I began writing about ten or twelve years ago, initially as a cure for insomnia: if I couldn’t sleep I made up stories in my head, then wrote down ideas – if I remembered them - in the morning. I soon realised you don’t remember ideas that come in the night, however pleased you are with them at the time, so I now keep a note-pad by my bed and scribble key words down in the dark before dropping off.

I write most mornings while the children are out at nursery and school, between about 9.30 and 12. When I was still teaching, I used the 8-9 pm slot after the boys were in bed. I actually think it might be easier in some ways only to have a small window for writing, because it means you have to get down to it. And of course the summer holidays for a teacher can be a pretty productive time. In 2001 West Midland Arts gave me a grant to pay for childcare over July and August, and I wrote nearly a whole novel in that period.

The first short story I had any success with was The Artist and the Liar, a sort of skit on the Turner Prize. It won a competition called Raconteur and was published in a smart paperback anthology: that was in 1994. I thought it was the bee’s knees. I re-sold the story to Top Woman magazine six months later.

In 1996 I submitted another short story to a London literary magazine called Madam X and made a valuable friend in its editor, David Rees - it was David who suggested I write a full-length novel and who kept pushing me to keep going. I wrote a novel called Magpie Lies about a woman who’s both very superstitious and very promiscuous, and David tried his best to get it accepted by a London publisher. No one would take it, but it did get some jolly nice rejections!

In the meantime I carried on writing short stories and over the years either won or was shortlisted for Real Writers (twice), The Kent Literature Prize, The Bridport Prize and The New Writer.

I don’t have the confidence to begin a story unless I know the rough outline of the plot. Often I even have the final paragraph worked out in my head before I write the first word. As ideas come for different sections, I jot them down immediately and then slot them in as I go along. My notebooks are full of weird non-sequiturs that look like the jottings of a madwoman. To write a novel I need, as a starting-point, time-lines, a family tree and a chapter-by-chapter summary worked out; that way there’s less chance of getting writer’s block. Maybe as I get less insecure I’ll be able to dispense with all the coloured pens and charts.

Where do I place myself on the writing map? Lord knows. All I know is I wanted to write about the lower middle class – women like me – because they don’t seem to have much of a voice in contemporary literature. Essentially I wrote a novel that I would have wanted to read, that reflected my kind of concerns, but didn’t seem to be available in the shops.