About Lesley


I guess I've been scribbling ever since I could. I loved writing stories at school and growing up in 70s London meant creativity was definitely on the school curriculum (unlike multiplication tables!).

My career as a primary school teacher, and then a deputy head, gave me opportunities to write - some of it wonderfully creative, some very factual and some just plain old boring.

In 2006 I joined a creative writing group in Leicestershire and dipped my toe into fiction writing. By the time the tutor retired I was hooked on writing fiction, had written several short stories and the first chapters of two novels. I took over running the writing group, Scribblers on the Fosse, seeing myself more as facilitator than tutor and spent time trawling the internet for exercises and stimuli which might inspire us to write.


In 2009 I was accepted for headship training and I also booked myself on an Arvon fiction course led by the authors Jill Dawson and Kathryn Heyman. I have to say that this course was life changing for me. The buzz of spending a week writing, surrounded by like minded people, was something I had never experienced before and it made me reassess my priorities.

As a result I gave up the headship training, gave up the deputy head job and, well, gave up the whole idea of working at all for a while so that I could spend a year travelling around Europe in the delightful company of my husband and dog. You can read about our travels in a smallish van on our joint blog Charlie Dog Came Too. 

While enjoying visiting some excellent places my plan was also to dedicate time to writing my first novel. To assist in this process I also invested in mentorship through the excellent Gold Dust scheme. This proved invaluable in helping improve the structure, style and direction of my writing.

I am now back in England. We have moved to a village near Cambridge, where I am in the final stages of editing the main body of the novel, which is complete up to the last couple of chapters. After working for a couple of terms in a school I felt myself quickly losing all of my free time, my writing time, again, and so I took the decision to really scale down in hope of spending more time writing. However, I do find that even the part-time tutoring I am currently doing eats into my writing time. I find I am much better when I can really get into the whole process, so that something like NaNoWriMo can be especially productive for me.

Lesley's Scibblings are then the ramblings of an aspiring writer. This blog is somewhere to put my writing 'out there', and a place for me to work on writing other than my novel. If you stumble across this it might, perhaps, also inspire you to write something. I'd be so chuffed if that happened.