I was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and lived next door to Titirangi Golf Course, which makes me a bonda fide ‘Westie’. Our house had the (then) standard kiwi quarter-acre section, and my brother and sisters and I treated the golf course like an extension of our back garden. My first attempt at writing was a romance about Elton John and a kiwi girl after I saw Elton at Western Springs during the Yellow Brick Road tour when I was thirteen. Hearing ‘Funeral For A Friend’ and ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ still gives me goosebumps.

My big OE (‘Overseas Experience’ for non-Downunder folk) beckoned when I was seventeen. I’ve since realized how brave my parents were to let me go. In England, on a blind date arranged by my cousin, I met my future husband, Les. It was a double date; I didn’t know his friend or the other girl. One of the rubber soles came off my wooden high heels which meant I sounded like I had a wooden leg. I decided to limp instead, it was better than going clunk! click! clunk! click! We went to a nightclub in Leicester Square. On our second date, we went to the greyhound racing in Romford with Les’ brother-in-law and twelve-year-old nephew. Yes, I know, dead romantic … but he was tall, cute and made me laugh. My husband tells people that my parents paid for a one-way flight for me, but that’s a scurrilous lie — they left money with relatives in the UK for my return. I just didn’t know about it. Or who had the money. In between travelling and scungy jobs, I did my nurse training, and Les went into the London Fire Brigade and started reading a lot. He didn’t have a lot of choice about the reading, because I always had my nose stuck in a book.

198444444!!!! No, actually it was1989 when I packed my bags and my Pom and returned to New Zealand. He did want to move Downunder; I didn’t kidnap him and force him onto the plane or anything. Our son and daughter were born, and while they were small I worked in the Emergency Department at the local hospital and, in between shifts, chicken pox and kindergarten, I began writing again while Les completed an MBA at Massey University and ran a business. It was a career change for him into the construction industry that prompted our move to the Waikato in 2003, and we’ve lived in the beautiful town of Cambridge ever since, along with a couple of horses, some cows, a mad cat and a deaf, bandy-legged black labrador. I began doing project management for community youth health projects in 2004.

New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t do them, apart from the one I made on New Years’s Eve 2005 to FINISH A BOOK AND SEND IT TO A PUBLISHER. I had six unfinished novels; every time I came across one, I felt guilty and shoved it to the back of the shelf. I kept on day-dreaming about being a writer and imagining what it’d be like to be published. I trawled publisher’s websites reading submission guidelines and learned that you make a submission only if you’ve completed the manuscript — more about that later. One night I dreamed about two women involved in a car accident arriving in heaven and a trainee angel deciding to send one of them back, but into the wrong body. During 2006, I wrote almost every night after work and most weekends, and in October I sent a query letter and the first three chapters of Bonkers to HarperCollins in Auckland. Sending the letter to HarperCollins was a major achievement for me and I was feeling quietly satisfied. I honestly expected a six-week wait followed by a rejection letter; I was just pleased that I’d finally climbed over the wall I always hit three-quarters of the way through a book. I knew how Bonkers ended; I just hadn’t transferred it from my head to my computer.

A week later my husband walked into the kitchen holding a letter addressed to the pen name I’d used for my submission (I used a lot of those in the early days; Michelle Holman is my maiden name). HarperCollins wanted to see the rest of the book. Les and the kids shoved me into my office and I spent every spare moment there, surviving on chocolate biscuits supplied by my daughter, tea/coffee by my son, and meals by Les, until I completed Bonkers at 5 am the following Thursday. The Christmas/New Year break meant that I didn’t hear from Lorain Day, the Publishing Manager at HarperCollins, until early February 2007, but I remember the conversation very clearly.

Lorain: Hello? Michelle?

Me: Yes?

Lorain: Yes.

It was magic. I swear the screams of jubilation shot straight up the Waikato Expressway to Auckland and did a lap of honour around the Sky Tower. Bonkers hit the shelves on 1 December 2007, and for a while I turned into a bookshop stalker before Les banned me from going into bookshops until I could control myself. But that’s another story …

Two years on and my second book, Divine, has been released. It’s still magic. And I’m still the woman picking peas out of the freezer at the supermarket.

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