About me

Who am I?

Johanna Nield is my pseudonym; 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 .. still working full-time. I’m now a Revenue Analyst with an international healthcare company but I previously worked for a national children’s charity – it was a challenging and sometimes heartbreaking job, but I loved it – and the people I worked with partially inspired my novels. In my spare time I 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.

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.

In March 2010, after encouragement from friends who had read it, I finally went public with the first part of the story and uploaded it to Authonomy, a Harper Collins site for aspiring authors. Under its then temporary title “New Beginnings” it attracted a lot of positive comments and support, and some very useful critical feedback.

Because I’m still unhappy with the way that “Mine, Yours, Ours” ended, I have started work on parts four and five. One is a sequel, the other is more or less the same story but from a different point of view. These people just won’t get out of my head!

I’ve also recently started work on a completely different story, with a new pair of characters who suddenly appeared in my head along with an almost complete back-story, and gave me an opening line of dialogue. The story has now been time-lined and I’m filling in the character details. I suspect it will be a short story rather than a novel, but I’m intrigued about the path that that will take.

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.

 

 

Many of you know that the three titles in my New Beginnings series have for some time been available digitally on Amazon. Some of you have kindly posted reviews there, for which I am and will always be sincerely grateful, just as I am thankful for every reader and for everyone who takes an interest in my writing.

July 2019 will see the removal of my books from Amazon.

A revised edition of New Beginnings, with a gorgeous new cover, is to be published in paperback by Cranthorpe Millner, an exciting and fast-growing independent publisher based in London. I’m very proud to be included in their expanding catalogue of authors and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with their editorial team to improve and update my novel for today’s market.

Publication date and retail outlets to be announced shortly.

My journey as an author is taking me in a new direction, and I hope you’ll come with me!