Out of work, a single parent and still living with her parents, 30-year-old Claire Connor’s life was far from what she wanted.
Then international publishers, Authentic Media, signed her to a prestigious five-book deal, including her first novel, ‘Rosie – Note to Self’, which film companies are interested in the rights for.
Claire wrote her first novel aged 8. Her great-grandfather?s amusement nearly also rendered it her last. Fortunately, much like her heroines, she persevered. Raised in Scarborough, Claire is one of five children in a family, full of teachers. Relishing the anonymity that having many siblings afforded her, she spent years lost in books. She dreamed of being Enid Blyton, not least so that she could make herself the heroine.
However, in families full of teachers people simply don?t become authors so she consigned her writing to an annoying itch to be scratched periodically, and got on with other things, developing a strong flair for the trombone and a distinctly un-sensible obsession with high-heeled shoes.
Following her studies, Claire worked for a Birmingham charity in the basement of an Irish Presbytery. Despite providing some great anecdotal material involving disasters with shopping trolleys, this was still nowhere near her childhood dream of Blyton-dom, or rather now, Austen-dom and she soon moved to London. But Claire soon moved back when she discovered she was pregnant, setting up home at the top of her parent’s high house to raise her daughter alone.
With her writing dream still as nebulous as the clouds outside her window and a very real need for money, Claire retrained as a holistic therapist, writing the odd short story from time to time and never getting published.
What will be will be
In a wonderful turn of fate, after a chance meeting, she was encouraged to go for an admin job for New York Times best-selling author, GP Taylor. Claire plucked up the courage to ask GP to look at some stories she was submitting to a chick lit competition. He happened to be in want of a co-author as well as a PA, and he loved her stories so much that he gave Claire both jobs.
Their co-authorship has resulted in ‘The Lipstick Confessions?, a series of five contemporary stories of romance and intrigue set in London, New York, Northumbria and Oxford. The first in this saga ? ‘Rosie Note to Self’ is due for release in September 2009.
