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Author of speculative fiction
Helena is a human of Earth, an organic in love with the machine. The future starts now, here. She’s fascinated with humanity’s quest to become multi-planetary and beyond. Her only regret is, she probably won’t live to see it. However, she can live it through story.
If Trooperman were a tree, this is how she’d be described…
British by birth. Born in Dorset and grew to adulthood in Hampshire. She also lived on the Wirral for several years before picking up her roots and moving with her family to Ontario, Canada in 2006. A little town called Dundas. The earth that keeps her rooted and nourished is her five grown children and her husband. Where they go, she goes. They are home.
Until she reached the ripe old age of thirteen years old, she wanted to be a nun. When she realized that life wasn’t for her, she had to be a COBOL programmer. After Technical college and Polytechnic (since then a university) in Portsmouth, she worked as a COBOL programmer in local government at Borough and District levels. She studied and took her degree between her third and fifth child. They moved mid-study to Canada where she also completed her graduate certificate in management at distance with the Open University of the UK.
Being a writer found Trooperman when she least expected it.
She was stuck in a rut and thinking through what she wanted when her children turned into teenagers. There was no obvious answer. Wanting to avoid the issue, in her spare time, she imagined whole escapades of adventures with the protagonists as ordinary women. “There’s just so few heroines out there. No that’s not true – they’re just everything I’m not. Heroines are tall or Amazonian, they’re blond supermodels, or martial arts tough women.” In the film running through her head, women of any size or shape or age are heroines. They are real, they care, they protect their families everyday of their lives. They are kick-arse!
Needless to say, if it hadn’t been for her local friend, she’d never have tried writing. Even then, she wrote to get the story out of her head. Helena had fallen in love with the film in her head, to the point she was concerned with her mental health. Exorcising it was the best thing that ever happened to her. Fascinated by the quirkiness of life, her story branches twisted and turned, but although blessed with plenty of ideas, Trooperman admits she had little expertise with story back then.
“I modularized my story like a program.”
2012 was the year she spent writing as much of the film in her head as she could. She had twenty minutes, twice a week at her three younger kids soccer games. All three had their games slightly staggered but in three different locations, sometimes other towns. This was the summer her husband worked in Australia and her parents visited for nine weeks.
The story was a part of her, and she was determined to finish it. Trooperman had been bitten by the story bug. This copy was never completed. It reached 350 thousand words and the story was no where near told. Here Helena became queen of the do-over. So began her greatest lessons. The first lesson was clear, even a tiny amount of time a week could yield massive word count.
Trooperman worked on establishing her place in a forest of words. She sought out other wordsmiths for friendship and took her first steps toward improving. She badly needed nourishment.
Maker, Manager, Marketeer. Proud to be an Alli.
Trooperman invested hours of her time reading all she could, and on what she called ‘on the job’ training, to hone her story writing. The training was a combination of doing and taking courses from more established fiction authors. If she was going to do courses, she needed to do them as she could afford them. This caused much delay. Along the way, she accepted she needed to wear many hats, from reader, to creator, marketeer, administrator and business manager. Helena grew stronger and more confident in what she was writing.
In December 2016, she produced her first fruit. GOOD FORTUNE, the first book in her quartet, Age of Unity. This first edition has since been removed from sale as she works on the second edition, renamed to POWER WITHIN coming soon. Between editions she has established her business and funding. She has also developed a range of fun short stories to accompany the main books as marketing tools and a series of stand alone novels that complete reader immersion into the series.
Watch this space, there will be much more fruit in the future as this tree’s yield grows!
