Melanie has enjoyed a twenty-year freelance writing career crafting non-fiction articles for the web and magazines. Her Gothic fiction The Nymphalidae won Honorable Mention in the Storm Crow Tavern’s 2015 Tales from Beermat Micro Fiction Contest and her short story, The Choice Between Fire and Ice was shortlisted in the 2016 Surrey International Writer’s Conference’s Short Fiction Contest. In 2018, Fitzroy Books published A Peculiar Curiosity, a Victorian Gothic novel described as “a vivid, melancholy and downright terrifying book”.