About Paul Anderson
Most kids want to be something cool when they grow up. I wanted to be a lawyer. It’s all I ever wanted in my life. All through high school I worked hard to achieve this goal, and when I was 18, I was ready to go. Turns out there was just one slight problem…
I didn’t want to be a lawyer after all. After only one week, I hated it, and knew I wanted to do anything else but law. But I had spent 6 years of high school preparing to study law, I was not going to just give up after one week of law school. So I kept going. From my mid-teens I had always been writing short stories and the usual bad teenage poetry. At law school, writing fiction kept me sane. When tax and the rules of evidence threatened to shut my brain down, reading and writing were always guaranteed to pick me up.
After my law degree, I decided to immerse myself in books. If I had to be a lawyer, I was going to be the type of lawyer I wanted to be - a book lawyer, an academic. I got a Master’s in law, and then began to study for a doctorate in law. And in the back of my mind I promised myself that I would keep writing, and maybe, some day, I’d publish something that had nothing to do with law. Under a pen name, so it wouldn’t embarrass my professional career, but I would do it. I’d be an academic AND an author…
Have you ever been in the situation where your head tells you one thing, your heart tells you another, and you need to hit a crisis point before you realise the truth of the matter? I hit that point in February 2007. The point when I realised I would never get my PhD. That I did not ever want to be a lawyer. That I was deeply, deeply unhappy. I still remember that day. It was when I looked at myself in the mirror and finally said “I don’t want to be a writer - I AM a writer.”
I have my day job, and that pays the bills. And in my spare time I write. About my life on my personal blog On with my life, and about my writing life on my writing blog Clamouring to become visible. I’m working on a few projects now and someday, soon, I hope to be able to say that my day job, the one that pays the bills, is writing.
Now you have an idea of where I’ve come from. And if you join me on Sundays, I hope to show you where I’m going.
