I write under a pseudonym, Johanna Nield; as a child I promised myself that if I’m ever fortunate enough to have my work published, then that is the name by which my readers will know me.

In real life, I’m a wife, mother, sister, daughter, grandmother .. and while writing my novels I was still working full-time. My last role was Revenue Analyst with an international healthcare company but I previously worked for a national children’s charity – it was a challenging and sometimes heart-breaking job, but I loved it – and the people I worked with partially inspired three of my novels.

I’m now happily retired and in my spare time I continue to love writing, reading, Doctor Who, photography, Shakespeare, David Tennant and chocolate (not necessarily in that order). My love for my husband and family comes before all else.

I was born in St Asaph and have lived for most of my life in Rhyl, a seaside resort surrounded by hills on the North Wales coast. I attended Ysgol Emmanuel primary school and Rhyl High school, where the English teachers in particular were hugely supportive and influential. They nurtured my love of reading and writing, and I credit them with passing on their passion for Shakespeare, Chaucer, and many other inspirational authors.

I began writing for pleasure around the age of ten, when a beloved teacher introduced us to the concept of Creative Writing, which was added to the school curriculum at that time. By my early teens I was spending most evenings writing at the dining room table while the rest of my family watched TV. I wrote short pieces of prose, poetry, short stories, and what would today be recognised as fanfiction, but I never shared my work with anyone other than a school-friend with an interest in one of my Bonanza stories.

I began writing my first novel in my mid-twenties. My battered typewriter – a mid-teen birthday present – was in storage at that time, so I wrote it long-hand in a series of cheap exercise books. After I’d finished it, I made several attempts to type it out, and to edit it, and much later to update it as well, but for the most part it has languished in a box file marked ‘Novel’ ever since. It has a title – “Loved and Lost” – and I’m still quite proud of having written it, but I doubt it will see the light of day again.

I’ve started several other projects in recent years, but they remain incomplete. Life has a tendency to get in the way, and my life has provided enough interruptions and distractions to provide material for a novel in itself.

More recently I turned my hand back to fanfiction (not Bonanza!) and shared those stories online, with very positive results: people enjoyed them. My fanfiction muse is currently AWOL but it’s a genre I hope to continue writing for once the inspiration returns.

In September 2008, I began sketching an idea for what was originally going to be a short story; by mid-October 2008 I had the outline for a novel, and by the following year I had written over 270000 words! I felt that the overall story, entitled “Mine, Yours, Ours”, was too long to expect anyone to publish in one volume, so I split it into three separate books and continued editing, rewriting and  updating it in my spare time during the next decade. 

The idea for “Mine, Yours, Ours” came out of nowhere. Tasha just seemed to take over my mind and wrote herself, and her blog, through me. Once we’d written a few entries of her blog, I sent her off shopping and sat down and thought about this new world that she’d opened up to me, and I wrote out a time-line and plan for the whole story. Somewhere around the middle of part two, Tasha wrenched control from me and the story ended up in a completely different place from that which I’d envisaged. I wasn’t at all happy, but I feel it makes better material for a novel.

The first book was published as “New Beginnings” by Cranthorpe Millner in 2019, and remained in their catalogue until earlier this year. I have just self-published it, and I’m working on amalgamating books two and three into a sequel. 

I have recently started work on a creative non-fiction project, weaving biography with family history and poetry. 

Another ongoing project involves expansion of a fantasy short story into a novel. 

Writing is, and always has been, a joy. Even if no-one reads my work, even if no-one enjoys it, I still enjoy the process and the escapism of emerging myself in new worlds and following these people – the people that I’ve created – along their paths. I hope you do, too.