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Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.

I have two vintage typewriters. One just about works and the other hasn't a hope in hell, bless it. But they're both beautiful, and they'll stay with me just as long as there's a roof over my head.

My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'

I was living in a large apartment with no furniture, just a typewriter, and because I had nothing else to do with my time, it made me take my writing seriously.

I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.

When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.

I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!

Whenever the kindly uncles and aunts came over for a cup of tea and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was always the same: an 'authoress', and illustrate my own books.

I'm a relic, and things were a lot different when I was fifteen and sixteen. There were no cell phones, no laptops... I learned to type on an actual typewriter.