/**<js>*//**<js>*/{"id":2054,"date":"2009-03-12T05:58:04","date_gmt":"2009-03-12T09:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jimmythomson.com\/?page_id=199"},"modified":"2009-03-12T05:58:04","modified_gmt":"2009-03-12T09:58:04","slug":"books-wot-i-hav-wrote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/books-wot-i-hav-wrote\/","title":{"rendered":"Write away (or punning for a living)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Once upon a time, all I wanted to do was write a book.<\/p>\n<p>About 20 years ago I wrote a novel called &#8220;Own Goals&#8221;, set in my home town, Dumfries, and related in a bizarre way to Scottish football fans. I sent it to one publisher who told me he didn&#8217;t want it but added that if I could find an agent, he was sure it would find a publisher. These were my glass-half-empty days and I took that as a crushing rejection and thought no more about it.<br \/>\nSoon after that, I met my current literary agent Selwa Anthony and everything changed.<\/p>\n<p>Selwa introduced me to Sandy MacGregor, who, as a young officer in the Australian Army in the early days of the Vietnam War, led a troop of volunteer engineers who not only defused Viet Cong booby traps but were the first to actually go down into the now-famous tunnel systems.\u00a0 Sandy told me about his experiences but I interviewed a lot of the men who served there and got the other side of the soldier&#8217;s life; the stuff they don&#8217;t write about in military histories.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;\">My wife Sue Williams was approached by artist Eric Lobbecke who wanted her to write a children&#8217;s story for him to illustrate.\u00a0 She was too busy but I was keen and the reult was The Koala Who Bounced.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>And then there&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Apartment Living<\/em> which I wrote with Sue , and which led to the weekly Flat Chat column in the Sydney Morning Herald and then, oddly, to the Ultimate Guide to Buying and Renting &#8230; which I wrote for Fairfax.<\/p>\n<p>I was approached to write the biography of cricketer Shane Watson but Watto sold only modestly at a time when the sports book reading public seemed to be more interested in bad boys than good guys.<\/p>\n<p>I then revisited the 3 Field Troop story with Tunnel Rats, which has done well and is still selling, and a more expansive story about all the Sappers in Vietnam called A Sapper&#8217;s War.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;\">Eric and I also revisited the \u00a0bouncing koala with The Koala Bounces Back\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>This year (2013) Simon and Schuster published my biography of bad boy turned good guy Wendell Sailor which contained a few shocking revelations that answered a lot of questions about this genial giant of both rugby codes.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, there is another crime novel in the pipeline although whether it does any better than &#8220;Own Goals&#8221; remains to be seen.<\/p>\n[ic_add_posts category=&#8217;books&#8217;]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once upon a time, all I wanted to do was write a book. About 20 years ago I wrote a novel called &#8220;Own Goals&#8221;, set in my home town, Dumfries,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2054","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dev.hux9.org\/jimmythomson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}