I look at the two men in the photographs and recognize neither. The young one is brash and cocky, while the other is older than I've ever felt. The only thing that connects them is the woman. (A love story that spans more than half a century and too personal for me to ever write, even if I share a little of its joy in every book.)
For the rest, three children I count among my friends, eight grandchildren maturing into the same category, and a life lived too well to remember growing old.
Amy Gallow came into being at the insistence of my first publisher. She quoted research that suggested women were more comfortable reading romance written by another woman rather than by a man and requested a female pseudonym, so I used my wife's middle and maiden names. Amy has since given me the services of editors, reviewers and readers as I learnt my trade as a wordsmith.
(The first time I saw "wordsmith" in a book, I thought it was a word made-up by the author for the story. Then I looked it up in the dictionary and found it was "a fluent and prolific writer" and knew what I wanted to be. When an editor, who knew nothing of my background, called me a wordsmith a few years later, I felt ten feet tall.)
I still write as Amy, she has many stories to tell, but David Andrews has his own tales, like the dying soldier of "The First Born" and of Fook Shing, the longest serving Chinese detective in the Victoria Police in the 19th Century.
For the rest, three children I count among my friends, eight grandchildren maturing into the same category, and a life lived too well to remember growing old.
Amy Gallow came into being at the insistence of my first publisher. She quoted research that suggested women were more comfortable reading romance written by another woman rather than by a man and requested a female pseudonym, so I used my wife's middle and maiden names. Amy has since given me the services of editors, reviewers and readers as I learnt my trade as a wordsmith.
(The first time I saw "wordsmith" in a book, I thought it was a word made-up by the author for the story. Then I looked it up in the dictionary and found it was "a fluent and prolific writer" and knew what I wanted to be. When an editor, who knew nothing of my background, called me a wordsmith a few years later, I felt ten feet tall.)
I still write as Amy, she has many stories to tell, but David Andrews has his own tales, like the dying soldier of "The First Born" and of Fook Shing, the longest serving Chinese detective in the Victoria Police in the 19th Century.