Welcome!
Thank you for visiting my blog, Storypot. My story is a bit long (because I'm not a spring chicken anymore, LOL). Hopefully, I am telling you what you want to know.
My writing career began in the late 1980s while I was a student at the University of Bophuthatswana (now called North West University). I was studying for a Bachelor of Science degree, despite the fact that my dream was to become a writer, because I needed something practical and I have an affinity with data.
While studying, I fulfilled my need for creative expression by writing children’s stories that I mailed to local educational publishers. One of my children’s stories, The Doll That Grew, caught the attention of a Macmillan Boleswa editor and was publishers in 1993. By then, I had decided to pursue a career as a full-time writer. At that time, becoming a starving writer was not scary at all. It helped that I was willing to take any writing job, as long as it allowed me to improve my craft and build my portfolio.
Most of the work I landed when I left university was in the non-profit sector, where I wrote educational materials, brochures, pamphlets, newsletter copy. When the Internet became more mainstream, I added website and blog content to my repertoire. Storypot was born in January 2006 when I began to publish some of my content online indepedently.
Organisations I’ve worked with /written for include the Non-Profit Partnership, which lobbied the South African government (National Treasury and the South African Revenue) for the creation of the Public Benefit Organisations and the associated tax incentives, the Soul City Institute and Charities Aid Foundation Southern Africa.
I've also worked as a senior journalist for ITWeb, a national IT business media house and published on a variety of national consumer magazines including Tribute, Femina and Cosmopolitan. While freelancing keeps the wolf from the door, that original hunger to write fiction is still riding me.
I’ve published short stories, poetry, children’s books and a short book for newly literate adults. Occasionally I've written and self-published non-fiction ebooks. I have yet to publish a full length novel and am currently shopping a number of manuscripts under a pen name.
I’m based in Phokeng, a village in the North West province of South Africa, where I write, grow my own food, volunteer for local NGOs, tinker with tech gadgets and apps and blog about it all. Occassionally, I travel into Johannesburg, where meet clients, hang out with friends and enjoy some city-related fun activities.
Check out my "Coming Soon!" page for works that are scheduled for publication.
Thank you for your support.
