I came to writing late in life, almost by accident. I was always writing, always telling stories, but mostly for myself. I remember lying on the sofa alone in the living room when I was quite young and making up tales as I spoke them aloud. I was part actress part writer even then, I think, because I took the roles as I invented them, playing out the scene.

My first romance was a fairytale. I still have it, scribbled in pencil in an exercise book. I must have been about ten or so when I wrote it. I remember the hero had to rescue the land from a plague of spiders that came out of the sea, which won him the hand of the princess. A few years on, in the same notebook but written more carefully in pen this time, there is an epic poem, rather more tragic than romantic, about a mermaid murdered by her faithless sailor lover.

After that grew a portfolio of poems, scraps of short stories, and half-completed chapters of potential novels. Meanwhile, with a secretarial qualification under my belt – which my father insisted upon as a useful “fallback”, and very useful it has been – and a couple of years’ experience in the field, I turned to acting.

The life of a working actress proved a polyglot of useful experience for the later writer.

To begin with, there is an awful lot of time out of work, which has to be filled with lucrative employment. I temped as a copy typist and secretary a lot of the time, but I took on all sorts of other work – cooking breakfast in a hotel, charring (being a cleaning lady), making brass lanterns (which lasted all of a week), and the usual plethora of jobs open to “resting” actresses: telemarketing, waitressing, demonstrating, you-name-it. Useful stuff for character studies.

When actually working as an actress, though I didn’t know it then, I was ploughing and seeding a veritable forest of emotional and technical expertise that I could later plunder for my novels. Motivation – what makes people tick? Dialogue – expression and rhythm, words that carry the tempo of the story. Characterisation – mannerisms, stance, posture, the outward versus the inward personality. Mood line – capturing your audience from the opening line, building the suspense, raising the temperature to the climax, and catching it all together for the denouement. Emotion – oh, what a fount of experience here! Joys and sorrows, highs and lows; tempestuous rages to impotent reserve; and why, why, why? Which brings us back to motivation.

I pursued this path for a good many years, unknowingly garnering material, which was to stand me in excellent stead for the future. Meanwhile, I still wrote. A half-finished science fiction novel was perhaps the closest I got to the bug before it got to me. I still hanker to rewrite that one, but I doubt if I’ll ever find the time.

And then the inevitable happened. I think it was inevitable. I had been working up to it for years, writing and writing and writing all sorts of things. Reports – I was always making up reports for this or that. Quizzes, poems, competitions, articles, short plays, rants. And my letters were usually pages and pages of trivia, propounding theories and arguments, describing small happenings of life. The truth is, I never stopped writing. I just didn’t realise it was my true metier until I was doing it for real.

My sister – another sometime writer who instead took up painting for her professional life – began a self-help group with a few other writers. The moment I heard about it, I wanted to join. We used to send out each other’s work, as if we were an agent. Actors do the same thing with co-operatives.

At first, I concentrated on short stories and articles. A couple of articles found their way into print, but at that time I was dissatisfied with the short story form. I had always loved and avidly read historical romance set in Georgian or Regency times. Georgette Heyer had been a favourite from age 11 when I first picked up Friday’s Child from my father’s bookshelves.

I can’t recall at which point in the proceedings I decided I would write a historical romance. But I know I intended it for Mills & Boon, and immediately read several of them to find out what they ought to be like.

Like most beginners, I thought I had the formula down cold first time out. I learned better very quickly. I learned there isn’t a formula for a start. There are parameters in every genre, no less in historical romance and in particular for Mills & Boon. But if you write a formulaic book, it won’t sell.

It took me eight years and eight books to find my voice. In other words, to get published. By that time, I had also completed my first huge mainstream novel – which I naively thought was going to make my fortune. I had a mountain of experience to draw upon from my acting career, but I had still to learn the craft of writing. It’s one thing to perform, quite another to translate that into words on the page. But there were areas of my writing that came naturally from my theatre experience, and I was that much ahead of the game.

Every writer treasures that first acceptance. I shot up to the ceiling and didn’t come down for days. And when your first printed book is in your hands, the feeling – even for a writer – is almost indescribable. But I’ll try. It began with disbelief. After looking at the thing in wonder for a while, a little bubble appeared in my chest. It grew and grew until it filled me so full I thought I would burst. It came out in the smile instead.

To this day, every time a new edition of any of my books appears and I hold it in my hands, I feel an echo of that same sensation. And perhaps that’s why I carry on doing it, struggling through the dark times for the pleasure of that unquenchable bubble of satisfaction.