Swapping hospital work for a writing career was a money-making tactic for bestselling romance writer Jill Mansell. As her 25th book is released, Hannah Stephenson discovers the author's love of Twitter, her dislike of sex scenes and why happy endings are so important.

Women's fiction writer Jill Mansell likes nothing better than to sit in front of the telly of a morning, Harley Davidson fountain pen at the ready to scribble down any new ideas she has for plots and characters in her escapist romantic novels.

She doesn't like the term 'chick-lit' but would rather her books were deemed 'feel-good'.

"I don't want anybody to be put off reading my books because they think chick-lit is just about a girl in her twenties whose only interests are shoes, chocolate and getting a boyfriend. I love writing about all age groups."

She doesn't do sad endings and humour is ever-present in her romantic yarns, which have sold more than three million copies over the years.

In fact, the humour in her novels cut short what could have been a promising career with Mills and Boon, she reflects.

"I wasn't getting the emotion that Mills and Boon wanted and I was putting in too much comedy," she recalls. "Mills and Boon didn't want that. So I thought I'd try and write like Jilly Cooper, my favourite style of author. I think I'd find it impossible to write without the humour."

Her 25th novel, The Unpredictable Consequences Of Love, set in the idyllic seaside town of St Carys in Cornwall, tells the story of a female photographer who's given up on true love and is hiding a major secret from her past from the man who falls for her.

If you're after Fifty Shades fodder, Mansell's books won't be your bag. Explicit sex scenes are not featured in her stories.

"That's because my mum used to type my books and now my daughter Lydia does," she says, laughing. "Even if a character of the age of 30 kisses another character of 30, my daughter says, 'Oh gross, OAP sex'."

Mansell, 56, has been penning her bestsellers, including A Walk In The Park, Head Over Heels and Take A Chance On Me, for more than 20 years now, and boasts more than 15,000 followers on Twitter, which provides yet another distraction from her writing, although she does love to chat with her fans.

She says the quiet that enveloped the house when her two children - Lydia, 21 and Cory, 19 - flew the nest, has been in some way replaced by the increased contact she has with her fans.

"It's difficult when you're used to having a house full of noise and things change," she admits. "I wonder if I've replaced it with social media, because the kids leaving home coincided with me getting an iPad and joining Twitter. That's like having other people sitting next to me on the sofa and if I want to ask them a question about anything, somebody will give me the answer."

Social media's come a long way since Mansell began writing and she's the first to admit that it's changed her life.

"We [writers] used to be so isolated, and now I love it. Most of the writers I know love [social media] too. It stops you just sitting at home on your own writing a book with no interruptions," she says. "We might get more books written without it but we love it."

Her writing career is a far cry from her former job as an NHS technician at the Burden Neurological Hospital in Bristol, carrying out brain tests to help diagnose everything from epilepsy to strokes to brain tumours and even brain death.

She would conduct EEGs (electroencephalograms) to measure electrical activity in the brain, working in operating theatres, intensive care and neo-natal units - and saw some traumatic sights.

Then one day, she picked up a magazine in the hospital waiting room and saw a feature on women who had transformed their lives by becoming bestselling authors. Jilly Cooper was one of those women.

"I thought, that's something I could have a go at. These women had been really poor, living in grotty little flats and couldn't afford a holiday, and at the time I was in that position," she recalls.

While she loved her NHS job, she knew there was never going to be much money in it, so she joined a creative writing evening class in the hope of changing her fortunes.

"I was swept away, like the people who go on The X Factor with dreams of coming out like Mariah Carey. I saw these authors living in gigantic mansions with gorgeous cars. Authors say you should never write to make money, but I did."

After a short spell trying to write Mills and Boon, she landed a publishing deal writing as she wanted to, but kept her hospital job for another few years until she felt financially secure.

"One minute I was going up to London for really glitzy, glamorous publishing events where we were all drinking champagne, and the next day I'd be back at work with patients yelling at me, and having sausage and mash in the hospital canteen."

Today, she lives in a large, comfortable house in Bristol and writes one book a year. She's already finished her 26th novel and is searching for a hook for her 27th.

"The internet and mobile phones have made plotting much more difficult because now, if you want to find something out about that boyfriend you went out with 30 years ago, you just type his name in and there he'll be. A lot of the intrigue has gone."

She gets a lot of her ideas from watching television but also scours problem pages on the internet for hooks.

Mansell's life hasn't been quite as colourful as that of some of her characters. She has been with her partner Cino, a property developer, for 28 years. They met through friends before she became a novelist, but have never married.

"We both just feel, if it isn't broken don't fix it," she muses. "I was married once before and very amicably divorced. The longer we've been together, the more scared we are of taking the leap. I don't like being the centre of attention in that way. If we ever get married, it'll be just the two of us in a register office."

At one point she was bothered by critics who said her happy endings were simply too predictable.

"What annoys me most about amateur book reviewers is when they say, 'It's predictable - you know it's going to end happily'. But 99.9% of my readers want the book to end happily. How it reaches that happy ending is what's enjoyable to people.

"I write feel-good fiction and the kind of books which cheer people up," she adds. "I make no apologies for that."

:: The Unpredictable Consequences Of Love by Jill Mansell is published by Headline, priced £14.99. Available now