{"id":2599,"date":"2020-03-16T14:14:03","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T14:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/?p=2599"},"modified":"2020-03-16T15:20:50","modified_gmt":"2020-03-16T15:20:50","slug":"alumni-profile-andrew-wareham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/2020\/03\/16\/alumni-profile-andrew-wareham\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumni Profile – Andrew Wareham"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Andrew<\/a><\/p>\n

How did your degree\/experience at university help lead you into your current career?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Part One of the Social Sciences BA included Economics, Politics, Economic and Social History and Sociology. Economic and Social History fascinated me, then and since. I specialised in Politics in Part Two because I wanted to keep the History to myself – my own hobby and ideas – i was afraid that academic study would have taken the fun out of it. Politics I enjoyed – often on the streets, the 60s being an active time; hence the nickname ‘Trot’., though I was far more an anarchist than a Trotskyite. I taught Economics for a few years before becoming convinced that secondary education in UK\u00a0is a pointless and valueless farce. I stopped teaching nearly forty years ago.<\/p>\n

What drew me to Kent? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The prospect of being part of something new, of being one of the First 500. The most striking thing I remember about Kent is being almost the only working-class student there; my thick, agricultural deep-Hampshire accent stood out. The collegiate\u00a0system offered some interesting experiences.<\/p>\n

Can you tell us about your life after Kent?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I dropped out for three years, going across to France immediately\u00a0after graduation. Paris was amusing in ’68. I wandered a while and met my wife and settled down, or attempted to, hence teaching. A few years of respectability and we took contracts in Papua New Guinea, where I ended up as a trainer and operational policeman with the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary. My children had the advantage of growing up in PNG.<\/p>\n

My wife became ill and we returned to UK where she made a base and I worked contracts in Saudi and Libya; I returned to UK and worked in the security industry until she eventually died in 2003. After that, my son, daughter and I formed a unit and now live in a large house with four St Bernards and a mastiff. I wanted to write and took a job as a night watchman which gave me a living and a good ten hours a night free to try to write. In ten years I accumulated 90 rejection slips. In 2013 I decided that my latest book, the Privateersman, was of publishable quality and that the publishing industry was wrong. I self-published on Amazon and did not look back. I am now publishing ten books a year, all historical fiction and well-reviewed and importantly, selling! I earned six figures last year,<\/p>\n

I love writing and spend typically 10 to 12 hours a day at the keyboard. I look to produce 3,000-4,000 words a day, and spend the spare time editing.<\/p>\n

Published this weekend is the first in a series of 8 to 10 novels of about 90,000 words each set in the First World War, Falling into Battle. In a fortnight, the second of my English Civil War series, Years of Blood, comes out. After that, a Regency romance\/spoof, A Pinchbeck Peer, Book 3 and then the 3rd book of the Colonial Warrior series, Billy Bacon and Tippoo’s Armies.<\/p>\n

I tell stories – and a lot of readers enjoy them. Mostly, they are tongue in cheek, distinguished, I quote, by bone-dry wit and with a viewpoint that is well left of centre. As for style? On the same day three years ago a professor of Literature at a very minor American college compared me with the early Charles Dickens while a lady from England said i was ‘as good as Jeffrey Archer’; I don’t know which was the greater compliment.<\/p>\n

I do know that I write because I cannot stop writing – I am driven by a happy compulsion.<\/p>\n

In my spare time I also collect English Pressed Glass – another compulsion!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How did your degree\/experience at university help lead you into your current career? Part One of the Social Sciences BA included Economics, Politics, Economic and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[118124],"tags":[177092,74],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2599"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2609,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599\/revisions\/2609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}