Writer's Treasury of Ideas

Linda Lewis began her writing career in 1990 when she signed up for a correspondence course. One assignment was to write about something she knew about, so she chose tropical fish. That first piece went on to be published and, over the next seven years, she wrote more and more articles about tropical fish for magazines in the UK, USA and South Africa. When her husband died in 1997, she began to switch her focus to fiction, selling her first story to Take a Break magazine in 1998. That was when she started to use the pen name, Catherine Howard. Since 2003, she has been working full time as a writer, concentrating mainly on short stories. Her stories have been published in many women's magazines, including Best, Chat, That's Life and Woman, as well as magazines in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Australia. She has lost count of how many stories she has sold, but guesses the number is somewhere between two and three hundred. In 2008, Linda was given a column in Writers' Forum, entitled Short Story Success, where she passes on tips to other fiction writers, and tells them about her life as a working writer. In 2011, her first novel, The Magic of Fishkeeping, was published. In the same year, she began to move away from fiction and switch her focus to non-fiction, producing three short writers' guides, and working on an autobiography. She also runs workshops for writers, including workshops at the Swanwick Writers' Summer School, and at the NAWG Festival of Writing. Linda offers a critique service and tailor-made writing lessons, helps organise and judge short story competitions and gives talks to all kinds of groups on a variety of subjects.