'My kids refuse to read my books - there is some raunchiness'

"I don't get embarrassed when my friends and family read my books, but the amount of people who think I've done the things in them is unbelievable."

Karen Hathaway, 56, was a senior financial adviser with a global wealth management company when she quit the corporate world to write erotic fiction.

She took on a new identity as author Wren Charles, replaced the spreadsheets with saucy stories and has now self-published seven books, with another four in the pipeline.

"I do sometimes sit and laugh when I'm typing because I know people will wonder where I've got something from. If I don't know something, I use the internet! I used to blush but now it's quite funny because these are novels, not manuals," she says.

"I live in Doncaster for goodness sake, where do you think I'm getting up to all this stuff with a romantic billionaire?!"

After a lifetime working in finance, her career took a sudden turn in her early 50s.

"I had never written anything, not one single word – it was the menopause which made me do it," she laughs.

"In 2022, I had a really weird year. I didn't feel right and there will be a lot of women out there who know how that feels. I hardly went out of the house, I just didn't want to go anywhere.

"Apart from work, I hardly went out for four or five months because I became anxious about everything, my stomach would be churning."

Karen spent all her spare time reading - getting through 400 books in about a year – and found romantic novels were her escapism.

"I was always a big reader, but that many books was excessive for me," she says. "I was going through one book after another, but I was in a bubble and it stopped the anxiety as I got immersed in the stories and the characters."

Karen told a friend that she was not keen on some of the plots she had read and accepted a challenge to publish her own book. She now writes every day in a summerhouse in her back garden.

She says: "When I started, things were a bit ropey and I was tussling with plots, but in January 2023 I just got cracking.

"If we're on a scale with Mills and Boon at one end and Fifty Shades of Grey at the other end, I would sit more towards Fifty Shades. They are spicy romances, but there is a story with a good cast of characters.

"I went for a pen name as I was still doing financial advice, so I didn't want somebody to type in Karen Hathaway and think, 'what's going on here then?'."

She decided to self-publish after being advised it could take two years via a publishing house.

"I just thought, 'I haven't got time to wait two years per book, I'll be nearly 60', so I decided I'm going to just go for it."

When she had the chance to take early retirement, she decided to leave finance and concentrate on writing full-time with the help of her husband and two grown-up children.

"I like to go and look at places to see if I can use them in a book. My next books are set in Yorkshire, so I'm using a lot of places up around Castle Howard," she says.

"My husband has been really supportive. He's usually doing the lifting and carrying at a launch party, dragging all the stuff up and getting us organised.

"My children are 27 and 24 and they refuse to read the books as they think it's weird, which is fair enough as there is some raunchiness and they don't want to think of their mother writing that. They help with social media though, the family has been really good."

One book takes 100,000 words, but Karen says she is finally feeling more relaxed.

She says: "I feel like I'm really late to the party if I'm honest, I should have started years ago. Start writing as early as you can

"Getting yourself to a place where you're happy is really important. If ever I get nervous, I remind myself that doing this job is fun."

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