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They say that new authors should write about what they know, and I can say that this is a very good idea and has given me publication success in non-fiction and fiction.

My first success was in 1999 with a Viewpoint column in the Lady, but they no longer do that, which is a shame.

I began writing short stories after I found two small press magazines called Crystal and Creature Features, and the one I've had most success with is CF all about animals. I created two series: a kitten based on antics of cats in my area in next door, and the other about an unlucky squirrel based on antics of squirrels I've seen in my garden. The latest success in CF was about an incident with a dog I had as a child. If you write about yourself it can be a good idea to add a touch of homour. Eg the end of the piece I put a bit about when I was born.

'I was born in 1970 and guess what Chinese year that is? Yes, you're right. It was the Chinese year of the dog. Any significance? No idea. Your guess is as good as mine.;

I've also began a series about birds I see in my garden and elsewhere and what happens. Again what I know about.

I also enter competitions and the one I had success with, coming second, was subconsciously, based on a girl who bullied me at school, who gets her comeuppance from magical shoes.

Then a few years ago I started to read health magazines and began to write reader letters to them. Again this was about things I knew about and am interested in such as using natural beauty products. Since then I've had success after success. So far this year I have had letters in Healthy winning a set of Dead Sea Spa magik toiletries worth £35, in Green Parent magazine winning a set of JASON toiletries worth £48 and a letter in Amateur Gardening winning a £5 National Garden voucher.

There is one other way I write about what I know - novels. My first children's book was all about healthy eating at school, something I am passionate about. In this I wrote that some of the girls had illnesses that I had experienced myself eg. bloatedness from drinking fizzy drinks, and sleep deprivation due to stomach pains in the night. The latter I had years ago and I now realise comes from a dairy intolerance.

My second book is about helping the environment at school, something else I am passionate about, and the third I'm currently editing is about using natural products at school. All topics I've had experience with and am passionate about and write about.

So what successes have you had writing about what you know? Let me know.

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at Harvard Business School. He researches the history of global business and has written extensively on the evolution of international entrepreneurship and multinational corporations, specializing in consumer products including beauty and fashion, as well as services such as banking and trading. His most recent book is Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. In the original post below, Professor Jones writes about the boom in natural cosmetics.

Next month, on March 24-26, the leaders of the natural cosmetics industry will assemble at the Sustainable Cosmetics Summit in New York City to discuss the boom time for natural beauty. Or, at least, what many are betting will be a boom. The event is organized by Organic Monitor, which recently issued a report outlining how large companies have been paying huge sums to buy iconic brands in this market segment. It has been quite a gold rush so far. In 2006 global industry leader L’Oréal paid over $1 billion for Britain’s Body Shop. Soon afterwards the bleach manufacturer Clorox – implausibly – paid $925 for Burt’s Bees, a Maine-based company which had begun making candles from the beeswax created as a by-product of their honey business twenty years previously, and grown to make $170 million of sales of organic beauty products. In 2008 Estée Lauder, an early mover in this domain which had bought Aveda in 1997 and grown the brand globally, took a stake in the trendy Indian business Forest Essentials, an ayurvedic cosmetics company which makes its products by hand in a village in the Himalayas. And this year kicked off with Shiseido, Japan’s leading beauty company, paying the enormous sum of $1.7 billion for Bare Escentuals, the San Francisco–based company which has built the minerals-based cosmetic market.

The natural cosmetics boom has been a long time coming. Entrepreneurs began to experiment making cosmetics from plants rather than chemicals as far back as the 1950s. In 1954 Jacques Courtin-Clarins, a young medical student who had observed that when patients were treated for circulatory problems with massage their skin looked better, started a small business making botanical body oils. At the end of the decade Yves Rocher launched a company which made plant-based cosmetics distributed through mail order in the rural village of La Gacilly in Brittany. The big problem for all these ventures was to find customers, who stubbornly preferred products which employed modern science to make them look younger and sexier. Natural cosmetics remained for decades an activity for the unusual entr

The first story today that caught my eye came from the Daily Telegraph, the main reason being that it’s in my neck of the woods – East Anglia (UK).

