Shy Feet is a collection of twelve short stories linked by an underlying theme; travel.

While  the stories are all very different – they are about love and loss, life and death, pain and pleasure – travel is what links them. That said,  even then the journeys the characters embark on are very different. In Oh, Henry a young couple go on a dream holiday to Thailand only for it to turn into a nightmare; in The Flowers Sleep Tonight, Thomas makes a journey to Barcelona on the trail of a girl he’s been following for five months and in Homes from Homes, you learn what happens when a visiting businesswoman lets the bellboy of London hotel into her room in the middle of the night…

We know they’re linked by the travel theme, but are they linked by a genre too?
If you’ll allow me I would like to create a new and possibly long-winded genre for my book; “Contemporary fictional short stories that move you”. (Thanks for letting me do that, it felt good.)

What kind of readers will it appeal to?
Short stories are a notoriously hard sell, to agents, to publishers and to readers who are yet to discover their charms. Therefore, I would say read this if you don’t like short stories. Why? Because I hope the book will change your mind. Readers can expect bite size, commute-friendly stories laced with quirks, twists and turns while also having enough meat to chew on and something to think about afterwards.

What kind of quirks?
Many of the characters are a little unpredictable and quirky. There’s the sixty-something year old Claudia who wants to leave her husband because he irons his underpants, there’s seven year old Max who thinks his baby sister is to blame for everything wrong in his world so he spends their entire holiday in France trying to feed her ants and there is the charismatic Johnny who “thinks life is one big party after another, and he has an outfit for each one” and is able to persuade his love to elope with him to get married.

Complete this sentence for us: if you like _________________, you’ll love my book.
Alice Munro or Aimee Bender.

Have you written any other books that we should read next?
One of  the stories in the collection – See the Amalfi Coast – is currently available for free on Amazon, but apart from that I don’t have any other published work at the moment. I’m busy writing my next collection of short fiction – stories inspired by my home city, London.

Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m a 31 year young freelance copywriter and researcher and I’m currently living in Amsterdam with my Australian partner. I’m originally from London and in October 2011 I left what I called “my lovely London life” to travel indefinitely. Why? Well, I fell in love didn’t I! My partner was already a location-independent freelancer and I found the concept of roaming the world writing stories for a living so romantic and tempting that I followed him. Not before I’d saved up a ton of money and spent a year selling most of my belongings; one must be romantic AND cautious.

They never tell you that in the Hollywood romcoms!
Do you have a website?
I write a blog about my travels, writing and my books called As the Bird flies, and you can keep up with my book releases by signing up to my newsletter.

How can we follow you on Twitter and/or Facebook?
I’m on Twitter – @bushbirdie and on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/AstheBirdflies.

What’s next?
As well as the short stories about London which I hope to finish the first draft of before the end of the year, I’m going to use NaNoWriMo to knock out a first draft of a novel idea I’ve been nurturing for a while. It’s a bit off the wall and a little risky as ideas go but I’ve assembled a strong family of characters so I hope they’ll see the idea through to a place where it works.