When I came back to fiction writing in the summer of 2018, it was like turning a key in a rusty lock of an old garden gate. I had been so long away that all my creative muscles had almost atrophied. I felt like the poor woman in the 18th century who was locked in an attic for twenty years by a sadistic husband, and now I could dance and play again. But my imprisonment had been self-inflcited.
I was writing. I had just completed an autobiographical account of my life as a grants assessor travelling around the world , which had been the first full length manuscript I’d completed since my thirties.
But then I discovered fanfiction, especially Archive of Our Own and delved into that wonderful resource, marveling at the talent of so many writers. I had a go myself, and ended up writing more than 480,000 words across twenty two stories for Carol and the Devil Wears Prada collection. It’s immediate, it’s free to post, the community is generous and caring, and it’s anonymous. You live or die by the quality and appeal of your writing, simple.
But then I wanted to escape the clutches of DWP and wrote my first, very bumpy sapphic novel, Isabel’s Healing, for which I was lucky enough to win the Lesfic Bard award for new writing, and those locked gates against passionate sexy fiction were well and truly opened.
It was a simple, age-gap, opposites-attract novel, by no means perfect. But it’s still probably my favourite. Isabel started a series, all set more or less around a women-led aid agency in London, with five more novels following the adventures of Isabel and friends. The fourth in the series, Love Under Lockdown, was runner up in the Lesfic Bard awards for Romance in 2022.
I have also written four novels set in California media land, with the second of those also being a Lesfic Bard runner up , this time in ‘action and adventure’, a stand-alone novel, and my own miniseries of fantasy adventures based on the late Roman empire.
I write because I love it, pure indulgence, whether with scratchy pen, fading cheap biro, laptop, desktop, tablet or phone. It’s like dancing and I think it’s an incurable disease! The only thing I hate is marketing, which is why you’ve maybe never heard of Maggie McIntyre!
Maggie McIntyre’s story, The Seduction of Rosie Barnes, is in SapphFic Eclectic, volume 5.
Butterworth Books 