Kathy Gates

I see myself as a late bloomer who loves to travel. Not sure how others see me, well, we can never really know, can we? I grew up in the the teeming metropolis of Sydney, although I don't remember it as such, and relocated to the beautiful little city of Hobart in 1995.

Reading has been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember,  and basically I'll read anything. Early favourites were Pippi Longstocking and Trixie Belden, then I fell for historical romance when I read Anya Seton's Katherine. Jane Austen and the Brontes came next followed swiftly by Simone de Beauvoir  who I discovered via Albert Camus. Well written biography and autobiography are always welcome and when travelling I love to read about the place that I happen to be in.

Always a reader, it never occurred to me to write myself but then one day I had an idea that I just couldn't get out of my head. When I blogged about a year of travel a friend said that I should add some romance. And that was the inspiration for my first Wattpad effort, The Battle for Baiardo. I spent a couple of weeks there, volunteering for a cultural association and met some English people looking for a holiday home. There was definitely an undercurrent of tension in the village about who was buying up properties. That was just before the GFC hit and I moved on to Malta. I did subsequently do volunteer work in an art school but that was in Casole d'Elsa in Tuscany and is still going strong.