When I first started writing back in 2002, I wrote some of the Julie Journals. I wrote from the perspective of more to get my story down on paper (so to speak) to be read, probably after I was gone from this world, than anything else. The challenge that comes from writing something to be read after you have gone is to have it somewhere where it can be read, so I posted them even though I was aware they weren't complete.

The style I chose was in the third person, and I wanted to create that feeling of reading long after the events had taken place, a sort of reflection, if you like, hence each of them starts with a view of someone reading a journal or diary.

Every so often, I return to the Julie Journals and write something I remember or, in a couple of cases, something that had happened recently. With the latter, it is easy, as that just becomes the next chapter number; with the former, it is trickier to slot them into an existing series. Because of this, the numbers aren't perfect, and I am aware that in some cases they are not quite in chronological order. Therefore, each chapter can be read in its own right as it is a 'snapshot' of that period in time, but generally speaking, the Julie Journals are an autobiographical account in roughly chronological order.

One of the things, when you write about your own life, is that you often get asked what level of truth there is in the stories. As most of us know, in life, things don't quite happen as quickly as they need to in a story to avoid boring the reader to death with triviality. Therefore, in a couple of places, I have moved things faster than they actually happened. It has also been necessary, in places, to change people's names to protect their identities.

As some of these were written a long time ago and very early in my writing life, they are a little raw in places. For that reason, I occasionally revisit a story and polish it a little, either by adding some detail or, more often than not, correcting the horrendous typos that litter some of my early work.

I hope you enjoy my life, and there are a few more chapters yet to be written, both of the things yet to come and also a few stories of my past yet to be told.

Julie xxx

P.S. - You will find 'Julie' pops up in a few of my fiction stories. The character portrayed is based on me, and the majority of the stories are not true, but in places, there are scenes that are very true, but classifying it as fiction allows me legal deniability.