costumes. And
doing all this in real castles all over England and Wales can be adventures
in their own right. I’ve recently been introduced to the joys of
quilting for something restful to do in the evenings. The main creative aspect of my life is
writing fiction, something I've been doing since childhood. I've been writing
in tandem with Terri Beckett for
well over twenty years now, and for many years it was purely for our own
enjoyment. Our first published novel is one of the results. My
Workshop/Tandem page will give you an idea of some of the novels we are/will
be working on. Finally, I am always open to constructive
criticism. After all, no writer can function at their best without it! So if
you have any comments about any of my/our fiction and this website, please
feel free to zap me a message. Last but far from least, thanks and credit
for the construction and design of this web-site goes to Phill Power, a human
of infinite patience when dealing with a demented parent yelling, "Make
It Go!" Phill is a freelance
Audio-Visual Technician with an international reputation for excellence.
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You can E-Mail me at - chris_jan44 at yahoo dot co dot uk
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