Dinah lives in East Sussex with her two children Leon 7 and Maisy 5. She began writing seriously about eight years ago. The main influences for the ‘Jordan’ books are her experiences of working as a youth worker in rural villages and a childhood spent immersed in ‘boy’ books such as the Just William series. Influences for characters come from time spent in the Territorial Army, encounters with some “nutty adults who were meant to be showing children the error of their ways” and her husband, whose Joinery firm Rise Joinery was “nicked” for the books in the form of Jordan’s dad’s firm “Rise building contractors”.

Biography

Dinah started school in Edinburgh and moved to the east end of London age 9.  By age 14 she was the ‘singer’ in a band called the Locusts, playing the underground circuit in London.  At the first opportunity she left school (aged 15) to work in a croissant shop in Charring Cross Road.

Many jobs (often simultaneous) followed:  Waitress, bar maid, Usherette at Drury Lane theatre, Stage Door Keeper at Drury Lane, tea girl at Recording studio, sound and lighting technician at Madam Jo Jo’s nightclub in Soho, fitness instructor, sound engineer in music studio, commis chef at Glyndebourne (among others), cleaning shop fronts, receptionist, soldier in territorial army, youth worker….

After five years spent in a steady job, working with young offenders in a secure unit Dinah decided to make a radical career change.  Her motivation for this was ‘a job that would make good money and that didn’t have the heavy emotional content that working with distressed young people carried’.  She wrote to Lloyd’s bank with a proposition: If you give me the course material for the exams needed to qualify as a financial advisor, I will take the exams in my own time.  And if I pass them, will you give me a job?  After six interviews the bank gave her the post anyway.  Dinah qualified as an FA and began work, but it proved disastrous.  She finally ‘blew the whistle’ on Lloyds in her article for the Guardian.

This proved to be a turning point.

‘I’ve got a little black book with my poems in…’ (Pink Floyd).

“I had a huge plastic box of notebooks and manuscripts that I’d written over the years.  Apart from a few peculiar childhood ornaments, it was about my only permanent possession.  Every now and then I’d write a rambling novel or whatever, and send a bit of it off in a haphazard way.  Amazingly I quite often received scribbled words of encouragement on the bottom of rejection letters, but by then I would have gone on to the next thing.  Leaving the bank made me re-adjust my whole perspective on life.  Having achieved the job through sheer audacity – even though it didn’t work out – had made me think outlandish ideas were possible.”
“I bought every magazine and book I could find about writing.  I started to think about it properly; read other people’s work critically.  For me the joy of it was that I had no one telling me what to think: no teacher, no lecturer….  I could see it all through my own eyes.”

Dinah started writing in earnest, eight years ago, just before her son was born.  Her daughter Maisy was one and, Leon, two, when she woke up one morning with light-hearted scenario in her head.  She wrote it as a short story and, without thinking much about it, sent it to an agent.
Amazingly, a few months later, the agent called. Should this become a set of short stories for seven year olds or a proper book she wondered?  Dinah wrote a book and two simpler short stories about the same people.  The agent chose the book.  It was published two years later by Scholastic under the title: Aliens Don’t Eat Dog Food.

Dinah on writing

When I was doing all my different jobs I had this really strong sense of being ‘in’ life: Standing on the roof at Drury lane theatre looking out over London, running across the fly floor with a message and looking down at all the hats of the cast laid out below; listening to the night watchman’s stories about his days as a fireman; handing out leftover food from the restaurant to tramps under Waterloo bridge at midnight. Then there were the afternoons spent in a dimmed nightclub chatting to the man who filled up the cigarette machine; evenings working as a bar maid listening to the life story of a drunk that I would never see again.  For years life seemed to be filled with incredible characters and amazing stories.  There was a conflict between just living it and wanting to capture it – like nailing a butterfly for a collection.
I would write things down about people: what they looked like, how they spoke, conversations, stories they’d told me. I used to make notes of certain atmospheres with rough little drawings and descriptions.  Often these became stories or poems.  I was fascinated by all these different lives interwoven with each other. The advantage was that I accidentally practised writing.  They still all live in my plastic box like exotic pets.  It seems strange to think that some of those people must be dead by now.  Perhaps I’m the only person who ever made a record of anything to do with their lives?  I keep wondering what the best thing to do with them would be.
The Warning books are about my more recent life as a youth worker in rural areas: about young people creating havoc in a claustrophobic village.  I hadn’t realized I could make people laugh with writing and was very surprised when people kept saying they’d laughed out loud at my  books.

I thought later that my sense of humour was honed in the gutty moments of life.  Sending things up is a good way of coping with horrible managers, rude customers and generally bad situations.  I’ve huddled in so many corners with other workers making up scenarios about a disliked person’s personal life, laughing until we cried.  After that, instead of minding dealing with them we would fight to be the one so we could gather more ammunition.  By then it would have become a sort of project: If we were waiting tables we would gather information on what the person ate, how much they ate, how they ate, what they said (or whatever, depending on the job).  I think these people would have died if they’d known the scrutiny they were under. All they would have seen is an indifferent, slightly bored, member of staff.  Especially skilled would be the ability to get in a hidden one liner and ‘corpse’ your colleague at a crucial moment.  (By which I mean freeze them because they were trying not to laugh).

But back to now. I feel as if I’m right at the bottom of an amazing writing-ladder.  Jordan is my first published character and I’m really fond of him – he’s a sweet, chaotic (and, yet, strangely destructive) person.  I hope that he will enjoy his special, fond place, as the first of many. I can’t imagine not writing. It think it produces weird brain waves that make an hour seem like a minute and, unlike many other forms of learning and work, it’s addictive.  Then again a life spent writing could pass in a flicker.  Who cares, when I’m in charge I can jump back ten years in a sentence.
In the meantime I have my own two little characters to look after – not to mention the big character: loos to clean, floors to mop, head lice to drown…I’m a writer!  I shouldn’t have to do this stuff!