Mandy, a self-proclaimed black sheep of her family of eleven, didn't think her life was particularly interesting until a film producer insisted she write her life story for him to produce-an extremely challenging task that is a work in progress but may take her a lifetime.Mandy has a BA from Deakin University. Her dedication and intense passion for writing came about when she had two sons in the early '90s. Every night rather than reading from books, they insisted Mandy create 'magination' stories, as they called them. Since then, she has written hundreds of adult stories, all at varying stages of completion and all with an element of romance.Most of Mandy's characters are based on real-life people. In A Guilt Within, Elle and Aisha bear an uncanny resemblance to her best friends, both in appearance and demeanour. And Liam, the romantic lead in one of her upcoming stories, is based on when she first met her husband on an overnight train. In the morning, after they had parted, he came running back to the train station searching for his wallet, quickly finding it again, and then offering to shout her and her sister out for beers (it was 6 a.m.). He confessed a week later to lying about losing his wallet, and, to Mandy's horror, he'd overheard she was a few years older than him, so he'd also inflated his age by ten years.She now lives with her slightly 'younger' husband and a somewhat neurotic dog. They have two amazing grown-up sons who regularly visit their extremely lively home on acreage in the Noosa Hinterland, where they happily share produce from the fruit and veggie gardens with the regular visiting wildlife, including ten king parrots, hundreds of rainbow lorikeets, and dozens of free-roaming kangaroos.
