The sea in my bones

My ambition was always to become an author. It sounds clichéd to say, "I've always wanted to write books" - all authors seem to say it, but that's because it's true, and there really isn't a better way of putting it. As a child, I remember being enraptured by the 1960s ghost story anthologies at my grandma's house, on a dusty set of shelves in the room that used to be my aunt's: their phantasmagorical covers and tea-brown pages; how they smelled, of age and cinnamon; the depths of horror that could be reached in a slender volume. Aged seven or eight, I sought to imitate these with efforts like The Nightmare House and Under the Bed, which were about as subtle as the titles suggest. I stapled the pages together and drew barcodes on the back, alongside an admittedly ambitious RRP. From a young age, I realised there was a commercial aspect to it.