Black Annis

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When she married she realised that teaching Latin was not the best option if she was to find work near her new home so she transferred to primary teaching where she specialised in drama. and environmental studies. She continued in Primary schools until retirement (With a four year break to produce three children)

She dabbled in non fiction writing that sprang out of her other interests and has had articles published on computing, gardening, roses and education. Her fiction writing, both in print and on the web, developed from oral story telling. The printed developed first. She discovered oral and written work required different techniques and spent several years developing her writing voice for short stories and won several prizes in short story competitions

. About fifteen years ago she abandoned short story writing in favour of novel writing and had to develop yet another voice. She wrote novels set in the British Mandate of Palestine between 1938 and 1948 . Three of those 'completed' novels have been put away as agent after agent says that there is not sufficient public interest in the era to make those novels a commercial proposition.

In the mclass nineties, she discovered the Internet and became enthusiastic about new media writing as opposed to linear text. While working on her multimedia work she became a mentor for Trace, the International Community for Online Writers, taught workshops for creative writing online at Libraries in the East Midlands and at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. During this period she had two short TV filmlets made about her as Cybergran, one for Channel 4 and one for BBC digital TV and was featured in Wired World on Granada Television. She is now on the seventh year of her online Garden Journal and runs another garden site, The Collaborative Garden which includes literary pieces as well as pages on private and public gardens in various parts of the globe. She has also written an online novel"Black Annis and King Richard' Bed" based on a traditional Leicestershire Legend. In more recent web work she has been experimenting with audio techniques in an attempt to retain the oral voice she no longer uses professionally.

She is now writing a memoir set in the British Mandate between 1936 and 1938 the theme being family relationships and how outside influences , such as the war and the Jewish and Arab campaigns for independence affected those relationships. Perhaps fact will go down better than fiction!
In the interests of keeping to a theme in the memoir she has torn out chunks from the memoir and posted them to the BBC site "Peoples War"