#TenThingsYouMayNotKnow – About Janet Gogerty

/ Marcia Meara

It’s time for another Ten Things list here on The Write Stuff, this time featuring author Janet Gogerty. I know you’ll enjoy learning more about some of the fun and interesting things Janet has done, so I’ll turn it over to her! Take it away, Janet!

Ten Things You May Not Know About Me
by Janet Gogerty

  1. I once worked on a chicken farm; it was up the road in our new Australian suburb and the cockerels used to wake us up. It was my school holiday job when I was fifteen, they paid me $13 out of the petty cash and on the first day the supervisor asked me to clean the toilet! I didn’t actually get to see any chickens, we sorted out the eggs.
  2. I had over forty white mice by the time I was elven.
  3. Family legend has it that HG Wells was a cousin of a great grandfather.
  4. Continuing the egg theme, I once worked on the easter egg run at a run down sweet factory – this time I was 21 and on my ‘working holiday’ – see further down.
  5. I do not have a clue what I am doing on the internet; anything you see from me is there more by luck than judgement.
  6. I am on the longest working holiday ever, it started on Christmas morning 1973 when I arrived back in England from Australia with a ticket to return in six months…
  7. I went to school in a manor house – mid way through my time at St. Peter’s junior school we moved from the Victorian school building into the manor house opposite St. Peter’s church.
  8. I had my first camera when I was eight.
  9. I got my first Lego set this year.
  10. I got my first Beatles record in CD form.

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Author Janet Gogerty

I have been writing furiously since I joined a tutored writing group fourteen years ago. I am an Indie Author, self publishing on Amazon Kindle and was delighted when publishing paperbacks on Amazon also became possible; at last my mother was able to hold my books and read them ‘properly’ and I had handy Christmas and birthday presents.

For nearly seventeen years I have lived on the south coast of England, before that we lived and brought up the children in a series of homes very near Heathrow Airport, where my late husband worked for thirty years. My teenage years were spent in Perth, Western Australia, our Ten Pound Pommie experiences inspired my novel Quarter Acre Block. I have had all sorts of jobs which provide great material for writing.

 As a reader, Kindle really expanded my horizons, with instant access to Indie Authors and other writers all around the world.

I don’t conform to a genre, but one of my favourite themes is ordinary folk facing extraordinary events. I have published five novels and four collections of short fiction. At my website Tidalscribe.com you can read my regular blogs about anything and everything; I also post flash fiction and you can read about my books and visit my photo gallery, where I indulge my love of point and shoot phone photography.

Life has been bizarre and difficult for many of us in the past year or more and for the first time in ages I haven’t got a novel in progress, but I have written a lot of short fiction for my blog, often the humorous side of people coping with lockdown and all the other Covid changes. Some of my characters ended up becoming regulars; perhaps they might end up in a novel, but will any of us want to read about Covid life by the time it is published?

Writing was a great distraction during all our various lockdowns and my other main interests, blogging, Zoom quizzes, gardening, walking and my beach hut also kept me sane.

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YOU CAN BUY JANET’S BOOKS HERE

 

 

 

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60 thoughts on “#TenThingsYouMayNotKnow – About Janet Gogerty”

  8. Thanks Marcia for running this series and inviting me along. Sorry I arrived late; I have just said farewell to Team H who have been staying on stage one of their summer holiday – I have been on the washing line, not On Line this morning! I hope you are feeling okay today with all your Covid worries.

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    • Thank YOU so much for participating in this new series, Janet. I loved your answers and am hoping I have the energy to spend some time responding to folks today, too. The fatigue seems to be the last symptom of COVID I’m dealing with, and it’s slowly going away, but I can’t promise. I’m trying to listen to what my body is telling me as I get past this.

      In the meantime, I know folks will be enjoying this post all day long, and I’m so glad you’ve traded the washing line for being ON line! 😀 Great to have you! 🙂 ❤

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  12. Oooh, that’s fascinating about HG Wells, Janet. What a cool legend to have circulating around in your family. I loved all of the facts you shared, although the 40 white mice kind of made me shudder a bit. I hope they weren’t all at one time, LOL!

    Thanks for sharing Janet’s facts with us, Marcia!

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  14. Thanks for introducing us to Janet. I can’t imagine having 40 of any pet, let alone mice! Lol! I had mice in my walls once, and I was traumatized by it. I still remember the smell. Ugh. Australia is on my list of top five places I want to visit. I can’t wait! 🙂

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    • Hello Yvette. Luckily we kept the mice in the rather nice garden shed my father had built for himself and didn’t get to use. My aunt did not realise how scared she was of mice until she arrived on a visit and I held out my cupped hands and said ‘Would you like to see my mouse?’ She ran away screaming!

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      • Lol! Poor aunt! I don’t think I would have run away screaming. They don’t frighten me. I just couldn’t sleep for days because I felt them running all over me and could smell them. (I don’t know if they ever got on my bed, but my mind is very powerful. It was awful. Lol!)

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    • Thanks Jim, I have to catch up with making my Harry Potter Lego owl, a difficult one. But the regular Lego has been spread all over the living room with little grandsons visiting. They put ‘Frightened Freddy’ into space so I have written another story for them. The five year old literally does not stop talking about Lego!

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    • I could write a blog about chickens, sadly I did not see any chickens until the day I noticed a drum in the yard full of male chicks being drowned. The chickens were in sheds and I fear this was a forerunner of factory farming. Ironically lots of neighbours kept happier chickens ( chooks ) in their back yards.

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  18. It’s nice to meet you here, Janet! I love your family legend about HG Wells 🙂 That’s a lot of pet mice! We had two rats as pets that turned out not to be two females and our group expanded so we had to find them new homes.

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  21. Legos hate me. They’re basically an expensive plastic mine field. Oh, also, I break them. I have magic powers because, sometimes, I don’t even touch them. Just one look from me and my kids’ work falls apart. It’s fun. But, yes, there are some very cool ones out there I almost wish I could do. 😉

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  24. What a wonderful way to learn about Janet. Yes, fun facts here, and yet they do give us some insight to a creative and witty woman. 40 white mice! Whoa. And first listening to the Beatles on CD gives me the idea that you are younger than me. 🙂 Off to your blog – thanks Marcia much for introducing me to this fascinating writer and woman.

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  25. What a colorful post from Janet. Lol, I chuckled at #5, as so many writers would rather not have to deal with digital madness. And the final grab was ‘beach hut’. A long ago dream, lol 🙂

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