When Sorcery Meets Sandhurst: How the Army Shaped My Fantasy Novels

This October will mark twenty-three years since I swore an oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and her heirs. I did this as a university student who’d just turned eighteen years old after Manchester and Salford University Officers’ Training Corps (MSUOTC) managed to persuade me to join them over the Territorial Army (TA), as the Army Reserve was known at the time.
 
I’d never heard of the UOTC before I went to uni. I had heard of the TA. Before I went to uni, I’d already worked in a wholesale bakery, a high street deli, a kennels, a farm shop, an ice-cream van, a packing factory, a care home, and a bar. I knew what minimum wage jobs looked like, and the TA sounded far more fun.
 
Except I joined the UOTC instead. If, like eighteen-years-old me, you have no idea what the UOTC is, then to explain, it is basically a branch of the Army Reserves for university students. Formed in the early twentieth century, it was created to fix a shortage of military officers. Back then, only the wealthy went to uni, and if the wealthy joined the army, they became officers.
 
So it’s the Army Reserve for potential officers.
 
Except it isn’t. Not anymore. It would love to turn all its officer cadets into officers, but very few ever commission. Most who join never join the Army, and the majority of those who do sign up, join as non-commissioned ranks, not as officers. But anyway…
 
I spent a year in the UOTC. I did the equivalent of basic training, quit my degree, left the UOTC, then after a short break where I trotted off to France to work as a chalet maid in a ski resort for a season—having never skied before in my life—I joined the TA. I then went back to uni, but I remained in the TA.

Me as an Officer Cadet in 2006

I went to the University of Leeds to study Earth Sciences and transferred to the nearest Royal Engineers TA unit—a detachment of 106 Field Squadron—based in nearby Bradford.
 
A year later, I commissioned. To this day, I’m still not entirely sure how that happened. Between 2003 and 2006, I rolled through the Army Officer Selection Board, the initial three modules of officer training, and then into the final training module at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. I popped out of the other end with a single pip on my chest, wide eyes, and thinking, “how the hell did that happen?”
 
That was my first three years of service; I’ve been trying to figure out how to be a decent officer ever since. I’m a major now, and I’m still learning.
 
I graduated from uni two years after I commissioned. At this time, I was already in charge of twenty-odd soldiers as a troop commander, and I had a stable boyfriend. And despite plans to join the Regular Army when I graduated, I found myself thinking: “do I really want to go back to Sandhurst and start again?” and “Do I really want to live away from Andy?”
 
I decided no on both counts. I ended up marrying Andy, by the way, so I guess it was worth sticking near him! Would our relationship have survived the inevitable separation that full-time military service would have brought? Who knows…
 
I got a graduate job in the waste industry instead. I rattled around the various departments and settled in the project engineer team. It seemed to fit. I did enjoy the work I was given, but irritatingly, I was not given enough of it. One of my biggest fears in life is boredom. So many decisions I’ve made in life are a direct result of being bored, or trying to be not bored. Some of them have been rather rash.

Me as a lieutenant in 2009 in Stavanger, Norway, by a memorial to some Royal Engineers who were killed in the area.

​But anyway. I had to turn up to work and look busy, but no one really cared what I was doing most of the time, so to alleviate my boredom I started writing a novel. Soon, To Save a Pegasus was finished. I tried to get published. Failed. Twiddled my thumbs for a bit longer, then trotted off to Afghanistan.
 
You see, a chance for a deployment had come up, and ever being one to jump at any opportunity that looks remotely shiny, I stuck my hand up.
 
This article is supposed to be about how my military service has shaped my writing. I’m in danger of writing my military biography here, so I’m not going to go into detail on the rest of my career. I’ll summarise what came next.
 
I spent one year away doing pre-deployment training, the tour itself, then a bit of leave before going back to my old civvy job. I went back, decided I was still bored, and quit to become a property developer. Soon after, I changed Reserve units and went to 170 Engineer Group as their recruiting officer for the Reserves. While there, another chance to deploy came up, and off I went to Afghanistan again. I came back to no job in the Reserves—my recruiting role had been taken over by someone else—so I transferred to a job in the regional Brigade Headquarters.

Me as a captain in 2014, in Belgium.

Meanwhile, I was busily bashing houses to bits as a civvy, slowly building property equity but not quite making the big-bucks I hoped to, when another opportunity popped up—a Full Time Reserve Service job (FTRS) as adjutant at Yorkshire Officers’ Training Regiment was being advertised. I applied, and to my amazement, I got it.
 
Three years later, after having my fill of that job, I quit. This time, I was going to do property development on speed.
 
I rounded up some outside investment and hit the ground running with multiple projects. Things were going well until Brexit uncertainty started playing havoc with the housing market. Sale after sale collapsed—not ideal for cash-flow. Then Covid hit. More delays, price rises, and eventually a property market crash. My head was ready to explode with the stress of it all when another opportunity came along. Another FTRS job. This time as SO2 Basing Operations, North and Scotland. I applied and I got it.
 
