About Me

I can’t remember a time before I didn’t want to write. I wanted to make people feel about my books the way I felt about books myself – bereft when I’d finished them, or I’d laugh or cry real tears at emotional parts.  But I didn’t think that ordinary girls like me got those sorts of jobs (I know, I know.) The trouble was I was split down the middle; half of me was saying I had no chance and to be sensible and get a proper job, the other half was telling me that it was all I wanted to do. I listened to side A too much in the beginning. I was an academic at school so it made sense for me to go to university and I did a vocational teaching degree in drama and education. I didn’t really want to be either a teacher or an actress but, mixing with a load of actors on a film set in a summer job I had, I did realise that they were all giving it their best shot even though some of them would make it big (and they did – Game of Thrones big!) and some would fall by the wayside… they were trying to make their dreams come true.

I left uni, trained for a while as an accountant in a building society (oh my – I hated that job so much), moved to Haworth hoping to be smitten by a Bronte muse as I always wanted to live there, and supplemented my income in the late 1980s by asking greetings cards firms if they’d buy the four line verse I used to write travelling the train to and from work.  One wonderful firm replied and said that they’d like to give me a chance as a ghost writer, writing copy for a new project – Purple Ronnie.  Having some of my poems turned into those cards spurred me on so much.  They might have only been daft cards (which turned out to be a multi-million pound industry phenomenon) but I – YES I – was in print!  I started to write my first book about a woman who fell in love with a vampire but the rejection letters came thick and fast.  Seems I was too early for a girl/vampire love story (plus it was a bit crap) but I finished it.

The accountancy job didn’t last very long.  There was only one coat that fitted, so I did a selection of various jobs in either Leeds, Keighley, Skipton, Haworth to pay the mortgage then once I was at home, I dragged out the typewriter that my dad had bought me and I wrote.  The trouble was I had nothing much to say.  The books I write have come from a lot of life experience and I hadn’t had any then.  And the books I attempted then had no real sense of where they were set because I couldn’t write about the south and I didn’t think anyone would be interested in hearing about the north. It was only when I was sacked for having too much of a Yorkshire accent (by a Yorkshire woman who had a Yorkshire firm in Yorkshire) that my humiliation led me to a state of sheer bloody-mindedness that my next book would be set in Yorkshire and stuffed full of Yorkshire.  And it was. But it was also rubbish and more rejection letters followed.  But whenever I felt as if I had no chance, I had two huge icons who kept me dreaming:  Barry Hines, a Barnsley lad who flew in the face of convention and wrote about the north and ‘made it’ and Catherine Cookson whose books lifted my heart – and she didn’t have her first book published until she was well into her 40s.  It wasn’t too late for me, I kept telling myself.  And there was a space for northern writers in this world, surely. I want Yorkshire to be as big as Cornwall.

I had a succession of short-term jobs, in offices, mills, banks, sales, exports and I hated them all, but I loved the women I worked with and they informed my writing.  I worked with older women who showed me that friendships knocked down barriers of age, background, colour, creed.  And I worked with younger women who were fabulous fun.  I ‘lived’ in my 20s and 30s, had some great times and horrific times and it coloured and enriched how and what I wrote. When I lost my job days before I found out I was pregnant, I wrote off to loads of greetings cards firms and asked them to buy my wares.  And they did.  I set up a little company called ‘Black Sheep’ and I became a professional joke and rhyme writer. I was content, happy, working from home with a wonderful set of people to meet up with on work events… but there was just that one missing piece in my jigsaw.  My job was the silver medal position and there was only one gold for me – becoming a novelist.

When I fell pregnant it was at the same time as two of my pals. My journey through pregnancy was nothing like I thought it would be. I kept a diary both times I was pregnant which was to come in handy.  One day, sitting in my front room with these two friends after the births of our first-borns, I experienced a lightbulb moment.  ‘Why aren’t you writing about this?’ said the lightbulb.  ‘Friendships, Yorkshire, pregnancy, work, relationships… the extraordinary things that happen within the parameters of ordinary, everyday life.’  That dropped a seed in my head. I carried on being a copywriter, moved back to Barnsley from Haworth, filed for divorce when I was pregnant with my second son and then I hit forty. And I felt that life was passing me by and I needed to get a wiggle on if I was to become the novelist I wanted to be. So I picked up my pregnancy diaries and started to write a story about three friends who became pregnant at the same time and sent it off to the agent I had been chasing on and off for FIFTEEN YEARS. And Lucie Whitehouse, who was an agent there then (now a crime writer who is amazing) sold me to Simon and Schuster and the rest… as they say… is history.

I am the poster girl for giving it your best shot and making it happen and many of my books do feature women who have been knocked into an alternative groove to the one they always imagined they’d be in, but find their way back to their dreams.  I got my publishing deal when I was forty-one.  I love what I do and I hope that comes through in my work. I have sold millions of copies of my books all around the globe now. So you see what you can achieve if you just put your mind to it even if the odds are against you. I had never done a creative writing class, didn’t know anyone in the industry. I was a single mum of two small boys holding down a full-time job and I had to write my books through the night until I was earning enough to let the day job go.  So you see, it can be done.

 

I’m a regular on the MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER circuit and can tailor make a speech to your requirements.  No audience too large… please contact me directly on my contact page for details or via The Speakers’ Agency.

I’m on Facebook as @millyjohnsonauthor,  Twitter as @millyjohnson, Substack as @millyjohnson, Instagram as @themillyjohnson, TikTok as @millyjohnsonauthor and I do have a website for American readers here too (www.milly-johnson.com)