A local councillor, Pat McCloud at Forest Heath District Council in Suffolk attended a committee meeting and was making his point when Councillor Lisa Chambers interrupted him mid flow.  Councillor McCloud, who obviously had got his knickers in a knot, then proceeded to send an email to some of his co-councillors commenting on the interruption and stating that Councillor Chambers couldn’t possibly have known in advance what he was going to say and went on to say that they used to burn witches at the stake for such skills!  This obviously touched a raw nerve and ended up going before the District Council’s standards committee where poor Councillor McCloud was found guilty of accusing Councillor Chambers of witchcraft.  The decision was overturned on appeal but it ended up costing the Council more than £3,000 to investigate and ultimately, of course, this will be added to next year’s tax bills for the general public to pay off next year.

Councillor McCloud, strangely enough, seems to have found allies in the local Pagans who were disappointed that Lisa Chambers and the committee members who found Mr McCloud guilty obviously felt it was a bad thing to be a witch.  As they quite rightly pointed out, not all witchcraft is bad – there are obviously black witches but there are white witches too who do good rather than evil.  I just hope that the witches there in Suffolk can conjure up a bit more cash for the council tax payers in their district to cover the wasted costs in this futile case and let’s face it, if this is how our money is spent in local government it’s no wonder the local taxes go up drastically year on year!

The second article from the Telegraph related to the above Golden Delicious apple.  No, it’s not been painted red – the apple has grown naturally that way!  It’s a ‘random genetic mutation’ apparently and the odds of finding one of these growing on your apple trees at home are 1 million to 1!  As you can imagine it’s causing quite a stir in the village where it grew – Colaton Raleigh in Devon.  The grower, Mr Morrish a retired painter and decorator, said he’d been picking apples to take to his sister-in-law and spotted this little beauty.  He’d been growing apples for 45 years and had never come across anything like it before.  Even the experts at the Royal Horticultural Society and British Independent Fruit Growers Association can’t find any rhyme or reason for it.  Just don’t tell the local council, Mr Morrish, or you may find yourself under close scrutiny by the Witch Finder General of Devon!!!

My third article was spotted in The Times.  It seems that the darker witches have been waving their wands in London!  A series of speed humps has been put on public walkways in London in order to prevent speeding cyclists.  Obviously the cyclists have got the hump but many pedestrians, particularly the elderly, have said that something needed to be done to combat the two-wheeled terrors.

Unfortunately these humps haven’t gone down well (or should I say up and down) with all pedestrians however.  Young mums with pushchairs and prams say they’re not that easy to negotiate and they’re not particularly wheelchair friendly; and of course the blind or more frail pensioners run the risk of tripping.  Somehow I can’t really see these catching on too quickly around the country.  Here in Norwich we tend to have a series of cycleways and footpaths combined which work quite well.  Half the footpath – the outer part is for cyclists and the inner part is for pedestrians.  There’s a white line down the centre so ne’er the twain shall meet – well, in theory anyway; although my experience is that all too often the twain do meet but thankfully, as far as I know, we’ve had very few fatalities although I think we’ve ended up with the odd bruise or scratch (or wonky wheel … and I’m talking about the bikes here, not the pedestrians or cyclists!).

Now to my final article which I found in The Guardian.  The Food Standards Agency is going to fund investigations into whether, after years of telling us we should be cutting back on sugar and using artificial sweeteners, aspartame can be damaging to the health and has side effects.

Aspartame is around 200 times sweeter than sugar and can be found in more than 4,000 products in the UK including diet sodas, ready meals, yogurt, cereal bars and candy.  It’s been considered safe for more than 25 years but now it seems the populace are finding that after consuming products with aspartame in them, they seem to be prone to headaches, dizziiness, diarrhoea and tiredness.

The research is apparently going to take the form of using 50 human guinea pigs who are susceptible to side effects and feeding them with cereal bars.  Some of the bars will contain aspartame and others will be aspartame free.  The results should be available some time next year and, if there is reason to believe aspartame could be damaging to the health, then further research will be carried out.

Now this is where my witchcraft comes into force!  For years (without the aid of a crystal ball) I’ve foreseen that all this cutting back on fat, salt and sugar and opting for artificial versions is bad for the health.  People for centuries have been eating the natural versions and don’t seem to have come to too much harm.  Provided you have a good range of all the natural minerals and vitamins and have a reasonable amount of exercise you shouldn’t need all these artificial things and now it seems my premonition has borne fruit – even if it’s not a genetically mutated fruit. 

Come on Witch Finder General – seek me out and burn me at the stake if you will!!!!

The first story today that caught my eye came from the Daily Telegraph, the main reason being that it’s in my neck of the woods – East Anglia (UK).

