For the first few years after taking early retirement, all I did really - rather like a Thomas Hardy version of Forrest Gump - was run around South Dorset.
I started writing the day I hobbled into a creative writing course in Weymouth on a walking stick.
Eventually I wrote a series of short stories set in Wales. The Welsh Book Council reviews were good and they encouraged me to apply for a Welsh Arts Council grant to help with publication by one of the small Welsh publishers.
The outcome? Well, the Welsh Arts Council are a short-sighted bunch of bastards, who couldn't recognise talent in a month of bloody Sundays and I hope they all rot in hell, and may their off-spring...
I took rejection pretty well, considering.
We moved back north again and I joined the South Manchester Writers' Workshop about three and a half years ago (if I keep my nose clean, I'll soon be due for six months off for good behaviour).
I have recently completed my first novel The Drop Pot Man. It's 'crime with humour' and seems to be full of ass-kicking women. It's just about starting to do the rounds. At the moment I'm writing some short pieces of celtic nostalgia (I think I'm going to stop doing these, as I'm getting as miserable as sin).
Plans? Possibly something based on travelling. I've not actually always been in the right place at the right time. I got caught up in a peasant's revolt in Bolivia, have been under surveillance by members of the Chinese army dressed as monks in Tibet and, in a very sinister encounter indeed, was mistaken for one Anton Stumph, in the foyer of the Yak and Yeti Hotel in Katmandu...
Oh, nearly forgot. I once met Helen Mirren.
