About Me

My name is Richard Watterson.  Not the 2 dimensional guy from The Amazing World of Gumball, but a real person.  Father of 3 amazing kids and husband to a wonderful wife who keeps me right.

I’ve always enjoyed reading fun books to my children, ones that made them laugh and smile were my favourite.  Now they are a bit more grown up we’ve started on chapter books.  Although these can still contain good humour, without the illustrations I feel the laughs are a bit more muted.  Nothing beats big pictures and fun, exciting stories.

Working full time for the family business means I work exactly that, full time… 7 days a week from 8/9am until I go to bed.  Every day is different, I enjoy my job and love working with my family.

I wrote my first book while traveling around Scotland in my work van.  Usually I would listen to music or podcasts on my 6 hour trips, but for some reason I started enjoying the peace and quiet so nothing was on.  All sorts of things go through your head when on your own, but I was always thinking of idea’s, inventions, movie idea’s, tv show idea’s and even a couple songs… most of which I am also still working on as there is a bit of potential there I feel.  But, then the idea of a caterpillar wanting to fly came into my head for no reason that I can remember.  I came up with a few lines and that was it… I genuinely couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Once I had a few paragraphs (wasn’t originally a rhyming book) I checked the internet for: ‘the caterpillar who wanted to fly’ as this was my original title.  I assumed there would be a vast number of books like this, but only 1 came up.  Upon thinking back, I may have had a typo in my search, but I am glad I did, otherwise I may have been put off finishing the story.  Over the months the text changed and it started developing into a rhyming book.  I found this much easier to work with.  From there the story came together really quickly, in fact I wrote more than needed to so kept some of the text for other stories that I started working on too.  Stories based on some of the characters from Caterpillars CANNOT FLY!  Others are totally different, some rhyming and some appear to be the beginning of children’s chapter & series books… and I am loving it!

I am thoroughly enjoying writing and illustrating, and I am lucky enough to have a job where I get to be alone with my thoughts for hours at a time with only a couple stops in between.  This gives me much needed thinking space.

 

• 2010 – Graduated with Honors Degree in Ethical Hacking & Countermeasures – University of Abertay, Dundee, Scotland.
• 2006 – HNC Interactive Multimedia Creation – Moray College, Elgin, Scotland
• 1987? – Design an easter egg competition winner  😀

I have more information to add to this page, that’s all I have time for today though…