I began writing cosy fiction by accident when I joined a 'Writing for Pleasure and Profit' evening class after the class that I’d planned to join didn't run because not enough people had signed up. One of the assignments was to write a short story for a woman's magazine, so I gave it a try even though I didn’t think it was my sort of thing. I was surprised by how much fun I had writing pure escapism with guaranteed happy endings, and the next week's session was on how to send it to an editor, so I did that too.

I was amazed and delighted when they bought it, so I wrote some more and realised that this was what I wanted to do while I built up my skills. After all, writing the books of my dreams had waited so long that they could easily wait a little longer.During the next decade, I sold over six hundred short stories to magazines including Bella, Best, Chat, My Weekly, People's Friend, Take a Break, and That's Life and even acquired an overseas agent so I could call myself a world-famous author. More than half my sales still come from outside Britain now, and I do try to make our little quirks clear to my lovely foreign readers.

I also managed to get books accepted by three separate publishing houses, including Mills and Boon, who then stopped accepting British fiction. The other two shut down so I started feeling a bit like a gremlin, which is why I love Kindle so much now, but then the market gradually diminished, and life sent me down a different path, and my dreams of being a full-time writer got put on hold.

I still wrote them whenever I could find time because they helped me to cope in difficult times. They felt as if they were something that I could control in a world that slid from one crisis to the next, sometimes with two or three at once in case I fancied variety, but my characters had a nasty habit of taking over, and they still do now. I’m in good company here because Jane Austen used to sit and sew, then suddenly laugh and rush over to her writing desk and start writing. My long-suffering family accept this, and I suspect they quite enjoy the times when I’m not watching them closely, especially if it means takeaways for tea!

!’m currently happily in what I hope is going to be a long period of calm between storms, so my dream has come true, quite probably because I’ve learned so much while I’ve been a carer (which I still am now.) I now know that I can find happiness in small things and unexpected places, and I’m very aware that life is precious and sometimes much too short, so I need to follow my heart and dreams whenever I get or can make the chance to. Unlike my most popular heroine, Amy Hammond, I have not found any bodies, and I don’t want to find any either.

I hope you've enjoyed my stories enough to want to follow me on Kindle books so that the nice people at Amazon will let you know when new books are published. You’ll see how to do if you look at any of my books, and you can also click through to my author page, where you can see an up-to-date list of all my books. I also write sexier and slightly more violent books as Eleanor Neille, so you might want to have a look at her and follow me there too, but I like to keep the two sets of books separate so that anyone buying a ‘Tia Brown’ book knows that they’ll have a happy, gentle read.

You can also see some of my inspirations on Pinterest. There’s a main board at ‘Tia Brown-writer’ and boards for each series

Whatever I write, I firmly believe in happy beginnings as long as you can work out who you are rather than who other people think you ought to be. After that, you need to work out what you want and be prepared to work hard to get it and keep ignoring all the ‘good’ advice from people who don’t seem to know you as well as they think they do.In my world, an ending is always a new beginning, even if it’s not a happy one. Obviously happy’s best, but if you were happy all the time, then you wouldn’t appreciate it, would you?