Rachel Redhead

I grew up reading all I could get my hands on, sci-fi and horror were my favourites though. I was the geeky kid who knew all the lines to Star Wars and watched Doctor Who every Saturday teatime. While I always loved reading books it didn't occur to me to start writing them until the 1990's and I realised how hard it was, but I stuck at it, teaching myself to write. I kind of realised that writing was for me at university. I was in the fantasy role-playing club and I was always bored just playing a character, I'd get bored easily and end up killing them off in funny ways, which pissed everyone off. So they let me run the games, which was more fun, but I realised that I wanted to control the stories and the characters too. That's when it didn't hit me and I limped on in ignorance for several more years. Eventually though I figured out that I wanted to be a writer.

I was lucky enough to find myself in a good fan-fic group, so I was able to explore literature and develop my writing style over the years. Developing my own original characters and then eventually producing my first totally original novel, Refugees of the Raithaduine. After that it was just a matter of keeping the ideas flowing, creating new characters and scenarios to explore the concepts and issues that I wanted to write about. The biggest one of these being about gender identity, I was able to confront the truth about myself and work though my fears enough to come out and transition into who I was supposed to be. I've recently being establishing a whole new range of books (the Rachel-verse) that stand on their own and yet can be linked together too. I have 'real world' books like 'Precious: New Beginnings' and 'Silk & Thorns', horror books like the Curse-Breaker series and also sci-fi books like 'Judy Collins: The Wander Years' and the newly published follow-up 'Judy Collins: Time's Enema'.

I'm not a big fan of sports, though I support Middlesbrough FC and the New York Jets. I am a fan of food especially triple chocolate cupcakes and Cornish pasties. I love reading and watching good tv shows. I think I invented binge-viewing by accident back in the mid 90's when I'd finished university but couldn't find a job. For 3 1/2 years I'd spend my days applying for every job I could find and at night I'd watch a dozen or more episodes of Friends or Babylon 5 or Frazier. I'd watch an entire run of movies over a weekend. I'm probably not the first, I'm sure there's been others before me, but I'm the only me that I know.

Now I can spend all weekend sat in front of my computer, writing one book, editing another, chatting on facebook, researching stuff on google and also keeping my DVD database up to date (I buy comedy DVD's from poundland sometimes, well sometimes I find a good one).