Roz White

I’ve been writing stories since my earliest memories: my first masterpiece was two pages of foolscap – with illustrations – about a television programme of the time, and contained more uses of the word “then” than any other. I’d like to think I’ve improved just a little since then; after all, I was only about five.

My English teacher in secondary school didn’t care for the dark, gritty science-fiction I regularly turned in for class assignments either, yet I persisted. I was teaching myself more than she ever did! As an aside, she also ruined both Shakespeare and Dickens for me, but that’s for another time.

So, where to really begin? I’m already in my fifties, although I’ve no idea when that happened! I’m British, English by birth and currently Scottish by residence: I’ve been here for over fourteen years now. Until the start of 2018 I lived on a remote island that requires me to commute by ferry for the day job – one of the best journeys to and from work in the world, surely! In the summer at least... that provided my core writing time, and with a favourable wind I could turn out a fair amount in that time. My output over the last twenty years or so has included over a dozen novels and a handful of non-fiction texts, the latter being well-known in their academic field – something of a boasting point, I’m afraid! There have also been magazine articles and short stories scattered here and there. Some are on here under the pen-name of H. A. Douglas.

Now, I live in Invergordon, and work out of Inverness. I have lost my ferry-time along with a great deal else (long story, but it'll make it into a book one day), so now Sunday tends to be Writing Day, and I can take all day, too.

However... if you look for some of these other books under my name, you won’t find them, and here we come to the part of this biography that, for all my years of dealing with it, I still don’t seem to have any proper sort of handle on.

I am transgendered. There, I said it! I am biologically male, psychologically feeling more and more female (whatever that means, but it feels that way to me) as the years go by. My writing allows me a useful window to explore this side of me, and undoubtedly helps keep me close to some semblance of sanity. My family (I’m married with children)are aware of this side of me, and have accepted it without question since the Great Secret coming out – for which I am incredibly, totally, grateful.

I have been full-time and in transition since March 2017. It's a long process with a lot of waiting and far too much NHS Gate-keeping, Jumping Through Hoops and so forth.

I love sharing what I do: I have taken to FaceBook like a duck to water, and I regularly post updates, snippets and recent news about whatever it is I’m doing. I am finding this to be a fantastic way of getting this gender-related business out there into places where it will hopefully do a bit of good and promote some understanding – not least in me!

My Facebook Author page: www.facebook.com/pages/Roz-White/1567046250194474