Gareth Hopkins

Hi, as I write this, I'm twenty-four years old, but in a couple of weeks I'll be hitting the quarter century and turning twenty-five. (duh, really?) I've been writing pretty much as long as I can remember, certainly since I started at primary school - I know this because my parents had a little short story that I write when I was four or five pinned to a corkboard in the cloakroom for years and years until, as a teenager, embarrassed by anything that even hinted how much of a child I had once been, I burned it. It's a shame really, because thinking back, it was kind of cool. It was called The Cat Who Wanted to Fly - I'd tell you the whole story, but I think the title did that one full justice. I went to uni and spent three years doing a Creative Writing degree - which really means, spent three years smoking too much pot and trying to work up the energy to get up and grab some munchies. Whilst at uni, I wrote three novels, two of which were terrible and therefore only recieved one draft, the third of which I have only recently finished off, having done four drafts. In between drafts of that book - called Slopey Dope's Fast Track to Freedom - I've written three or four other novels too, which are all relatively unfinished and which I can now hopefully start to tune up and get moving on properly. I'd love to get published, but up until now, I haven't really been satisified that anything I've written has been good enough, but after finishing this last draft of SDFTtF, I'm thinking that I'll at least send it out to a few agents and see what happens. But, that's kind of all for the future, because at the moment, I'm planning my first, and long-time coming, backpacking trip. Up the West Coast of America with just a map, a backpack and a beard, so all plans for publication are going to have to wait until I get back.