Manifesto: On Never Giving Up

• I had entered my twenties convinced of the unassailable goodness of women, the beatific, idealised Virgin Mother of my Catholic childhood, and the belief that women were good (my mother) and men (my domineering father) were bad. In time, my thinking became more nuanced, which would in turn inform my approach to writing characters in my future fiction. I learned that no two people are the same and it was a lack of imagination to create them as such.
• If I did nothing, nothing would happen.
• "The years I lived as a lesbian were a period of self-exploration and discovery with two pivotal relationships that affected my creativity. In the first, I thrived and my well-being and creativity prospered. In the second, I allowed The Mental Dominatrix to chisel away at my hard-won sovereignty and damage my creativity. I vowed never to let it happen again."
• Life presents us with obstacles. It's never a completely smooth ride for anyone, and while nobody wants to struggle, it's the only way we build resilience.
• As I peel back the layers of my life, it's clear to me that my journey to becoming a writer of books began long before I'd put pen to paper. If I think about the origins of my cre-ativity, then it leads me back to the inevitable source, my childhood, where I read books because I was bored, and I was bored because there was little to entertain me.
• My goal, as always, is to continue to write stories and to develop my skills. There is no point of arrival whereby one stops growing as a creative person; to think otherwise will lead to creative repetition and stagnation.