My book is... everything I’ve always dreamed about. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a tiny tot, only just old enough to pick up a pen, and although it’s taken me 40 years to achieve that long-held dream it’s been well worth the wait. Every time I see The Chosen Queen on a bookshelf I get this amazing feeling inside and to know that there are people out there reading and enjoying it is a wonderful thrill.

What I really want to write about is exactly what I am writing about. I’m totally absorbed by my three queens – Edyth of Wessex, Elizaveta of Kiev, and Matilda of Flanders - and am loving creating their stories. When I first secured an agent it was with a contemporary novel, based loosely on my own experiences as a stepmother. I really enjoyed writing it but when we didn’t secure a publisher I turned to historical fiction and I won’t ever look back. I love shaping the past into stories that readers can access and enjoy and feel privileged to say that doing this is now my job.

I’ll never forget... the moment that the email came through from my agent saying that PanMacmillan wanted to buy the Queens of the Conquest trilogy. We were about to go on holiday with friends and I took a print-out of it to show them. My dear friend Brenda read it out loud in a very dramatic voice on a vast beach in Wales (King Griffin, hero of the first part of the novel, would very much have approved) and the image of that is forever imprinted on my mind.

My favourite place... is probably my office. We had an extension three years ago, mainly to get a bigger kitchen, but above it we built a beautiful space that has become my work room. Up until then I wrote in a corner of the kids’ playroom, in the kitchen, in the hallway… anywhere really. I’m still happy to write anywhere (I particularly like writing on trains) but my office is my haven. It’s light and airy and lined with hundreds of books and I love it.

The most dangerous thing I have ever done is... falling off a vast Spanish cliff in a little yellow 2CV! I was 19 and on holiday with my boyfriend at his grandparents’ lovely villa in Javea. They’d lent us their car to go to the beach and we’d had a lovely time but on the way back, on one of those winding mountain roads I will always now hate, another car came round the bend on our side of the road and my boyfriend had to swerve to avoid it. He hit the mountain rise on the right and that spun the car and sent us across the road and over the cliff on the left. I believe we turned over twice before finally, thankfully, the car lodged upside down against a small tree and we were able to scramble out, shocked by amazingly unhurt. The other car had stopped and was driven by a French couple and as I could speak French I spent the next hour translating between them and a lovely Spanish family in a house nearby who looked after us as the emergency services came. It wasn’t therefore, until we finally got back to our hosts that I realized I’d nearly died and burst into tears. Even then, there wasn’t much time to worry as we were due at the ‘best paella restaurant in the area’ that night and my boyfriend’s grandparents were determined not to waste the booking!!

The first time I... sold a story to a magazine was a wonderful moment. It was only a small, anecdotal piece about my time as a rower and it only earned me £25 (almost all of which I spent on a bottle of champagne to celebrate) but it was the first stone in what is turning into a wonderful path so I will always treasure it.

I regret... very little. I maybe should have gone into the world of bookselling/publishing out of university, instead of the rather sideways move I did make from an English Literature degree at Cambridge to a job as a production manager in a small textiles factory in Lancashire, but I had some wonderful experiences there and it was as a result of joining the company that I met my husband so it’s hard to wish it any other way. I feel as if I’m in a good place at the moment so whatever it took to get here is fine by me.

I remember... visiting Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh as a young child and being very struck by a dramatic bloodstain on the floor of the bedchamber where David Rizzio was murdered by Lord Darnley. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was standing on the very spot where that event had happened hundreds of years before and ever since then I’ve been acutely aware of history as a living thing – an imprint on our own present. That’s why I love writing historical fiction so much.

The one piece of advice I should have listened to but didn’t... was almost certainly from my mother but to be honest nothing in particular springs to mind. I’ve been very lucky to be surrounded by people who have been supportive of my crazy plan to become a writer and one of the things I used to particularly hate about getting rejections (and I got loads of rejections) was having to disappoint them. My parents, my husband, my friends, my kids, though, repeatedly advised me to carry on and I will always thank them for it.

I love... my family. That’s an obvious thing to say really but it’s still so very true. I have a wonderful husband who has been so supportive of my dream to become a writer (indeed it was his idea for me to ‘give it a go’ in the first place) and four wonderful children who keep my feet firmly on the ground and who, for the first years at least, kept me so busy looking after them that I was always desperate to get writing once I had a few hours to myself. I think that’s what’s enabled me to become disciplined about my writing and also to learn to cherish it.

I hate... people who drive too slowly. Patience isn’t my forte and when I set out to get somewhere, I want to get there with the minimum of fuss. I probably drive a bit too fast myself (though less so these days as I have children in the back) and I certainly get impatient with people who can’t find their accelerator off junctions!

I wish... there were more hours in the day. I absolutely love being a mother but it’s a very busy job and I never seem to have quite as much writing time as I would like. To be fair, I have more than I used to, as when they were little I would only get the odd hour here and there. Now I get a whole school day but the bell goes at 3.15 and I’m often deep in the middle of something so it’s hard to shift mode. Next year, though, my youngest goes to secondary school so I will get 8.30am – 4.30pm which will be a lot better, enabling me to do all (or at least most) of the writing I want to and then switch off and find times for the kids afterwards.

I can’t say no to... cheese. I’ve always loved the stuff, especially late at night with a glass of port, and as I’ve got older and lost what used to be a relatively sweet tooth, I’m more cheese-mad than ever before. For four years in my twenties I rowed at a fairly serious level as a lightweight. That meant that every summer, despite being pretty lean and fit already, I had to diet like crazy to lose the best part of a stone to hit race-weight. Cheese was very much off the menu then (as was port!) and it took me years to allow myself to eat it again but it’s definitely a big pleasure for me these days.

Yesterday, I... came home from a wonderful 5-day trip to Carcassonne in the south of France with my lovely husband. We left the children with my Mum and it was the longest I think I’ve ever been away from them. It was a bit strange but really good for us to relax and have some lovely meals in peace. I also found the medieval city incredibly inspiring – watch out for that in some future fiction!

What I’m reading right now is... Shadow on the Crown by Patricia Bracewell. It’ the first in a trilogy about Emma of Normandy who was Queen of England at the start of the 11th century (about 50 years before the events in The Chosen Queen) and I’m really enjoying it.

My favourite book growing up was... Milly Molly Mandy, a collection of old-fashioned tales of village life, as well as pretty much anything by Enid Blyton, especially her boarding school books. I must have read the Malory Towers series 50 times over as a girl.

My all time favourite book is... Tess of the D’Urbevilles by Thomas Hardy. I love Hardy’s writing – his sense of atmosphere and of place is second to none - and Tess is such a wonderful heroine. The book is very sad but has a real sense of journey which I’ve always enjoyed.

The book I would recommend everyone to read is... Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl. For me, it’s commercial historical fiction at its finest – lively, exciting and an original take on events people might think they know well. A couple of times recently I’ve been lucky enough to be favourably compared with Philippa Gregory and I consider that a huge honour.