Hello and welcome to the Tottie Limejuice website. I’m Lesley Tither, better known as Tots or Tottie, and I write travel memoirs and humorous travelogues as Tottie Limejuice. I also write the Ted Darling Crime Fiction series as L M Krier.

I was born in Cheshire and grew up in Stockport where I went to school. From there I trained in journalism at Harris College, Preston. I then joined the staff of a local weekly newspaper in Greater Manchester as a general reporter. I stayed in journalism for several years, a job which saw me working as a court and coroner’s inquest reporter.

My first commercial writing success came when I was sixteen. A television production company in California bought my storyline for a popular TV western of the day, for what seemed like a huge amount of money. Especially as I wrote it covertly under my desk at school in lessons which didn’t hold my interest.

For a time I took a career break from writing and spent eight years owning and running a holiday riding centre on top of a wet and windy plateau in Wales. (see Trot On! ) To boost my income in the off-peak season I worked for the Crown Prosecution Service as a case tracker.

When I moved to France to take care of my elderly mother, who had vascular dementia, I worked as a freelance copywriter. We’re the silver-tongued devils who persuade you to buy things you probably don’t need because our honeyed words have convinced you that you can’t live without them.

When my mother died, I wrote a series of books, the Sell the Pig series, about moving to a new country with an elderly and confused relative. It was only ever my intention to write a trilogy of Pig books. But maths was never my strongest subject, so the trilogy quickly became five. Then six, when people wanted to know about my early life, before moving to France.

So who is Tottie Limejuice? Where does the name come from? All is revealed in the first book in the series, Sell the Pig, as too is the origin of the saying from which the series takes its title: ‘Dear Mother, it’s a bugger, sell the pig and buy me out’.

You can find full details of all the books in the series here.