Benefitting from astonishing openings in the time/space continuum, I have managed to travel the world and live in many countries. A planned career path, you ask? Not even close. From musician to journalist to editor to publisher took me from New Zealand to Europe, from my own businesses to working for some of the largest media companies on planet Earth.
Did I mention my passion for goth and steampunk fashion and music?
Involvement in projects that spanned continents — at EMAP and Sky, for example — offered wonderful opportunities to visit and work in cities from San Francisco to Moscow, including London, Edinburgh, Paris, Copenhagen, Prague, Granada and Milan to name a few.
No matter whether a designer, creative director or systems manager, my roles have tracked alongside the inspired changes to the publishing industry over the past 40 years — the Apple years!
Yes, sorry, I’m an unapologetic iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and MacBook user, and even visited the Xerox Research Centre at Palo Alto way back at the dawn of the graphical user interface (otherwise known as point-and-click with the mouse) and the WYSIWYG text editor.
As a late starter in family-building, I’d had the chance to jump into the world of web with both feet, from the NeXT computer through Dreamweaver and Joomla and all the way to WordPress dominance. One significant also-ran in my toolbox has been Adobe, from PageMaker through the QuarkXPress years and back to InDesign, with PhotoShop all the way.
And the music continued to play on, from the Cow Palace concerts in San Francisco for the likes of Genesis and Gentle Giant, to the Ahoy concerts in Rotterdam for Tina Turner and Janet Jackson, and right along with Floyd, Led Zep, Prince, Muse, System of A Down, etcetera, etcetera. And with plenty of recommendations from my children to keep me in tune with the many offshoots of what I choose to call rock or dance — whether that includes Limp Bizkit or Skrillex.
A few of the cities I’ve visited appear as backgrounds to the thrills in the Women Out of Time trilogy, which includes the forthcoming novel Red Diamond.
