About Me

January March 2014

How did it get to March? On further reflection, how did it get to 2014? And how did I get to Sweden? Oh, by MAGIC SOARING METAL BIRD AND FRIENDS*!

Anyway, so a lot has changed in the 14 months since I last updated my About Me. By a lot I basically mean everything. About halfway through 2013 I visited a little town in the south west of Sweden called Halmstad, for the purpose of visiting my girlfriend (who I had not yet revealed on my blog because I wanted to make a big deal about it because she was also a blogger and the story behind us was pretty sweet – you should go back and read that in this post here) and also to size the place up to see if I could live there. I found my answer pretty quickly and in January of this year I left everything and everyone I’ve spent most of my life with behind in Australia to move permanently to Sweden to be with the girl I love. It was the best thing I have ever done, even though it was also one of the hardest, most upsetting and challenging things to leave Australia, my friends and my family like that. Sometimes we just have to make impossible decisions in life, and that was a big one for me.

Of course, I haven’t transformed into some completely different person. I never liked the heat, so I’m loving being in a colder climate all the time (I seem to enjoy it more than the locals). I am very likely about to go back into teaching in the very near future and continue my career there. I am most definitely still writing, and am taking on two writing challenges in the next month with more to come later in the year. I should really start to take a more focused approach to learning Swedish, because, you know, that’ll be handy seeing as though I live here now. I am slowly converting the population of Sweden to eating burgers the Australian way, one by one (and by Australian way I basically mean with salad and most importantly beetroot – try it, it is amazing). Once I have a bit of money behind me, I’m going to start exploring the country some more too.

I’m still the same book loving, novel writing, music obsessed, coffee drinking, wine gulping silly person I’ve always been. I’m just 16000 kilometres away from where I last updated my about page, that’s all.

Please feel free to leave comments and to contact me (contact details are directly below). Keep being your awesome selves!

*Magic Soaring Metal Bird And Friends is a new hit TV show, book series, movie series, audio series and series of collectable toys that I’ll be releasing later on this year.**

**This may be a slight exaggeration. Or blatant lie. Although I totally could write a story like this, right?

Contacting me:

Feel free to leave comments here there and everywhere on my blog. If you wish to contact me though other means, you can send me mail by homing pigeon, use telekinesis to rearrange the letters on my fridge, or hire a sky-writer to put a message up in the sky. Otherwise, I generally steer away from a lot of social networking (because it’s just so time consuming!), but I do use GoodReads (the Reading Challenge counter on the right hand side of my blog links you to my profile, which is easier than trying to find me by name), and I also use Twitter. Lately I’ve even started using Instagram.

My Instagram is theotherwatson which is remarkably like my WordPress username so that I don’t forget it. My Twitter is @abritishperson and this is mostly because I am a British person (who lives in Australia Sweden). I could have thought of a wittier username, such as “notanaussiepersonbybirth” or “dudewholikestoreadbooks”, but I panicked and went for the obvious (actually, I wanted to see if anybody had taken it, thinking somebody surely would have…the rest, as they say, is history. Or the future, if I were a time traveller. You never know). Anyway, feel free to follow me – I don’t bite (unless you’re a sandwich). And let me know who you are so I can follow you back (unless you’re a sandwich. Seriously, why would I follow a sandwich? That doesn’t even make sense)!

January 2013

It’s been over a year, so it’s time to update the ole’ about me section (but never fear, the old “About Me” and “Contacting Me” sections which proved remarkably popular are still below this, for your perusal so you can discover the me of olden days…(i.e. 2012)).

The last year has been a dramatic one for this magic-wielding hero person. After destroying the evil llama king and his custard apple minions, they attempted to reincarnate themselves in the form of pygmy shrews and a small handful of lychees, which proved somewhat ineffective. But the hero drank too much coffee and began to have a deep philosophical conversation with a talking pistachio, and so the shrews of doom and their lychees of sweet, succulent…also doom decided now was the moment to strike while the hero was in mid-hallucination. However, they were in for a surprise, as it was all a set-up, and the talking pistachio was in fact a human person thing (one of the lychees had insisted that pistachios were A LOT smaller than that, but nooo, the shrews didn’t listen did they?) and suddenly the bad guys were being eaten by the good guys! Hang on, this just got weird and twisted.

Excuse me a moment…

*super clichéd action movie sound effects are heard in the background*

Okay, that takes care of him. Sorry about that folks, back to a normal about me section now.

I’m a writer, I’d say aspiring but let’s be honest – I write, so I’m a writer. I write all sorts of books, stories and poetry, whatever takes my fancy at the time – I don’t like to stick to any one genre particularly, and at the end of the day there are only really three kinds of writing: bad writing, good writing, and extremely good writing. My reading habits are all over the place as a result. I also have participated in NaNoWriMo for four years in a row now, and have won each year. My NaNo novels so far have been a dystopian fantasy (which wasn’t very good), a historical fiction (which had some potential), a psychological thriller (which I actually quite liked and want to rewrite), and a weird comedy thing (that fell apart due to a lack of passion on my part).

Aside from this, I’m also a high school teacher, am deeply interested in all aspects of the arts, music, movies, comedy, food, neurology, history, languages, and the world in general. I currently live in Australia (though was born in England), where everything is entirely dangerous (or so the rest of the world believes, but hey, I’m still kicking. Right? I am still alive aren’t I? Oh please tell me I’m alive!?!), quite hot and regularly on fire, under water, being blown away, eaten by a shark and whatever other stereotypes you want to throw at me. No, actually Australia isn’t that bad, and it is a beautiful place with a quirky bunch of people living here, with an even quirkier sense of humour. You’ll like it, I promise.

Make sure to comment on my posts if you have anything to add or share, as I love good conversations flowing on my blog, and you can find me on Twitter at @abritishperson where I tend to mostly tweet silly stuff, and the occasional interesting thing I find. But mostly silly stuff.

Until next time….G’day!

…Meanwhile,  10 seconds later….

“What? No, Evil Pygmy Shrew, you can’t say hello. Why? Because I just banished you from this world, what are you even doing here? No you can’t borrow a dollar, what do I look like, some kind of charity hero? Oh fine. Here. Go. Before I eat you again.”

January 2012

I guess I should write something clever and interesting about myself here, something that will make readers want to return to this blog. But it has to be believable, so I can’t say something like, “I ride unicorns on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the latter while I drink whiskey” because nobody will believe me (unless you’re super awesome).

So I guess I’ll be serious and write an honest about me type blurb. I was born in England in the decade before the decade before the decade before this decade, despite only being a quarter century old. As a young child, I was given magic powers to search out and destroy the evil llama king and his custard apple minions.

Sorry.

Serious. Okay. I’m just a guy who says things about things and sometimes writes them down. I read, write, teach, love, fly, timetravel…ahem…and I live in Australia. Sometimes I like to travel by kangaroo (this is a lie, nobody actually does this).

Okay that’ll do. Any questions? Nope. Jolly good.