A life more interesting?? - Linda Strachan

I SO wish I had spent my youth doing daring deeds like skydiving, bungee jumping or even had a gap year deep sea diving in the Philippines.I wish I’d had a quirky job, been a grape peeler for an emperor or excavated tombs in Egypt for a famous archaeologist - I would love to have been a blacksmith and been able to make elegant but deadly swords, but with my luck I would probably have been offered the job of sticking feathers onto arrows!

Why, you may ask, am I so consumed with having had a fascinating life?It’s not that I want to do anything other than write, I love it, but I am trying to write a short biography for my upcoming, first teenage novel, Spider, and I am suddenly overcome with a sense of my own boringness!

My previous attempts to make my past life sound interesting might have been fun and jolly for the young cuddly readers of my Hamish McHaggis stories, but I really want something with a little more street cred for this book and most of my previous life seems just too ordinary.

Now if I’d had a few exciting or weird jobs it would be so much easier to write a pithy and amusing little biography- like the ones I read in other writer’s books! They all seem to have done such interesting things
A friend said - 'you’re a writer, make it up!'

So I sit and scribble and score out and try again, but for some reason I can think of all sorts of exciting things for my characters to do but none of them seem right for me. I keep worrying that someone will ask me technical details about how to catch a fire-eating dragon, or extract a marble from an angry camel’s nose.

So, if you see me doing something really bizarre it may not be because I am tremendously brave or quirky… just looking to do something that I can put in my bio!