Who am I? How am I?

All my life I've lived in the same square mile of England. In spite of this, I have a fairly global outlook on life. Both John Cheever and Emily Dickinson were involved directly and indirectly in wars of the world, which forced them to take a wider view of things. I grew up with the second Gulf War, so became accustomed to seeing wartime images on the news every day. This was an influence on my pacifist beliefs - which certainly come out more in my writing than in my conversation.

Dickinson admired other then-contemporary female writers, taking influence from them as much as male writers. In my life came Harry Potter, making a female writer the most popular writer worldwide, but the two who had most influence on me were the relatively contemporary female writers Harper Lee and Marjane Satrapi. In the case of Satrapi's Persepolis, a graphic novel, this - along with Alan Moore's Watchmen - allowed me to branch out in my aspirations as a writer. I'd liked comics for years, but those aforementioned graphic novels ignited my interest to write them in addition to older textual genres...

Being a sexual minority, as Cheever was, I've also grown up with much less of a "heteronormative" viewpoint than most writers. I rarely write stories with only heterosexual characters. My sexuality, as well as my non-binary interpretation of gender, definitely inform the characters I write. I think fiction, in general, should reflect reality to an extent. Since a large percentage of writers aren't going to write LGBTQIA people, somebody's got to do it - it may as well be somebody who is one. In order for texts to tell truths about the world, they should be inspired by true and personal lives.