10 Things you didn’t know about… Jemima Pett

The last of my featured posts in the blog tour for Zanzibar’s Rings appeared on Lynn’s Romance Enthusiasm, which is pretty weird as it’s really a Romance blog behind an Adult blogger screen!

I thought as they already had a biography for me, I might as well go to town with the adventures my imagination took me on when I was a kid. Some of it is true.

Actually, it’s all true, but some of it mainly happened in my head. And as Dumbledore said, just because it’s in your head, what makes it not true?

10 Things you Didn’t Know about Jemima Pett

  1. Jemima wrote her first book at around age 8, called the Whispering Stream. It was ten small pages long, and written in pencil.
  2. Between 8 and 12, Jemima was a champion show jumper. She had six horses in a stable outside her house, and she won a medal in the Olympic Games with either Zingaro or Riversprite. She also built show jumps out of stuff from her father’s shed, and jumped over them in the garden. No, there were no horses, except model ones, whose stable was a shelf in her bedroom. They are still in her living room cabinet.
  3. By about 10, Jemima had graduated to terraforming and designing fantasy islands. You know, if she had been born thirty years later, there would have been a huge career for her in gaming and animation.
  4. Jemima’s careers advice at school was “well, you’re going to do maths at university, aren’t you?” Nobody said, but what next? And she hated maths at university. It wasn’t problem solving any more, and she was a problem solver.
  5. Several decades (and careers) later, Jemima decided to get into ‘environmental’ subjects, since it no longer meant ‘heating and ventilation’. First she did some grad courses with the Open University, including geology, environmental impacts, oceanography and planetary science. Then she did a Masters degree and got into research related to energy efficiency and climate change.
  6. Jemima absolutely loved working on research in energy efficiency and climate change, loved the people she worked with and the events she went to. Her particular skill is linking issues and ideas across different academic disciplines.
  7. The low point of this part of her career was being at a reception to launch some research at the Houses of Parliament, and having to shake the hand of a particularly oily politician. How was it? Clammy.
  8. Once she went part-time, she started writing again. A world running on strawberry juice in fuel cells featured strongly in her first series. She still thinks we should be researching the properties of strawberry juice as a renewable energy resource.
  9. Her first seventeen guinea pigs (over twelve years) were immortalised in her first series by having characters named after them. Her latest two guinea pigs are named after characters in the series.
  10. One vet she knew said he approached guinea pig diagnosis as follows: if he can’t identify it for a small mammal, he thinks horses and scales it down. So her guinea pigs are really show jumping horses, scaled down. Of course!

But you probably knew, or guessed, most of that.

And next month – it’s Christmas, or Yuletide, or whatever you’d like to celebrate for the winter/summer solstice.