I would like you to meet a friend of mine, W.J. Watt. W.J. is the author of Highland Hunger: Call to Arms

What made you want to be a writer?

From a young age I wrote stories, mostly junk but my old teacher really encouraged us in our two room school, she was an old school teacher who really really pushed the three R, Reading wRiting and aRithmatic, not like what gets taught in our schools today, and creative writing was always a plus, and when you are in a school where there is only 20 pupils, and two teachers, you always got plenty of help

When I left primary school at the age of 12 to go into secondary education, the creative side was dropped from our curriculum so I sort of lost writing for years, but I was and still am a prolific reader, although the television is always on in our house, I watch maybe two series a year , the rest of the time my nose is stuck in a book, and I first thought about writing again a few years ago when I was working on commercial fishing vessels.

I knew my time was coming to an end at that industry as I had sustained an injury to my spine when I was serving in the Highlanders, a Scottish infantry regiment back in the 1990s and was medical discharged, but the specialist seeing me told me my injury would become degenerative as I got older and that by the age of Forty I would be lucky if I could continue hard graft so when I was 39 I finally found my body unable to continue , I gave my boss some ten months’ notice to quit, so we could get a greenhorn aboard and trained up enough, and at the same time I was thinking about what I could do to stay in employment, I came across a few how to write books , character development, plot development and things like that, so I bought those and I would like to say I read them but alas I didn’t,  I got into the catering industry and in the are I stay that is seasonal so finally last September I finally decided to write a book. At that point I was heavily reading post apoc, came across some really good authors and some not so good, and thought I could do just as well if not better than the not so good ones and thought nothing to lose, and over the past few years in Scotland has been a time of constitutional changes and referenda, 2014 we had the Scottish Independence referendum and 2016 we had Brexit, that gave me the basis of an idea , and used both things first of all Brexit  and then Scottish independence, but being a post apoc fan I tried to think how I could do it differently then I had a brainwave, a zompoc but not the usual outcome, I had read Slow Burn by Bobby Adair a few months earlier and liked the idea of the Slow Burns, being not a zombie but not a person either, and through this I got my idea of a zombie caused by a virus , but a polar opposite of the usual shambling brain dead creatures we have come to know and love.

Most Indie Authors have day jobs beyond their writing. Do you, and if you do, how do you balance writing, work, and life in general?

I work seasonally in the catering industry, here on Skye we rely heavily on tourism, but that season is short from April to the middle of October so between Mid October and the end of March I have time off, very little employment off season, and that was one of the reasons I started writing when I did, and although I am the father of five, my three oldest are 17 or older, they don’t seem to need dad time, in fact the middle of that three is away volunteering in Africa, so only the youngest two need my time , so once they are in school or in bed I spend my time writing.

In the book Highland Hunger: Call to Arms. What was your inspiration in writing it?

We just had Brexit, a referendum in the UK about leaving the UK, and two years ago we had the Scottish Independence referendum, now during Brexit , England voted to leave the EU while Scotland voted massively to stay, and the Scottish National Party  stated if we had a massive constitutional change of direction, a second independence referendum was on the cards, I used this to stage a civil war when things happened in the story,  we had political assassinations, special forces attacks ,and a virus released on those that believed in fighting for independence but that brought about deadly consequences to a UK government refusing to acknowledge a Scottish Yes Vote, all fiction or is it

Do you have any projects coming up that we should keep an eye out for?

My net project is another trilogy set back in history, the Jacobite uprising in Scotland , the first book finishing after the main characters escape Scotland after losing at Culloden, these characters are going to be vampires, so think of Outlander with blood suckers, the second book will be set as the Scottish vampires fighting for the French as mercenaries against the English crown forces, which did happen in history, in fact that is how Scotland and France are known as the Auld Alliance, and the third book is set in the US during the War of Independence and the main characters are those same vampires from Scotland.

Do you have any advice for writers that are just starting out?

My advice to anyone staring out is research what you are going to write about, research the genre, read some books and see what is successful, if like me you like post apoc, join book clubs like The Isle of Skye Post Apoc Book Club page on Facebook where the indie authors are always willing to give advice to someone asking, so use it, find out what sells and what doesn’t, and a mentor is a great thing, I have a few guys who I go to James Wallace, Thomas Watson, to name guys I can speak to and Devon C Ford, has really taken me under his wing when I signed up to DHP publishing on Facebook for  a year, they have also helped take the sting out of costs, supplying an editor and really good graphics company for my cover, this is a joint venture for a year showing me the ropes of going fully independent in a year’s time.