Maryanne Coleman

In my life, I have been many things - biomedical scientist, administrator, business owner, but none has defined me as much as my most recent incarnations as writer and, as a kind of offshoot, editor. I write alone - when I get the time; I will be the first to admit that the third in my Pandemonium trilogy is hideously late - but most with my husband, M J Trow. Together, we have written eight in the Marlowe series (Tudor) and five in the Grand and Batchelor series (Victorian) for Severn and yet another in a series yet to be published, for Endeavour, this time set in Nero's Rome. My editing is usually non-fiction and I applaud anyone who can put so many words together without going off on a tangent - I don't think non-fiction is for me because I would be making it up by the second paragraph. Which brings me to blogging - this is my tiny chance to write things as they are, not how we would like them to be. Sometimes, a thing just grabs you by the throat and you need to share it and Facebook posts just aren't enough - when you have as few 'friends' on Facebook as I have, you would get a better audience having a chat in a bus queue. It's hard to pin yourself down in a bio - yes, I am a writer, editor, wife, mother and grandma, not necessarily in that order. But when I am being one of those, the others are all lining up in my head, jostling for position. For example, as I write this, I am sitting opposite my husband , expecting a call from my son and still chuckling at a photograph of my grandson, sent this morning. In my more minor roles as gardener, co-cook and bottle washer, gardener, cat's slave and all the rest, I am simply sharing a lifestyle with a huge proportion of the population and am looking forward to sharing how life strikes me.