Aubrey Waddy

I'm one of those people who discovered their vocation in the second half of their life.

A vocation - how lucky is that!

In 1985 I started writing the children’s stories I was telling my three year old son Dan. I thought this would be an easy route into publication, and establishing a money-earning career as a writer. Ha ha. The phrase ‘rejection slip’ entered my vocabulary. After no success with more than 45 children’s stories, and not wishing to attempt teenage fiction, I ventured in 1996 into unknown territory, a full-length grown up novel. Would I be able to finish it at the hour a day I used to be able to average by getting up at five o'clock in the morning? Not my preferred part of the day. I chose a setting that wouldn’t involve time-consuming research, the medical world in which I worked and the home environment in which I lived. After 416 hours on the first draft and a further 400 hours of editing, the resulting novel was taken up by a small publisher and appeared in print in 2002 as “The Progressive Supper”. What a thrill!

Writing is always on my mind and in 1986 a chance remark from an old squash-playing friend in Sydney gave me the idea for a thriller with a background in professional squash. I wrote the story between 2005 and 2011 under the title “Caught off Court”. The end result was published as “Sex and Drugs and Squash’n’Roll”, a strapline I’d dreamt up. The cover designer suggested we should use it as the title. Good idea? I’ve an extensive background in squash, including representing England many times in Masters competition, and winning the 2015 o-65 National Championships. This has helped me make the background of the story entirely authentic.

Back to The Progressive Supper: I sold just a few hundred copies when the book came out, but the small publisher didn’t have the resources for publicity. The story’s hero is a vascular surgeon, and almost uniquely for a work of fiction, the book was given a (highly complimentary) review in a world-renowned academic monthly, the Journal of Vascular Surgery, see my web site. Sadly, the publisher hadn’t even put the book up on Amazon when the review came out, so I must have missed a lot of sales.

Partly for this reason, and partly to respond to people’s comments about the way The Progressive Supper started, I decided to republish an updated version of the book. It came out in June 2102 as “Just Desserts”.

Nowadays I’m having enormous fun rewriting my first children’s stories, about the ‘Plughole Boy’, for my new grandson. There are twenty stories in the series. It’s fascinating going through the process of having illustrations done, far more complicated than I’d imagined. Watch out soon for the Plughole Boy series in bookshops, and if you’re a parent or grandparent, you can look forward to reading to a spellbound child the closing lines of each story, ‘You know who it was, don’t you? It was the Plughole Boy!’