I am a total geek. My handle in many tech chatrooms is juliageek, I can code in HTML, CSS and PHP, and am fluent in Adobe Creative Suite, Quark Express and all things Mac. I was a graphic/website designer for many years and loved the combination of techy stuff and creativity underpinning that sort of work – I still use loads of software for planning and writing, and the structural thinking I learned back then is really useful to me as a novelist.

I have a Masters in Sequential Illustration. Until I hit my forties, I’d always thought I was all about the pictures rather than the words. It took my MA (where I wrote and illustrated two children’s books – http://juliacollins.co.uk/ill_child_books.html) to teach me that the words of a story came to me far more easily than the pictures.

If you scour psychology textbooks from the early 1980s, you will find pictures of a teenage me making faces. I was a drama student, and it was a paid gig (£30, I think), where we had to facially express a series of emotions. The big problem was my hair, which was styled along the lines of Terry Hall from Fun Boy Three meets Siouxsie Sioux (Google them, kids). It took a lot of wetting and combing to make it look less – as the photographer so diplomatically called it – “date specific”.

If you scour medical textbooks of the late 1980s, you will find a picture of my cervix, which was taken after a pioneering minimally invasive cone biopsy, following a brush with cervical pre-cancer in my mid 20s (turn up for your smear, sisters).

I keep sane by running. I can do distance, but not speed. I’m doing the Brighton Half Marathon for the second time in 2017, with my daughter Nel and husband Tim. They are both over 6ft tall, and all leg, so they will finish way ahead of me, but I maintain that being a relatively squitty 5’7”, I have to take two steps to their every one, so, to meet their loping effort, I should halve my time. The logic sort of holds.

I have a love/hate relationship with writing. I have these hideous writing demons who sit on my shoulder and tell me that every word I write is rubbish. Every morning I battle with them, but over the years I have developed a strategy that, while falling short of totally annihilating the little bastards, at least sends them away for a while. It’s all about speed. I just sit down and start writing without thinking too much, and I touch type as fast as I think, just anything. After ten minutes of that, I am lost to the world and the demons are sitting down at my ankles where they can’t see what I’m up to. That’s when the love bit kicks in. Big editing follows this word-vomit approach, of course.

I have two cats. Sandra, the tabby, is feisty and pretty, with circular eyes like the cat in Shrek. Don’t tell her, though, but her brother Keith is my favourite. He spends most days lying on my desk, sprawled between my keyboard and my monitor. For pictures look for #Keith on Twitter.

I have been a parent for 27 years. The youngest of my three children, Joey, is 17 and will soon be following his brother and sister into the world. I will miss him enormously. It brings new freedoms, but if find the idea of the looming empty nest daunting. Who will I look after? Whilst I am fiercely proud of my three lovely adults, I really miss the hot press of a toddler’s head as he or she cuddles up against me.

My husband is a playwright and actor and tours his (mostly) one-man shows all over the world. I sometimes go with him (and will increasingly do so – see point 8 above). Last year we went to Korea for a week and this spring we’re going to Ireland on a tour that I am also producing for him. I love to travel, and wife-on-tour is the best gig, even if I sometimes have to operate sound and/or light for him. It’s legit, though. Before all the writing and the graphic and website designing, I was a theatre director, so I do know a thing or two about it. LX Q 9: go!

I am scared of the dark, and most particularly, the dark in the countryside. I grew up in a village eight miles outside Cambridge and, in my teens, I’d often get the 10:30pm bus back from town. The bus stop was at the edge of the village and I had to cross the (unlit) longest village green in England to get home. It was a very special kind of hell for me. This intimacy with fear certainly informs my writing. When I was thinking about the Fenland house that Louisa and Sam move into in Her Husband’s Lover, the idea of the night-time silence and space around it really haunted me. I had this image of Louisa wanting to escape the building, wanting to run away from it, but being unable to do so because of the empty darkness surrounding it.