I'm a British author and I live in Somerset in the south-west of England time writing, reading, drawing, learning languages and gardening.

I haven't always wanted to be a writer, It didn't even occur to me to try until I was in my forties, but the moment I did, I was hooked. 

I started out with scripts. There are many rules to writing scripts. Brevity is the key, and leaving a lot of the description and setting to others. But scriptwriting is a very competitive field and the Internet was rapidly becoming somewhere where publishing your writing was a possibility, so I turned my hand to writing short stories. The transition made sense, because brevity is they key with short stories, as well. This brought some success. I had stories published in women's magazines (under the pen name of Lily Bond), on a Big Finish Doctor Who CD, in anthologies and online publications and I was placed in one or two small competitions. I found I particulary liked writing very short stories (also known as flash fiction). This is still the case. Towards the end of 2012 I started to experiment with longer pieces of work and have since independently published a number of novels and short stories. 

I don't like to restrict myself to one particular genre. Over the years, I have discovered a particular liking for writing shorts with a horror element - although you won't find copious amounts of blood and gore in any of my stories. I believe what the reader imagines is much more interesting than having everything spelled out, even in something as short as a 6-word story. 

Most of my writing could broadly be called young adult, mainly because of the character ages. However, I have written for an even younger audience, middle grade, and produced audio books for these stories.

Right now, I am writing short stories exclusively, most of which I am publishing on my author Youtube channel. There are also readings of some of my older stories on there. You'll find a couple of those at the bottom of the page. The channel is aptly named Juliet Boyd Author and you can find it at: youtube.com/@julietboydauthor.

For most of my working life I was heavily involved in training people to use computer software. It was never my main task, but something that built up over time, once it was realised by the powers that be that I was better at learning and using software than many others. I was once described as a technical end-user, which sounds about right. This is why I started my author tech channel on YouTube, because I knew I could be of assistance to those who were struggling with working out how to use software.

The main focus of the channel is Scrivener, which is a dedicated software application for writers that enables you to output to Microsoft Word and also to eBook formats, but I also have videos on various other software that could be useful to authors. The channel is called Juliet Boyd - Tech Tutorials for authors and you can find it at: youtube.com/@techtutorialsforauthors.

What's a section about language-learning doing on an author's website? Well, because I'm also a language student and I have a channel about that on YouTube, too.

Languages were always some of my best subjects at secondary school. Everyone, at that time, had to learn French. I think we started in the first year. Then, in the second year you were required to start a second language. My second language was Spanish. But I didn't stop studying them at school. I continued on to do A levels and then on to what was, at the time, Birmingham Polytechnic, to do a Diploma in Foreign Languages for Business. This was a three year course and I, once again, studied, French and Spanish, but also started to learn German. However, I never really got a handle on German, although I still recognise some words now.

After that, I pretty much never used French again, but I did go on to use Spanish in my working life for about ten or eleven years. This was mainly simply typing the language, but it did enable me to travel to Mexico, Columbia and Spain with my work. Again, though, once I left that work, I never had need of using Spanish again.

Fast forward to December 2020 - you know, those times - and I decided to learn another language to fill the hours. I had, at that point, no interest in rekindling the languages I had studied previously, so I plumped for Italian and started learning on Duolingo. This experience was so different to language-learning when I was in the education system. It really worked for me. Within six months I had completed the Duolingo course and had already read my first novel in Italian. I had also started a YouTube channel to document, in some little way, the journey. But after six months of the channel, I kind of ran out of steam on things to say and abandoned it. In the meantime, though, I continued on apace with my Italian and by the end of 2021 had finished a series of novels and, maybe unwisely, felt I needed a new challenge.

In December 2021, I started learning Welsh. This has not gone so well, partly because of changes made on Duolingo and partly because, although Wales is right next door to England, the language is very different and pretty complex. I am slowly getting there, but it will take a long time before I feel in the least bit competent with it.

Another time jump to October 2022, and I decided I was going to give my language channel another go. It still only had about 5 followers at that time, which was a very sad state of affairs. However, within a very short time (at the time of writing this sentence it's March 2023), the channel has grown to over 100 followers. 

Also in March 2023, I made another rash decision. I decided to rekindle my French. At time of writing, it's been less than a week, but I remember a surprising amount, considering it's multiple decades since I've done anything in the language. So, I guess I'll be making videos about that, too.

If you're interested in watching my languge journey, or starting on one yourself, the channel name is A Language Learning Tale and you can find it at: youtube.com/@alanguagelearningtale.

BREAKING NEWS: Check out my new podcast on languages. You can find more about it under Languages in the menu.

Although I used to engage on social media channels, I no longer do this. I have deleted some of my social media accounts and only use those that still exist to keep in contact with certain people. I have also removed my email from this website, because I was getting to much far too much spam. If my decision on this ever changes, I'll put the email here.

If you have enjoyed my writing, or my videos, the best thing you can do to support me in my endeavours is to share these things with people you know, who you think might also enjoy them. 

Thank you so much for your interest.