Paula Williams

Paula Williams is living her dream. She has written all her life - her earliest efforts involved blackmailing her unfortunate younger brothers into appearing in her plays and pageants. But it is only in recent years, when she turned her attention to writing short stories and serials for women's magazines that she discovered, to her surprise, that people with better judgement than her brothers actually liked what she wrote and were prepared to pay her for it.

Now, she writes every day in a lovely, book-lined study in her home in Somerset, where she lives with her husband and a beautiful, but scatty Dalmatian called Jemima. She still writes for magazines but has recently branched out into longer fiction. She also writes a monthly column, Ideas Store, for the writers' magazines, Writers' Forum. And when she's not writing, she's either tutoring, leading writing workshops or giving talks on writing at writing festivals and conferences and to organised groups. She's appeared several times on local radio - in fact, she'll talk about writing to anyone who'll stand still long enough to listen.

But, as with the best of dreams, she worries that one day she's going to wake up and find she still has to bully her brothers into reading 'the play what she wrote'.

www.paulawilliamswriter.co.uk