My name is Helen Smith.  I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old.   In my early years I filled several notebooks with my rhyming iambic pentameters and wrote lots of stories that ended "... and it was all a dream." 

I was supposed to go and live in Paris for a year when I was twenty but I had my daughter instead.  When she was little, we travelled the world together in search of adventure. 

Then we came back to London and I wrote my first novel. 

I've done loads of crap jobs.  I always felt it would be cheating to get a good job and earn lots of money - I thought it might distract me from my true purpose.  Now, though, as I live in genteel poverty in Brixton I wonder if I could have been wrong all along.

I've cleaned toilets in a motel in Bondi Beach, I've worked as a magician's assistant, a clown and a karaoke hostess in a bar in Hong Kong.  I've worked as a waitress in Dorchester, in what is known as Thomas Hardy country, and in Woollahra, which is a nice leafy part of Sydney. 

I worked for a famous art critic to help him finish all the projects he was working on in the three months before he died.  It was just a typing job, really.  I've done loads of typing - I love typing, I'm really fast at it.  I don't like practical things but I like knitting, typing and changing gear in the car, in that order.  Every other practical task I hate - I tiled the bathroom once and cut an artery in my foot.  Blood spurted about two and a half feet, all the way up to my thigh.  I thought I was going to die but of course I didn't.  All the tiles are a bit wonky and every man who has ever been in that bathroom has commented on the poor workmanship. 

The man I will eventually marry will not have to undergo any arduous tasks to win my heart, but he will have to satisfy a number of secret criteria, one of which (no longer a secret, now)  is not commenting on the tiling in my bathroom.

My life now

I'm looking after a 13 year old dog who was born on Valentine's Day.  The dog's name is Jessie.

When I'm not looking after Jessie I spend my days writing.  I'm working on a play and a novel.