Life got rapidly better for me after I left school, but for the first few months I hadn’t got a clue what to do. My dad eventually filled in an application form for a job as a journalist with the local newspaper. Somehow I got the job and went off to do a course for six months training.
The course was great – it was my only real time as a student – but by the end of it I had decided that I really wanted to write and that no other career would do.
For the next fifteen years, I wrote on and off, had casual jobs here and there, spent a lot of time out of work with not much to do, and I enjoyed myself enormously. I moved to Bristol after a couple of years where I lived until I was thirty. Inner-city Bristol was a great place to live, with a big racial and cultural mix. I learned a lot there and got my feeling for life. My book Junk is based on Bristol in those years, and although it is not biographical, you can pick up a lot of the atmosphere and meet a few of the people in its pages.
I was living in London aged about thirty five when I began to think it was time for me to really try hard to see if I could make writing work for me. I’d written a great deal off and on for years, a lot of it experimental, but I’d never really put getting published over writing what I felt like writing. So I had a a go – I did short stories, radio drama, and
children’s fiction.
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