I enjoyed the role, but once I’d settled in I ran out of enough work to fill my time. I tried to find work, but kept being told that the things I suggested were not my department’s problem to solve. So, I started writing again.
 
It was perhaps six months into this role that I started writing the first book in The Gallantrian Legacy. Inspired by a holiday where I found time to read, I suddenly recalled an idea for a new book that had been rattling around in my head since I’d finished To Save a Pegasus. In this story, I send a military character from Earth to a magical planet where he has to become a sorcerer to help his wife defeat an evil queen.
 
I’ve always loved fantasy. My relationship with the army has been broadly positive. A combination of the two seemed obvious—to me, at least.
 
I guess the journey I send Tom on, one of my two protagonists, is a journey I would love to go on myself. Tom is a captain in the Royal Engineers when he and his wife, Emma, are abducted by aliens and told that Emma is secretly the heir to a throne on a faraway magical planet. Just to clarify, because Tom is a Regular and a man, doesn’t mean I wish I’d joined up full time and had a different gender, because I’m quite happy as a female Reservist! It just made sense that he was who he was in the context of my story.
 
Between 2021 and 2022, I drafted the six books in The Gallantrian Legacy. In that time, I also quit my FTRS job and started a job for Amazon. I liked the job, but between the long hours, the night shifts, the resumption of my Reservist role and family commitments, it was just a bit too much. So I quit. And late in 2022, with six books drafted and all in need of a lot of editing, I decided I was going to try to make it as an author. Three and a half years later, I’m still working on that one!
 
If people ask me what I do for a living, I now say I’m a Reservist, author, property developer and buildings surveyor. I do a little bit of all four jobs, but I think my passion is writing. Especially writing fantasy fused with my military experiences.
 
In my second book, I send Tom and Emma back to Earth. Tom ends up being arrested for desertion and has a court martial hearing in Catterick. I once did court martial duty in Catterick, so it was the obvious courthouse to choose! I’ve been to Catterick a fair few times and although I don’t mention the name of the pub where Tom catches up with his old friend Mark—a major in the infantry—I can picture it quite clearly in my head. Along with the style of the room in the Officers’ Mess that Tom ends up kipping on the floor of on the evening after Mark picks him up from the courthouse. I’ve seen the inside of those kinds of rooms plenty of times.

Me as a major in 2023, on a training weekend in Catterick.

​Mark is probably my favourite character. He and Tom were at Sandhurst together, and whereas Tom is a very stereotypical officer—from a middle-class family, went to uni, then commissioned—Mark joined the ranks at sixteen and was put forwards for a soldier-entry commission in his early twenties. Mark grew up on a rough estate in Manchester and got embroiled in petty crime as a kid. Like many people whom I’ve met in the Army over the years, his service somewhat turned his life around.
 
Mark is a bit of a rogue. But he’s also a flyer. He’s an OC at the Infantry Training Centre at Catterick, and his career is progressing nicely when he ends up following Tom back to the magical planet that his old friend had spent the last two years on. Mark ends up stuck there and stuck in the rest of my books in that series, too!
 
Some of my favourite scenes feature banter between Tom and Mark. Mark takes the mick out of Tom for being a typical officer from a middle-class family. Tom grudgingly concedes Mark is better at tactics than him. Mark is clever, direct and tells things how he sees them, and has an interesting time adjusting to life on a medieval-style fantasy planet.
 
Tom’s character draws on my experiences as an officer in general, and my many years of working closely with regular officers, as does Mark’s character. But Mark’s start to life is more similar to mine. Like Mark, I grew up in a single-parent family on a council estate with a mum who was often out of work. I can’t confess to ever being involved in petty crime, unless the odd underage drinking session counts, but my background is very different to the majority of officers I meet in the Army.
 
I recall clearly how difficult I found it to relate to my peers in the UOTC. When they all chatted about gap years and ski holidays and experiences that were way outside the price bracket of stuff I ever did as a kid, I confess I struggled with a degree of jealousy at first. I’d keep quiet and wouldn’t know how to engage in the conversation. I never made any close friends in the UOTC for this reason.
 
Over the years, I’ve come to realise that no one can help the life they’re born into. All they can do is shape the hand they are dealt. As I have, as Mark does. And that years of service life can mean you have more in common with fellow soldiers and officers than you do with anyone who had the same upbringing as you.
 
The longer you serve, the more of an imprint service life has on who you are. In my case, it’s shaped my novels. I simply couldn’t have created Tom and Mark without my military experience. I don’t think I’d be able to make Tom a convincing sapper if I wasn’t a Royal Engineer. I recall someone once saying Tom wasn’t like a ‘real soldier’ in a review of one of my books. I wanted to scream back, “not everyone in the army is in the infantry!”. I didn’t. But I did tweak my manuscript to make it clearer what the role of a Royal Engineer was.