Frances Peck

I’ve always been a writer. I was nine when I got my first typewriter. A red-and-white model designed for kids, it was cheap and lightweight, mostly a toy. But it made my stories and poems look official. They looked like writing.

When the realities (and bills) of adulthood set in, I gave up my own stories and went to work on other people’s instead. As an editor, ghostwriter, and instructor, I helped thousands of writers, subject-matter experts, and students produce better material. I wrote a little under my own name, co-authoring the HyperGrammar website (later adapted into HyperGrammar 2) and writing Peck’s English Pointers, but mostly I stayed behind the scenes.

Much as I enjoyed helping other people with their words, my own were clamouring to get out. After a decades-long hiatus, I tried writing fiction again to see what would happen. Like that, time folded back on itself, and I was caught in the magic of making things up.

Now I have two novels, The Broken Places and Uncontrolled Flight, that are all mine: my characters, my ideas, my name on the cover. Going public still feels scary; it’s a lot more comfortable to stay in the background. But sometimes you need to do what scares you—to rush straight at it to feel alive. That’s one of the things my fiction is about.