LOCAL author Katie Fforde will be teaching a creative writing course at this year's Cheltenham Festival of Literature. It is only the latest stage in what seems to be her gentle mission to spread the good luck she feels she had at the beginning of her writing career.

"I've been very lucky," she told me when I interviewed her at The Retreat last week. "Luck is what you need when you begin writing. You make your own luck but no-one ever gives you the recipe."

This is a telling remark - she began writing whilst working at Mother Nature in Stroud. "My husband puts all my success down to the fact that I worked in that place," she said, "because it gave me something to write about."

Her first novel, Living Dangerously, is - in her own words - a 'prettyfied' version of her time at the health food shop's caf.

She has gone on to become one of Random House's top ten selling writers, alongside such luminaries as John Grisham.

Fforde has used this success to help people as much as she can: "I keep introducing people to my agent - she's a very tolerant woman!" she said with a smile.

But she also gives the Katie Fforde Bursary to aspiring writers of romantic fiction. "I was a new writer for a long time," she said, "and when I finally got some money I wanted to do something to help new writers."

The bursary prize is a year's subscription to the Romantic Novelist's Association, with the chance to attend the RNA's annual conference.

"It's not a great deal of money, but when you're starting out it might seem that way," she said. "The winners don't have to be the best writers, only the most deserving. At least two of the bursary winners have gone on to be published. The RNA is a very broad church and is very supportive. Writing's a very hard business to get into; you might as well be helpful."

Which leads us back to the writing course at Cheltenham on Monday, October 11; "My main aim is to give people confidence," she said. "Some people need permission to write, permission to do it badly and then see what comes of trying again."