WHEN SOMEONE HANDED me a copy of Hand to Mouth by Paul Auster way back in 1998, it sparked a long-forgotten memory in me - I loved to write.
You see, once upon a time I entertained the desire to be a journalist, but the flame burnt out when I hit High School. Being the number one clown in school in those days was my only real ambition back then, so I look back fondly and ponder how much I may have achieved as a clown, had I stuck at it as a career choice.
A few weeks before my High School career was due to draw to a close, my life as wannabee clown had not been without varying degrees of success, but mostly it was a complete failure. I was also faced with the harsh reality that most of my friends had nailed down a serious job or a place at college or university.
I remember vividly the day my father came into my bedroom and offered me a choice: "Start applying for college courses," he said. "Or I'm taking you down to the building site first thing on Monday morning."
It wasn't a tough choice.
Unfortunately there were no clown colleges taking on new recruits in the Paisley/Glasgow area at the time, so I plumped for an I.T. course at the then known Paisley College of Technology (later known as the University of Paisley, and now known as the University of the West of Scotland).
During my four years in Storie Street and surrounding areas, I lost the vision of writing entirely; my life taken up with lectures and seminars about semi-conductors and network topologies - very exciting stuff. I found a good job at the end of it, though, working in the I.T. department of a life assurance company, first in Glasgow and then in Edinburgh, and somewhere in between all this, I managed to pen my first novel.The Nutty Boys was a dreadful attempt at a humorous novel, and was really more of a diary, but it proves to me that the writing spark had never fully been extinguished if I had it in me to sit down and write over 40,000 words while working a day job.
So when I read Hand to Mouth not long after moving to Edinburgh, it was like turning up the knob on a gas fire and watching the flames fill the mantle with powerful red flames; the heat literally rose up inside me and the passion was lit.
I enrolled in a Creative Writing course at the Open College of the Arts and immersed myself in poetry and short story writing. I loved it. I wrote and wrote and wrote, joined some internet forums, met a load of people, and finally in May 2004 I had my first acceptance, a short story entitled, Once a Borderer. Four months later I sold my first novel; Hunting Jack was published as a serial and things were suddenly moving.
As I come to write this short biography four years on from then, I've still only published one novel, but have added two chapbooks, three e-books, several short stories and numerous poems in magazines and journals to my name. I'm also building a successful freelance writing business, have two more novels in different states of completion, and am expecting to see a new chapbook and e-book published later this year.
Life is very good.
And I still like being the clown.
Colin Galbraith
February 2008