An aspiring author has said she hopes to make writing her new career after publishing her first book. Watch more of our videos on Shots! and live on Freeview channel 276 Leah Warner has written and published "Euphoric Dreams", an anthology of poems and short stories around four categories of Love and Loss, Fantasy and Horror, 21st Century Living and Animals and Nature. The 39-year-old from West Bromwich said that most of the poems, apart from the fantasy and horror, were situations and times of her own life that she put into words to write a poem, while the fantasy and horror section were more short stories.
She said the idea of the book came from her years of working in Bereavement Services for Dudley Council and hearing the poems read out at funeral services, as well as her own experience of having to write a poem for a family member's funeral. She said: "It all started a couple of years ago when my great aunt down in London passed away and I was asked by my mom to read a poem at the funeral. "That evening, I had a look on Google for funeral poems but, unfortunately, nothing really I was reading felt like a true representation of my aunt as I wanted it to be quite personal for her, so I decided to write my own poem for her.
"I read it at the funeral and had lovely kind comments on how fitting and beautiful my words were for her, so after that, I started getting ideas on other poems I could write and within a couple of days, I had wrote quite a few." She said that she had al.