A local councillor, Pat McCloud at Forest Heath District Council in Suffolk attended a committee meeting and was making his point when Councillor Lisa Chambers interrupted him mid flow.  Councillor McCloud, who obviously had got his knickers in a knot, then proceeded to send an email to some of his co-councillors commenting on the interruption and stating that Councillor Chambers couldn’t possibly have known in advance what he was going to say and went on to say that they used to burn witches at the stake for such skills!  This obviously touched a raw nerve and ended up going before the District Council’s standards committee where poor Councillor McCloud was found guilty of accusing Councillor Chambers of witchcraft.  The decision was overturned on appeal but it ended up costing the Council more than £3,000 to investigate and ultimately, of course, this will be added to next year’s tax bills for the general public to pay off next year.

Councillor McCloud, strangely enough, seems to have found allies in the local Pagans who were disappointed that Lisa Chambers and the committee members who found Mr McCloud guilty obviously felt it was a bad thing to be a witch.  As they quite rightly pointed out, not all witchcraft is bad – there are obviously black witches but there are white witches too who do good rather than evil.  I just hope that the witches there in Suffolk can conjure up a bit more cash for the council tax payers in their district to cover the wasted costs in this futile case and let’s face it, if this is how our money is spent in local government it’s no wonder the local taxes go up drastically year on year!

The second article from the Telegraph related to the above Golden Delicious apple.  No, it’s not been painted red – the apple has grown naturally that way!  It’s a ‘random genetic mutation’ apparently and the odds of finding one of these growing on your apple trees at home are 1 million to 1!  As you can imagine it’s causing quite a stir in the village where it grew – Colaton Raleigh in Devon.  The grower, Mr Morrish a retired painter and decorator, said he’d been picking apples to take to his sister-in-law and spotted this little beauty.  He’d been growing apples for 45 years and had never come across anything like it before.  Even the experts at the Royal Horticultural Society and British Independent Fruit Growers Association can’t find any rhyme or reason for it.  Just don’t tell the local council, Mr Morrish, or you may find yourself under close scrutiny by the Witch Finder General of Devon!!!

My third article was spotted in The Times.  It seems that the darker witches have been waving their wands in London!  A series of speed humps has been put on public walkways in London in order to prevent speeding cyclists.  Obviously the cyclists have got the hump but many pedestrians, particularly the elderly, have said that something needed to be done to combat the two-wheeled terrors.

Unfortunately these humps haven’t gone down well (or should I say up and down) with all pedestrians however.  Young mums with pushchairs and prams say they’re not that easy to negotiate and they’re not particularly wheelchair friendly; and of course the blind or more frail pensioners run the risk of tripping.  Somehow I can’t really see these catching on too quickly around the country.  Here in Norwich we tend to have a series of cycleways and footpaths combined which work quite well.  Half the footpath – the outer part is for cyclists and the inner part is for pedestrians.  There’s a white line down the centre so ne’er the twain shall meet – well, in theory anyway; although my experience is that all too often the twain do meet but thankfully, as far as I know, we’ve had very few fatalities although I think we’ve ended up with the odd bruise or scratch (or wonky wheel … and I’m talking about the bikes here, not the pedestrians or cyclists!).

Now to my final article which I found in The Guardian.  The Food Standards Agency is going to fund investigations into whether, after years of telling us we should be cutting back on sugar and using artificial sweeteners, aspartame can be damaging to the health and has side effects.

Aspartame is around 200 times sweeter than sugar and can be found in more than 4,000 products in the UK including diet sodas, ready meals, yogurt, cereal bars and candy.  It’s been considered safe for more than 25 years but now it seems the populace are finding that after consuming products with aspartame in them, they seem to be prone to headaches, dizziiness, diarrhoea and tiredness.

The research is apparently going to take the form of using 50 human guinea pigs who are susceptible to side effects and feeding them with cereal bars.  Some of the bars will contain aspartame and others will be aspartame free.  The results should be available some time next year and, if there is reason to believe aspartame could be damaging to the health, then further research will be carried out.

Now this is where my witchcraft comes into force!  For years (without the aid of a crystal ball) I’ve foreseen that all this cutting back on fat, salt and sugar and opting for artificial versions is bad for the health.  People for centuries have been eating the natural versions and don’t seem to have come to too much harm.  Provided you have a good range of all the natural minerals and vitamins and have a reasonable amount of exercise you shouldn’t need all these artificial things and now it seems my premonition has borne fruit – even if it’s not a genetically mutated fruit. 

Come on Witch Finder General – seek me out and burn me at the stake if you will!!!!