Claire Bentley

About Me

I am a freelance fiction editor, a speculative fiction writer, a blogger, and a proud parent of two small boys.

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I have adored books, reading and writing since I was a child. I'm a huge bookworm, and throughout my life I've written stories in whatever spare time I could find.

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Like most writers I became an adult and had bills to pay, so I gained a First Class (hons) degree in Psychology, and started my career as a healthcare researcher. Over the course of 13 years I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, in academia, and alongside the NHS. I worked on numerous research projects aiming to help people improve their health and wellbeing, and published a number of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles resulting from this work.

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In 2014 I began studying part-time for my Masters. In 2016 I had my first son.

Then began a fraught period of raising a small child, managing my career, and finishing my Masters (which I did in 2018).

Then 2020 hit. I won't bore you with the details of the challenges and the complete mental and physical exhaustion which followed. There’s a good chance you experienced this yourself. Suffice it to say that the COVID-19 pandemic had a huge (mostly negative) impact on my life. In March 2020 I was pregnant with my second child, trapped in the house with my energetic first child, and juggling childcare, home-schooling and a difficult pregnancy with a job which was even busier than usual.​ The lockdowns were awful and we lost loved ones.

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The cherry on the cake: I was made redundant during maternity leave with my second son.

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One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic was the stark reminder that life is too short. If we have creative goals, dreams and passions then we need to pursue them sooner rather than later. I harboured dreams of becoming a professional author my entire life, and I decided it was time to make my dreams happen!

I always loved writing, editing, teaching, and helping other people with their work. This, combined with the changing needs and challenges of my growing family, made me realise that if I didn't take a leap into the unknown and set up the writing and editing business I dreamed of then I never would.

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I completed training in copyediting and proofreading in 2021, set up my freelance editing business in 2022, and made a plan for publishing my own novels in the future.

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It is my mission in life to write amazing stories and help others do the same.