Three Years!

So today marks three years since the release of my first book The Last Free Man and Other Stories.
I felt then and still feel a huge sense of accomplishment about this. I have barely a High School education, i have never done a creative writing course and have spent most of my life battling against the odds yet here i am, a published author.
The book went on to be shortlisted for the Chief Minister's NT Book Awards in 2020.
People are still reading it and i recently did an interview with a podcaster about it.
The genesis of the book was a sort of mid-life crisis i had.
I had hit the age of 32 and realized that i wasn't drastically better off than i'd been at 22. I got depressed and spat the dummy with mainstream society. I left the city and went to live and work at a roadhouse on the Nullarbor. I felt better almost as soon as i got out of society and gave up caring about it...funny that.
While i was living and working in the middle of nowhere i decided to try writing a book. I'd always been a big reader and half thought of writing one day but i finally got serious about it.
I tried writing genre fiction first....i was terrible at it.
I wrote a science fiction novel that was just awful.
I wrote a crime fiction novel that was also awful.
I deleted them both and thought very hard about what i was doing.
While i was doing this i read the short stories of W. Somerset Maugham for the first time. They were brilliant! His knack for telling the tales of odd people in remote parts of the British Empire was sublime.
Then a thought occurred to me...
What if i wrote short stories about the people and experiences i'd had out here on the Nullarbor?
Something went "click" in my brain and the stories that became my first book started coming out thick and fast.
And here we are three years later.